July 7, 2003

Plains Folk: Corpus Christi

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Looking at my photo of the altar boys of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Dazey, North Dakota, leading the 98th annual Corpus Christi procession up the shaded pathway, only one thing seems incongruous: the colorful brand-name sneakers protruding below their white robes. But hey, it’s a living tradition. And a splendid one.

I’m glad Peggy and Jack Wieland sent me the invitation to be a part of it. The Festival of Corpus Christi, a venerable tradition of German Catholics, is a rare thing in this country today.

You may have met some of the folks from St. Mary’s in this column before. These are the people who gather in the church basement in late summer to cut hundred of pounds of cabbage and stash it in trash cans to make the kraut for their fall supper.

Theirs is a beautiful, pale stucco church set on well-kept grounds ringed by groves of trees. Through the groves, the pathway for the Corpus Christi procession circumnavigates the church grounds. The fall supper is a fine thing. The Festival of Corpus Christi, though, is fundamental to the faith of the parish.

Here’s the routine. The day before the festival, parishioners gather at the church to make preparations. Women carry armloads of peonies and other flowers cut from their home gardens into the church basement to make floral arrangements for the altar and for the two little wood-frame chapels situated along the procession pathway. Men work out-of-doors, sprucing up the grounds and, this year, mulching the 300 trees planted as replacements in the groves for ones taken out by Dutch elm disease.

I watched as George Amann drove up, his car seats covered with religious artwork collected from the walls of his home. We carried the pieces into one of the chapels. Following longstanding tradition, others were doing the same, delivering the artwork from their homes that belonged in each of the chapels. I was there, too, when Lloyd Wieland drove up with his pickup loaded with boughs of cedar, Russian olive, elm, and mountain ash. He and Jim Wieland and George started tacking the boughs artfully around the pictures hung in the chapels and onto the doors. It is a transformation. The plain little chapel buildings become scenes of wonder.

The mass of the day following was most impressive. People from nearby and from as far as Alaska and British Columbia came up the aisles, embraced one another, squeezed into the pews. What an astonishment when the male choir launched into the Kyrie Eleison. The singing may be a little rough, but these guys hit the notes, you bet.

Principal Celebrant for the occasion was Father Cletus, from over in Hope. He must have known a Lutheran was present, as he made transubstantiation the subject of his homily. He was invited over to preach by his friend, Father Matthew, priest of St. Mary’s. I should mention that these two fellows are Nigerians. I mention this for reasons I will get back to.

We walk the pathway toward the southeast chapel for the first Adoration. Little girls have strewn the path with flower petals, the altar boys lead the congregation, the choir sings as it marches, the blessed Host is carried by Father Matthew under a canopy, women murmur rosaries, and over the heads of all, through the gaps in the grove, we can see forever across a sun-drenched bumper crop of wheat waving in 40-mph winds. Piety in this moment is not just audible, it is palpable.

The people kneel when Father Matthew upholds the host at the chapel, and he tells them, "Let the Sacrament bless our lives, bless our families, bless our community." Our community, he said. Somebody write the Bishop and tell him to send us more of these guys.

I have to tell you, too, what George Amann told me while he was bedecking the chapels. I noticed he put the aromatic cedar on interior walls. He described how the women would carry the peonies into the chapels and shut them in overnight. He said, "You ought to be here in the morning when they open the chapels. You never smelled anything like it."

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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