Church of St. Paul Apostle of the Nations

What's not to love about Italy? Wherever you go, there's a story in art and culture and some kind of pasta dressed up in fine sauces. Once the world gets vaccinated, the crowds will be back. Even Disneyland can't compete with Rome on a bad day.

There's St. Peter's, of course--go early and avoid the lines. There's the Colisseum and the Pantheon, and Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where mass has been celebrated every morning since (wait for this now) the fourth century--you heard me right--the fourth century, which makes 1492 sound like last week.

Some fabulously wealthy Roman, or so the story goes, caught a vision of the Virgin who somehow made it clear that he should build a new cathedral on the spot where she'd make it snow the next day. It was August--who could have guessed? The next day, mid-summer, there was snow. Then a cathedral.

But even if you've not missed a celebration of mass in half a lifetime, chances are slim and none you could gain an audience with the Pope back then or anytime through the years, even today.

But on January 27, 1887, a young woman named Katharine Drexel met with Pope Leo XIII, but then Katharine Drexel, who would, later in life, officially become a saint, wasn't just your average Josephine. Her father, an investment banker from Philadelphia, was rich--mega, no other way of saying it. When he died, she and her sisters, a fine Catholic family in Philadelphia, came heir to his millions. 

But Katharine wasn't some dowdy rich girl. Her parents had taught her to respond to the poor--to give, well, endlessly. She told the pope she thought he should, without delay, send missionaries to Native people throughout the American west because they were suffering and had already suffered brutal injustices.

The story goes that Pope Leo smiled. "Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?" he famously said, and thus began a saga that even touched Siouxland, many, many thousands of miles away.

Once the Missouri River determined to slice through South Dakota, it created a glorious scar, leaving huge grassy shoulders on both sides of a valley so breathtaking that if you're driving you have to remind yourself to keep your eyes on the road. If you follow Old Muddy northwest out of Yankton, you hug the only segment of the river that looks at all like the unruly waterway it once was.

The tiny town of Greenwood--yes, Lewis and Clark stopped there--may well be the most historic ghost town in North America. Up on a hill a monument celebrates the 1853 Treaty, which wasn't exactly a victory for the Yankton who lived there. In 1890, a ghost dance was held there along the river, just one of many throughout the west and so frightened white folks that the massacre at Wounded Knee resulted.

But keep going, past the churches and the tribe's herd of buffalos on your left. You can stop at the cemetery and see old Ree's monument some other time, but get yourself to Marty, a burg named after South Dakota's first real Bishop.

You'll spot this towering landmark from miles away, but only when you drive into town will you measure just how mammoth it is up close, the Church of St. Paul Apostle of the Nations, an immense, gorgeous limestone house of worship worthy of that long name.

Whatever you do, get yourself inside. Ask around. Get yourself a tour from one of the Sisters, who live next door. The dog won't bite.

What's behind the altar is a wall of portraits--popes and bishops, disciples and apostles, saints of all ages. Takakwitha is here, "Lily of the Mohawks, the only Native saint.

The stained glass is gorgeous, all of it done by an a St. Louis artist named Emil Frei, who learned his art from his father, a Bavarian glassmaker. The stations of the cross feature Natives in every Holy Week role, including the Savior.

Physically and spiritually, the Church of St. Paul, Apostle of the Nations, was the dream of the Eisenman brothers, one of whom, a priest, Father Sylvester, came west when three Yankton men, Thunder Horse, Zephyr, and Yellow Bird went recruiting.

The other was a builder, Father Sylvester's actual blood brother, Leonard John Eisenman. Together, ora et labora, the two Eisenman brothers directed twenty or so local workman through the years it took to build the place.

But not to be forgotten was the work and the support, in every way, of a woman of means who once held council with the Pope. Katharine Drexel, Saint Katharine, sent her own order, The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, to the new cathedral at Marty, South Dakota.

It's a huge place and a huge story, even out here near Greenwood, where Lewis and Clark made camp out of a river that still looks today as if the Corps of Discover could once again come ashore. If you don't know it's there, St. Paul's will appear as if out of nowhere. But there it is, immense.

Not until you leave, not until you keep going north or turn around and head back towards Yankton will you draw breath again. It's that kind of vision. It's just plain amazing.