The annual festival began Tuesday afternoon at St. Ann Church, when a statue of the Virgin Mary's mother was carried down the steps then secured to a wagon for a procession
HOBOKEN -- Though the 600-pound statue of St. Ann is no longer borne on shoulders of barefoot women, the annual procession and feast honoring the Catholic Church's mother of the Virgin Mary still brings Hoboken natives back home from far and wide.
"Every year," said Mary Morin of Paramus, a member of the Hoboken High School Class of '71. "Whenever we're here. As long as we're not in Croatia, we come back."
Morin, a Roman Catholic who was a parishioner at St. Ann Church on Jefferson Street before leaving Hoboken 45 years ago, was speaking Croatian with her two sisters as they waited under a broiling noonday sun at the base of the church steps for the statue of St. Ann to be carried out.
"My father used to sing in the church choir," Morin said, switching seamlessly from Croation back to English.
The sisters were talking to John Bussanich, another member of Hoboken's Coation-American diaspora, who now lives in North Bergen. Bussanich, who taught at Hoboken's former Public School No. 8 across the street from the church before retiring from the district in 2012 as an assistant principal, had just attended the Tuesday morning Feast Day Mass immediately preceding the procession, in which a visiting priest stressed unity among parishioners and the broader community.
"These are just the walls of the church, be we make the church," Bussanich said, summing up the mass by Bishop John Corriveau, who had come from British Columbia, Canada, to deliver the guest sermon.
"It's lovely," Corriveau said later, as the procession paused on Adams Street, complimenting parishioners and the St. Ann pastor, Fr. Remo DiSalvatore, on a recent restoration of the church's interior. "They're magnificent people."
The robed priest had just posed for a picture with Anthony and Elmina Scillia, a Fair Lawn couple who have roots in the Mile Square City's Italian-American community.
"My father's mother's family is from Hoboken, so we come back for the St. Ann festival every year," Anthony Scillia, a 34-year-old land surveyor, said.
The procession, which weaves for about 3 miles and cantake up to six hours including periodic stops, is the highlight of the annual St. Ann Italian Festival, a Hoboken tradition now in its 106th year.
Every July, the blocks surrounding the church at 7th and Jefferson streets are transformed into a carnival of zeppoli, Italian sausage, music and red, white and green bunting. The festival began Friday night and ends Tuesday evening.
Just after Noon on Tuesday, following the mass, half a dozen men of the church carried the statue of St. Ann down the front steps to the sidewalk, having to stop and back up momentarily as the saint's halo snagged a wire stretched above the sidewalk.
The statue was then bolted to a kind of high-riding wagon at about shoulder height and blessed wih holy water by Corriveau, before being wheeled around town in a procession that included a brass band, clergy and lay people, and local officials including Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer.
Tuesday's heat took its toll. Hoboken Police Chief Kenneth Ferrante, who marched in in the procession for several blocks, said one officer who had been riding a motorcycle and wearing a bullet proof vest suffered a bout of heat exhaustion and was taken to Hoboken University Medical Center as a precaution.
Injuries had been common in years past, when women of the St. Ann's Guild would bear the statue on their shoulders and carry it, barefoot, through the city streets in a show of devotion to one of the Catholic Church's most revered matriarchs.
However, the ritual has been dropped in recent years for safety reasons.
Cindy LoPresti, a third-generation guild member, said the often hot and always heavy lifting achieved the intended effect.
"You want to feel you're suffering for the saint," said LoPresti, whose grandmother, Mary Mingolo, helped found the guild. "That's the reason some people still want to carry it."
Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.