Once long ago, four hearty pioneers made their way north and west of Pella, Iowa, in hopes of discovering an empty chunk of land for a Dutch Reformed colony in the last unsettled region of the state of Iowa. The story goes that they looked around, thought seriously about land around Cherokee and the Little Sioux River, then hiked farther north and west, where trees were at a premium and the only ready building material was sod from the vast, treeless prairies all around. The year was 1870.
When they returned from their scouting trip what they considered "open" land (it was morally acceptable and hugely convenient to simply write off the Yanktons as heathen and, thus, make them expendable), they brought the good tidings back to the saints in Pella and soon began to organize a return to stake out some of that fine, cheap land for themselves. I'm sure, as the pilgrimage began, the elders beseeched the Creator and Heaven and Earth to accompany them and bless their expedition to what they would like to think of is their own holy land. Holy Writ was read, I'm sure.
At almost exactly the same time, May of 1870, a train of 18 covered wagons, manned and womaned by Luxembourgians, Roman Catholics all, left a town they'd established in the 1840s, not unlike Pella, a town they'd named St. Donatus, and a church where, in 1861, they'd created an outdoor "Stations of the Cross," that still exists on the edge of a steep hill behind the church. I can't imagine that, as the pilgrimage began, the elders didn't likewise beseech the Creator of Heaven and Earth to accompany them, to watch over them, to keep them from harm in the frontier they wanted to domesticate for a new colony of believers.
The place they still honor as the half-acre where the new settlers built their first church is no more than a half-dozen miles from a village named for a Dutch hero, a place called Orange City, Iowa.
Just inside the front door of St. Mary's school in Alton stands a statue of the Blessed Virgin, holding the Christ child. Imagine--150 years ago that statue came with. When the wagon train hit river beds--the most dangerous moments on the trek--the pioneers carried the Blessed Virgin in their arms, their precious cargo wrapped in blankets. Nothing in its brightly-painted visage today suggests wear-and-tear or the memory of a month-long, arduous trip all the way across the Iowa prairie.
It's perfectly clear that both groups of believers suffered the same pestilences--three years worth of grasshoppers that ate everything and sent some of the pioneers from both colonies back east, stoutly convinced no one could live in god-forsaken land. They'd never felt the cold as severely in the valleys and forests along the Mississippi. Always, always, in January cold descended from the Artic Circle. In July heat, the sheer persecution of incessant winds were unbearable. When an Orange City preacher told relatives far away that life was impossible here, the most powerful man in the colony found a way to send him on his way. He's buried in South Dakota.
Is there really any reason to believe that Orange City prayers were any less intense than those offered in Alton or Remsen?
For a few years, Catholics in Alton could hold mass only when a visiting priest would happen through. In order to celebrate Christmas in the closest church (in LeMars), pioneer families had to get out the oxen and begin the long trek at midnight, the night before.
Their first church, built in East Orange Township in 1881, on eight acres of farmland donated by a member of the church, was named--not surprisingly--St. Donatus.
My dad's antipathy toward Luxembourgian entrepreneurs who ran the company where he worked, was borne, in large part from the 400 years of church history he'd come heir to, a history that began with the Reformation in Europe and a heritage of distrust for Roman Catholics, who insisted on fish on Fridays and endless repetitions of the Rosary. He had little tolerance for religious Catholics, priests and nuns, and, at times, hinted, giggling at furtive groanings in rectory. Having said all of that, I think it important to say that my father was a loving man, a quiet soul, a deep believer in his Lord God almighty. He found his bosses' personal behavior offensive--they were heavy drinkers; and, I believe, blamed the absence of piety he found it difficult to look past on nothing more or less than their being Roman Catholic.
I don't think my dad was all that much different than other Dutch Calvinists of his time--he may have even been more tolerant than others.
I've been thinking about St. Donatus and statues and stained glass and the Stations of the Cross, been visiting local Catholic churches in an effort to define bigotry people like myself have, something entirely separate from thoughtful doctrinal differences. I've come to believe that the Roman Catholics around me are better at using story than are those whose Protestant tradition gives them identity. Sola Scriptura is all about "reading" the Bible, not necessarily about "seeing" its great stories.
Good Friday, the passion of Christ, is more clearly readable in Remsen St. Mary's than it is in Covenant CRC. Christ's Resurrection shines through the stained glass on Easter morning. I don't think either side have a monopoly on piety. There are fully as many "cradle Catholics" in Alton than there are and "cradle Calvinists" or cradle Protestants" in Orange City. But righteousness dies when our regards turn to ourselves.
One of the greatest stories about St. Donatus Church in St. Donatus, Iowa, is that the Stations of the Cross that meander up that steep hillside behind the church were constructed in 1861 by a group from both churches, the Catholics on one edge of the valley and the Lutherans a mile away. Look again and for yourself at the picture of the two churches that share the same valley. They stand a mile apart, but not really. Even these days, on Good Friday, men and women and children from both churches take up their crosses and pilgrimage together.
(One more day. There's yet more to say.)
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