AMBOY – If you’ve driven past Saint Patrick Catholic Church at 32 North Jones Avenue in Amboy, you’ve seen the new roof.

After two years of fundraising, “Save the Steeple”, St. Pats has a new top all members of the parish are proud and happy with.

They are letting the new roof sink in for a little while as fundraising is currently on pause. It will start back up in the fall or after Christmas because repairing the church is not finished.

“We’re excited that the roof is done. It looks great,” said Carol Prunty, the parish bookkeeper. “But we’re not done by any means in terms of church repairs. The first part of the roof project was $319,000 and the second part was $119,000. We were able to raise it with the help of so many generous donations from the community and others.

“Now we need to tuck point the actual steeple which will probably be another $100,000. Then the windows need some work, but we haven’t priced it yet.”

The tuck-pointing project is the next step as the steeple is crumbling in certain areas.

“What we have left to do is tuck pointing for the church’s bricks. Some of the bricks are original when the church was built approximately 170 years ago,” said Beverly Halsey, the St. Pat’s pastoral associate. “They need to be reinforced. You can see little pieces of the bricks break and fall down all the time.

“We’re taking a little breather from fundraising to give people a little bit of a break since we’ve been doing it for a little over two years now. Everything gets redundant and we don’t want to do the same things over and over.”

What Halsey, Prunty, all everyone else involved is excited about with the completed roof project is the access to the complete parking lot.

The roof project blocked off the main portion of the parking lot for three weeks as the two-part project was being completed.

“We’re glad to have our parking lots back, especially for the people who are older and have to use the side doors and park close,” Halsey said. “That was a huge inconvenience, but they all kept coming to church.”