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>> 29 1 All Saints from Village Church to Shared Parish In early 2008, I facilitated the creation of a bilingual display on the history of All Saints Parish. In preparation, a group of older parishioners sorted through their memories, I sorted through parish archives, and a handful of us looked through the photographs, newspaper articles, and other materials provided by the same group of elderly parishioners. A teacher with an artistic bent designed the display space and helped me set out the materials. We set out old photographs, first-person accounts of the past, anniversary booklets, newspaper articles, and artifacts. Over the next few weeks, parishioners filed by the exhibit after mass or during the Lenten fish fries sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. They examined photographs of the old Gothic Revival church—inside and out—and the old parish school building (also formerly a house for priests and then nuns), both now long gone. Some of the Euro-American parishioners pointed out their own ancestors in first communion photographs from 1906 and baptism photos from 1914. There were reproduced accounts of turmoil in the town of Havenville from the early years of the parish. People looked at Altar Rosary Society medals from the 1940s and 1950s, an anniversary booklet from the 1990s, and a grayed photograph of the twin angels that once flanked the old Gothic Revival church’s entrance. It was pointed out how photographs of Catholic Youth Organization activities during World War II contained only young women, most of the young men being away at war. People remembered with pride the women’s choir from the early 1960s, a group of housewives who had made popular records of sacred music and toured internationally. 30 > 31 without understanding whence it came. We cannot understand, for example, contemporary resistance to demographic changes without a feel for the fraught intercultural encounters of the mid-twentieth century , when Havenville was a homogenous Euro-American cultural environment and differences were not well tolerated. On the other hand, history can offer hope. Reconstructing intercultural encounters of a more distant past—for example, the relatively uneventful nineteenth century rapport between Germans and Irish, between Catholics and Protestants—might provide surprising resources for wading through the intercultural tensions of today. * * * The history of All Saints Parish can be roughly divided into four distinct periods. All Saints began in its early years as a tiny Roman Catholic parish in a small Protestant town. During those “village church” years, it was one of the few English-speaking parishes in an area dominated by German Catholics and other ethnic Catholics in national parishes . After many decades as a small-town parish of this kind, population growth after the Great Depression made it into a “social parish,” a comprehensive social environment for Catholics. This period lasted well into the 1970s (in part through the long tenure of one pastor), but it eventually surrendered to multiple social forces that made its community less tight and cohesive. By the 1980s, a more “decentralized parish” came to birth, which by the late 1990s had slipped into the “shared parish ” era when parishioners began to share their church with an immigrant community from Latin America. There is a temptation to think of intercultural relations, one of the major themes of this study, as a product of the shared parish era at All Saints. But long before that epoch began, encounters, perspectives, and clashes between cultural groups shaped the parish community at All Saints. In the description of the history of the parish that follows, intercultural perspectives offer a frequent lens through which to view the unfolding story. Though certainly not the only lens, this one raises consistent questions about the negotiation of religious and cultural identity in Havenville, even from its earliest days. But these issues take the fore in the era of All Saints as a shared parish. 32 > 33 the Germans who came settled in agricultural areas.6 So many Germans settled in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys that the area between Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati became known to historians as the “German triangle.” A pattern developed among Catholic parishes for these Irish and German immigrants. Ethnic or national parishes— parishes for single ethnic or language groups, established either de jure (by church law) or de facto (by circumstance)—dominated the cities, while the rural areas, with fewer concentrated immigrant communities, sported a mix of territorial and ethnic parishes.7 Irish migrants frequently formed national parishes, but these parishes...

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