Morning Thanks--The Purple Church

It's purple. Well, these days, some twenty years of Dakota sun later, St. Charles Church may well look a little pink; but originally it was purple, an actual purple church. May well be the only one in the world, at least the only one I know of, an honest-to-goodness purple church, St. Charles on the St. Francis Mission, SD. 

Wasn't always. It was built in 1886 with funds provided, in large part, from the gift of St. Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia, heir to her father's banking fortune, who dedicated that fortune and her life to helping people and was sainted by Pope John Paul II in 1987, a century after St. Charles of St. Francis was constructed. 

If Father Pierre-Jean De Smet had worn a fitbit, his mileage would have been out of this world, so traveled was he throughout the American West of the 1840s.  Although he didn't set up an altar at St. Francis, his influence among the Lakota people was significant enough to prompt the Rosebud Lakota people to take note. Years later, their handsome, barrel-chested chief, Spotted Tail, on a visit to Washington in the 1870s, told President Rutherford B. Hayes, "My children, all of them, would like to learn how to talk English. They would like to  learn how to read and write. . . I would like to get Catholic priests. Those who wear black robes." 

In 1881, a subsequent Rosebud headman, Two Strike, asked the "black robes," the Jesuits, to start a school, so they did, dedicating a building in 1886, that first school financed by Katharine Drexel, a school the locals called Sapa Un Ti, or "where the black robes live."

St. Francis Mission's footprint on the reservation is significant. Not only did it establish education among Spotted Tail's folks, today it includes suicide prevention and alcohol and drug abuse recovery programs. But all of that has started, here, with the purple church.

Officially, the purple church is named St. Charles Borromeo Church of St. Francis, which is a mouthful. While it's a noble to hold to a name, in this case, St. Charles Borromeo's own history is so far away in time and place that it's easy to understand how that last name simply disappeared. A 16th century cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, Borromeo is officially a saint, but his clashes with Protestantism were neither saintly nor bloodless, which undoubtedly makes his story of little relevance to a people whose history includes Little Big Horn and a sea of white people moving in. Among the Lakota, there much call for knowing more about the theological terrors of the post-Reformation era in Italy and Switzerland. 

So the name is gone, mostly. And in the little Catholic Academy that's now run out of St. Francis mission, every noon lunch begins with prayer. But it also begins with a plate set with food that will not be eaten but instead left our for those not present, the old ones and others who have gone, an old Lakota ritual meant to honor the ancestors. I'm not at all sure how comfortable St. Charles Borromeo would have been with that such pagan symbolism. 

But the purple church has had to adapt, to change, to bring itself into the world it occupies on the reservation. It has had to stop telling people how to live and to start listening to what good things were all around, to speak less and listen more.

But why purple? Is there some symbolism or something? 

I'm told that it all started in a summer bible school, when one of the priests simply asked the kids a relevant question. "So we've got to paint the church," he told them. "What color do you think the church should be."

Some kid said purple. 

It's that simple. That's why today St. Charles at St. Francis is a purple church. Thanks be to God.