A Fictional Interview with John Baptist Greco at Holy Land USA
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Pine Hill, Waterbury, Connecticut — Mid-1960s
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. John Baptist Greco (1895–1986) was a Waterbury attorney who had once studied for the priesthood before illness and finances forced him to abandon it, going on instead to earn a law degree from Yale. Beginning in 1955, he led a volunteer group called the Companions of Christ in building Holy Land USA out of repurposed materials on Pine Hill, and by the mid-1960s the site was drawing roughly 40,000 visitors a year. One line below is real and documented… when asked years later, in 1974, about the park’s purpose, Greco told the New York Times, “We just show them what we believe.” It is used here slightly ahead of when it was actually recorded, as it reflects a philosophy he held consistently throughout the park’s life. Everything else in this conversation is imagined. Greco closed the park for renovations in 1984; the funds set aside for that renovation were stolen, and he died in 1986 without ever reopening it, after which the site fell into decades of disrepair. Nothing in this piece, set roughly twenty years before any of that, is meant to foreshadow it directly… the dramatic irony belongs entirely to the reader.
SETTING: A gravel path winding past the miniature Bethlehem, tour groups moving between the replica buildings. Greco walks slowly, greeting visitors by name, plainly at home on this hill.
Dan: Mr. Greco, forty thousand people a year now, on a hill you built almost entirely with donated labor and scrap materials. Did you imagine it would grow to this?
Greco: I imagined it would exist. I did not spend much time imagining its size, if I am honest with you. When you begin with an empty rocky hillside and no money to speak of, you learn quickly not to measure your vision in numbers. I measured it in whether one more person left this hill having felt something true. The forty thousand is simply what happened while I was busy doing that.
Dan: You wanted to be a priest once, didn’t you, before this?
Greco: I did, and it did not happen… illness, then money, the usual obstacles that end a young man’s calling before it begins. I will tell you something I do not say to everyone: I have never fully stopped grieving that particular door closing. But I came to believe a man can serve a calling without ever wearing the collar for it. I could not stand in a pulpit every Sunday. So, I built one out of cinder block and old plywood instead, and I have been standing in it every day since.
Dan: What do you say to people who ask what this place is actually for… is it meant to convert people?
Greco: We just show them what we believe. That is the whole of it, really. I am not interested in arguing anyone into anything on this hill. I am interested in a person walking through Bethlehem, however small and however humble the replica, and feeling something stir that they did not expect to feel when they parked their car.
Dan: All of this runs on volunteers, on donated time, on you personally walking this hill every day. What happens to Holy Land the day you’re no longer able to walk it?
Greco: The Companions will carry it forward. The volunteers, the sisters, the people of this parish… this was never meant to be one man’s project standing on one man’s legs.
Dan: But it started as one man’s project, didn’t it? You, alone, on an empty hill in 1955, with nobody else believing in it yet.
Greco: It did. That is fair to say. I suppose I have never fully worked out how a thing that began entirely inside one man’s conviction is supposed to keep running once that conviction is no longer walking around in a body. I tell myself the faith itself will carry it, that faith doesn’t need my legs specifically to keep moving. I hope that is true. I have not, if you press me on it, actually built the structure that would make it true regardless of what I hope.
Dan: That sounds like something worth thinking about now, while you still can.
Greco: It does, doesn’t it. I confess I would rather spend this afternoon showing you the new Garden of Eden pieces than sitting with that question. But you are not wrong to have asked it, and I suspect I will still be turning it over long after you’ve gone back down this hill.
Dan: Thank you for the walk today, Mr. Greco. And for showing me what you believe.
Greco: Come back anytime. The hill isn’t going anywhere. I only wish I could say the same with certainty about everything on it.
John Baptist Greco closed Holy Land USA for renovations in 1984, and the money set aside for that work was stolen by the people entrusted with it. He died in 1986 without ever reopening the park, leaving it to the Filippini Sisters, who lacked the funds and the singular energy that had built and sustained it for three decades. Within a few years, one of Connecticut’s most-visited attractions had become a roadside ruin. The leadership lesson from this hilltop, at the height of its success, is one Greco himself brushes right up against in this conversation without quite closing his hand around it: a vision that only runs on one person’s energy is not yet an institution, no matter how many volunteers show up to help build it. Real succession isn’t hope that the mission will outlive you… it’s the deliberate, often unglamorous work of building something durable enough that your own legs are no longer the load-bearing structure.
Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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