The hum of prayers being said in Spanish echoed inside the cool, softly lighted sanctuary of St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church in the East Village, where about a dozen people clutching rosary beads encircled the statue of Our Lady of Divine Providence.

The scene looked like something from the 1950s, when the devotion to La Providencia — like many of the faithful themselves — first came to New York, packing churches from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the South Bronx.

These days, only a handful of mostly older women show up.

“We used to have 250 people come for a novena,” said Aleida Lopez, who spent almost 50 years worshiping at nearby St. Emeric’s Church until it closed and merged last year with St. Brigid’s, forming the parish of St. Brigid-St. Emeric. “The whole parish used to show up. But people get turned off by the closing of parishes. They get cold hearts and lose the faith. Or they move away.”

Devotion to La Providencia, whose feast day is celebrated on Nov. 19, was a ritual in the late 1950s that helped ease the pain and struggles of life in a new city for Puerto Ricans who had to fight discrimination on the streets and second-class citizenship in churches, where they were relegated to the basements. It also served as a way to rally the Spanish-speaking faithful, ushering in an era of growth for the city’s Latino Catholics.