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Transfiguration Church has seen all the transformations of Chinatown.
Founded as Christ Church in 1827 as New York City's fourth Roman Catholic
parish, its founder was a Cuban, the Rev. Felix Varela, who had argued
for Cuban independence when in Spain and had to flee the country. The
Rev. Varela was also a journalist and educator, and was very popular among
his mostly Irish parishioners. After several years of cholera epidemics
and a couple fires that destroyed the original church, the Rev. Varela
and his parishioners moved to a former Dutch Reformed 
Church
on Chambers Street in 1837 and gave the name The Church of the Transfiguration
of Our Lord. The Rev. Varela had to move to Florida because of poor health
in 1846 and died there in 1853.
In the same year, Transfiguration moved to its present site on Mott Street. A look at the change in pastors is a mirror of the changes in population that have occurred over the years. Irish pastors were replaced primarily by Italian pastors in the late 1890s and early 1900s as the Salesian Society, a missionary society founded in Turin, Italy, took over the staffing of Transfiguration. Even in the early 1900s, the Salesians tried to reach out to the Chinese community and got a Chinese-speaking pastor who had been stationed in China. Evangelical work among the Chinese was slow, however. By 1913, only 30 Chinese men had been baptized, however.
In the 1940s a Chinese School was opened and had more than 40 students. It was a hint of the way things would change. A few years later, the Maryknoll Fathers, a missionary group well-known for their work in China, took over management of the church. It initially caused some hard feelings among the Italian-American parishioners as they could see more attention was being paid to the growing Chinese community.
In the 1960s the Transfiguration School, now with a sizable number of Chinese students and many non-Catholics, hired only lay teachers. "When I went to school there they still had nuns," says Jim Albanese, 73, a retired postal worker who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life and who now does volunteer work at the church and school. "Seeing how some of the kids behave today, I'm one who thinks that we should go back to the days when you'd get a good rap on the knuckles for misbehavior."
In 1972, Father Mark Cheung was invited by Transfiguration to succeed Father Joseph Fung, an assistant pastor. When Cheung was promoted to parish administrator, he became New York's first Chinese priest to be appointed to the position.
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