A disagreement over a proposed bell tower has led a Ukrainian Catholic church near Pittsburgh to sue local government leaders in federal court, claiming that religious discrimination is preventing the parish from properly honoring its dead.
Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church had sought permission from Collier Township in 2023 to construct a 13,000-square-foot chapel and retreat center, including a 65-foot bell tower building, adjacent to its cemetery, according to the federal lawsuit filed this month. The church planned to ring the bells for brief periods each day and for extended periods on certain holy days throughout the year.
The township denied the proposal, citing “economic hardship and inconveniences” to residents, despite similarly size secular buildings nearby. As the church worked to revise its plan, residents raised concerns about traffic and noise from the bells at public meetings last spring, according to a legal filing from the township.
Officials later told the church the project would only be approved if the chapel was significantly smaller and the church limited the use of the facility, including the bells, to funerals and memorials, according to the federal lawsuit.
Later, when the church presented a scaled-down design with a shorter, smaller chapel, the lawsuit alleges, a township official asked at a public meeting how the church would pay for the chapel. “Please don’t tell me Jesus is going to pay for it,” the official allegedly said.
The official did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
Sheldon Nahmod, a constitutional law expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the Supreme Court has looked unfavorably upon similar comments in the past.
“That kind of an attitude has made another appearance, where the Supreme Court says it reflects a sort of hostility against religion,” he said.
The church alleges in its lawsuit that Collier Township violated the First Amendment and a decades-old federal law aimed at ensuring religious people are treated fairly when it comes to land use.
“This country is known for its religious freedom,” said Father Jason Charron, who leads Holy Trinity in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. “To be told we’re not able to pray when we want and for whom we wish and how we wish within our own tradition was shocking.”
Brian P. Gabriel, an attorney representing Collier Township, said the lawsuit surprised the municipality, because there is a pending state court case on the matter, in which Collier officials have denied any religious discrimination. Gabriel said church members aren’t being prevented from practicing their religion, as they already have a church building with a bell about 2.5 miles from the proposed chapel site.
“The township certainly feels it did not do anything that was discriminatory,” Gabriel said.
Holy Trinity has about 225 member families, according to the lawsuit. The church became a Ukrainian Catholic Church in the 1940s and purchased the cemetery property, the site of the proposed chapel and bell tower, in 1953.
The concerns about noise have come largely from residents of a nearby development that broke ground in the late 2010s. They were concerned about the church’s practice of tolling its bells on multiple annual “All Souls Saturdays” to commemorate each member who has died in the congregation’s decades-long history, according to the federal lawsuit.
The church had also planned to ring the bells during services, as reminders to pray and daily at 3 p.m. for its “hour of mercy,” which commemorates Jesus’ death. Tolling bells to honor the dead is a long-standing part of the Ukrainian Catholic faith, Charron said.
“They are the lips of the church. They announce happy or sad moments: feast days, weddings and funerals,” he said.
The township ultimately said it would only approve the new chapel if its bells were limited to use during funerals and memorial services, according to the lawsuit. Officials also stipulated the bells not be rung to memorialize any parishioner who died before June 9, 2025.
But Charron said the township’s limits would prevent the church from honoring the dead in its traditional manner.
The church also noted in its lawsuit that the proposed bell tower would sit 12 miles from Pittsburgh International Airport, along the commercial flight path. The noise from the airplanes ranges from 45 decibels to more than 100 decibels, according to the lawsuit.
The church at one point agreed to limit its bells to less than 60 decibels, according to a court filing. By comparison, a normal conversation is between 60 and 70 decibels, according to Yale University’s Environmental Health and Safety program.
“You’d have to hear the bells over the roar of a 757,” said Holy Trinity’s attorney, Jeremy Dys, who called the township’s noise objections “silly and stupid.” Dys is senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, a legal nonprofit that specializes in religious freedom cases.
In the 1940s the church emerged as a refuge for Ukrainian Catholics who found respite from Soviet rule, the lawsuit says.
The Ukrainian Catholic Church, of which Holy Trinity is a part, is one of 24 autonomous Catholic churches, composed of the widely known Latin Church (often referred to as the Roman Catholic Church) and 23 smaller Eastern Catholic churches. Despite being from different heritages — from Armenian to Ethiopian to Ukrainian — these Eastern churches all still answer to Rome.
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