Visiting St. Donatus

 

Odd-looking thing, really. Its keyboard makes it a piano or organ of some sort, but it comes packaged in what looks like a suitcase far too big to carry-on, a thick black trunk that folds out to enable an entire instrument inside--if it can be called that--transportable, to be carried along, hither and yon. 

Don't know if it still plays. We weren't offered a concert. What we know is that it was found in the rectory when the last priest left, along with more than a few other treasures now on exhibit in the museum of St. Donatus Roman Catholic Church, St. Donatus, Iowa.  And we know--we were told--that it belonged, heart and soul, to a precious middle school teacher named Sister Seraphica. 

It's a stretch for me to imagine a beloved middle school teacher named Sister Seraphica, but then I wasn't raised Catholic. In fact, my own roots plunge so deeply into the Reformation that it's hard for me to imagine any Sister Seraphica who is not scourge, a terror, a closet abuser. 

But this organ-to-go is here in the church museum because Sister Seraphica was so greatly beloved by her kids, kids who heard her muse often about wishing she had an organ. Without her knowing, entirely on their own, they found this portable organ, gathered the shekels, bought it, and presented it to her, a memorable moment, I'm sure, exceedingly precious to Sister Seraphica of St. Donatus, Iowa.

So the story goes that the strange-looking organ-in-a-suitcase was in church one day during a confirmation when suddenly and inexplicably one of the furnaces exploded with such heft the floor heaved. People fearfully left the sanctuary. Our museum guide told us that when the men checked the furnace and let the people back in, they discovered one soul who'd never left. Yes, Sister Seraphica, who told them with firm resolution that after all the hard work her students had gone through to get that beloved beast, she was going to go with it rather than leave it behind.

It's a museum story, really, the kind of tale that get spun so frequently that its edges don't get worn as much as gold-leafed. But there it stands, this organ-in-a-trunk, adorned with sheet music whose language may well be imperiled, Luxembourgian, from a country so little that it might just fit into the county where I live, as do more than a few descendants of the Luxembourgian immigrants who first came to St. Donatus in 1838, those whose particular ancestors left St. Donatus in ox-carts that took them ploddingly all the way across the state in 1870.

The cemetery behind the St. Donatus church has stunning statuary, but it also guides you up an very rare outdoor rendering of the Stations of the Cross, brick stations built up against the steep river bluff in 1861 already. It's not an easy stretch of ground, but then it's not supposed to be. You step carefully up the steep side of the hill until you arrive at the Pieta Chapel, built--if you can believe it--in 1885, modeled after a chapel at a place called Vianden in Luxembourg.

And there it is--the pieta. Amazing.  

For the record, here's a shot I took myself of Michaelangelo's, at St. Peter's Basillica, Rome.

Jesus seems more of a child, much less of a weight-lifter in the master's rendition. Mary is a far bigger woman than our Savior is a man, eccentric characteristics of the most famous pieta in the world.

But I've stood before both, admired them, both of them, one a work of art, the other a work of devotion. Loved them both, one at the entrance of the most famous basilica in the world, each day courting thousands of visitors, many of them pilgrims; the other in a small chapel of quarried native limestone standing alone atop a sharply rising hill that overlooks an emerald valley as wide as the horizon, just a few miles from the Mississippi, and an old church that hasn't the wherewithal or the numbers to support a priest and makes its very existence sketchy. 

Honestly, this child of the Reformation loved 'em both. Loved 'em.