DIXFIELD – Tears flowed as the final Mass ended at St. Joseph’s Catholic Mission Sunday morning and parishioners sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”

More than a 100 parishioners, including some who will experience the painful church closure experience again next Sunday when neighboring St. Theresa’s in Mexico closes its door forever, too, attended the Sunday Mass.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Janna Schuster of Peru, a 12-year member of the Dixfield church. She’s not sure where she and her family will attend church in the future.

The closure of St. Theresa’s – and St. Joseph’s, which has been serving the Catholic faithful in Dixfield for 51 years – is part of the restructuring of Catholic parishes throughout Maine to adjust to the dwindling number of priests available to serve the congregations.

The two remaining area Catholic churches – St. Athanasius and St. John in Rumford and Our Lady of the Snows in Bethel – have been renamed as the Holy Savior Parish served by the Rev. Angelo Levasseur.

But on Sunday, it was a day for St. Joseph’s parishioners to get together one last time.

“It’s very upsetting. We have had a very vibrant community,” said Sharon Gates, one of the church leaders and a member for 27 years. “We feel like we’re losing part of our family.”

Gates was married twice there because her first husband died. Her two children, grandson, and son-in-law, now a Marine in Iraq, were baptized there.

Other St. Joseph’s members attended funerals and weddings, confirmations and first communions. And at one time, the church had a very active youth ministry.

The final Mass, celebrated by the Rev. James Martel, centered on the third chapter of Ecclesiastes from the Old Testament, which notes that everything has a season.

“In 1957, a group of people felt it was time for a gathering to celebrate Mass in Dixfield,” said Martel. “All along throughout the years, the church flourished. There’s a time for building up and a time for ending.”

That group first met in the old opera house on Main Street in 1957, then in the basement of what is now St. Joseph’s in the mid-1960s. By 1978, the congregation was able to complete the church and services were held upstairs.

Martel, who is retired, was the first priest to celebrate Mass when the upstairs sanctuary was completed, and the last to celebrate Mass on Sunday. In recent years, he has helped out by serving the church off and on.

“All stories must end,” he said of the church’s history. “So did this one.”

During the past couple of years while the area churches have been meeting to decide what direction to take for the four area Catholic churches, the Dixfield church was open only in the summer months.

Yvonne Hemingway, a church member for more than 30 years, wrote a letter to St. Joseph’s members as if it were written by the church itself, ending with, “It’s not important where you worship, but that you worship.”

Prior to the service, she said saying goodbye was so hard.

“It’s been part of our lives for so long,” she said, adding that the Rev. Joseph Lange, who had served as priest for St. Joseph’s and St. Theresa’s, particularly touched her heart and her life as well as the lives of her sons.

“When he had a sermon, he was speaking directly to you. He was down-to-earth. When Rodney and Richard (her sons) went off to college, they always attended Mass,” she said.

Sunday also marked the fifth anniversary of Lange’s death.

Some of St. Joseph’s parishioners will help serve breakfast next Sunday for St. Theresa’s members so they will have a chance to participate in that final service.

And for Schuster, who grew up and went to school at St. Theresa’s, she’ll have to go through another painful experience.