A people of faith

A parish is a living place. The bare twigs Marie Perry planted behind Sorrowful Mother Church now tower above the church. Father Raymond Weiber’s new shrine to St. Francis recollects those Franciscan Fathers who kept the Faith more than 100 years ago in the parish.

Mrs. Jean Kosik stopped by to paint the rectory office the other day. Paint brush in hand, she spoke of modern Catholic identity. She and I and Father Weiber and Sister Kathryn Kirk reflected on media coverage of the Holy Father’s visit, about how the ordinary lives of ordinary Catholics are not very newsworthy. I thought about the Holy Father’s theme, “Unity in the work of service,” as I observed Mrs. Kosik paint the doorjamb.

Joseph and Joyce Slawnikowski, the parish council president and his wife, had just left. Father Weiber said: “They’re here for Mass every day.” Faithful people.

Father spoke to a parishioner about a concrete walkway behind the rectory. They spoke in Polish, fluent Polish, flowing Polish, conversational Polish in the back yard of the rectory in Wheatfield, Indiana.

“We didn’t hear the word ‘ecumenical’ in those days,” said Margaret Grube, as she sat at the dining table, remembering her grandfather. “When you come down to the nitty-gritty,” she said, “good people are good people. The Methodist preacher used to come through here on horseback and he lived at my grandparents’ house when he was here. They fed him and gave him a bed so he could minister to the Methodists.”

Glimpses, a few memories. Who can say what reflections they bring, what significance they hold for those whose lives have been intertwined in this 100-year-old parish? We speak of buildings and windows and roofs and shrines. We tell stories of statues and who gave the ciborium and who made the altar linen. But a parish is a living place, ten thousand acts of charity, enduring faith, loyalty and service.

No monument recalls the work of the Victory Noll Sisters who labored to teach the faith at Sorrowful Mother parish. No marble slab marks the spot where Father Donald Hardebeck sat in his station wagon outside the public school in Fair Oaks, his motor running the heater in winter time, teaching religion, teaching the Catholic faith.

Only oral history recalls the courage of those Sorrowful Mother parishioners who were hated by the Ku Klux Klan. And what about the Protestants who resisted the threatening pressure to join in the bigotry?

The past becomes a part of the present in ways none of us understands. People will say that they love Sorrowful Mother Church. Buildings, though, are incapable of love. People know that. It’s just difficult to separate the brick and wood from the heart and soul of a parish. Objects become symbols of something deeper: the sign of faith which cannot be seen.

Time was, when the crickets sawed their songs in the marshy wilds of that once uninhabited country, a fearful, hopeful German family arrived at a clearing in northern Indiana. With a lump in their throat and a prayer to God, they stopped to stay, to live there, to call this green space home. There was no church, no parish hall, no house indeed for themselves unless they began to cut trees.

Weeks passed, months. A lone rider, hungry, weathered, spotted chimney smoke and stopped to pay a visit. He was a priest, he said, do you folks know of any Catholics in the area? Family members turned to one another and smiled. A tear formed in the mother’s eye, a tear of joy. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on September 27th, 1987