BLESSED SACRAMENT (1912)

"I hear lots of babies crying at Mass--and that's a good sign in a seventy-five-year-old parish," Leo R. Horrigan noted in 1987. Father Horrigan, pastor of Blessed Sacrament since 1976, added that many second and third generation families stay with the parish.

"Maybe I shouldn't be saying this," Father Horrigan added,

but our ghost has also stuck with the parish. He lives in the third floor of the rectory. We call the ghost Fred--Monsignor J. Frederick McDonough, who put his heart and soul into this parish for twenty-four years, dying here in the rectory in 1936. Fred doesn't bother me anymore but he's spooked a lot of assistant pastors.

Father Fred is said to ride a bicycle around Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, as he did in June 1912, while organizing thirty-four families into a parish. Although the Baron Eugene A. von Winckler platted Park Hill in 1887, development was slowed by the 1893 Depression. Not until after Mayor Robert W. Speer began building the tree-shaded streets, boulevard, and parkways for which Park Hill is still famous did the neighborhood begin to flourish.

Initially, Park Hill Catholics attended the chapel at Mercy Hospital, the procathedral in the basement of Cathedral School at 1842 Logan, or St. James's after that church opened at 13th and Newport in 1904. Bishop Matz and Monsignor Hugh McMenamin, rector of the cathedral, sent McMenamin's assistant pastor, Father McDonough, to establish the new parish requested by Park Hillians. By 1913, the first parish census listed forty-five families.

The neighborhood welcomed Father McDonough, a rosy cheeked, shy young priest. The youngest of thirteen children, McDonough had been educated by Jesuits at Boston College in his native Massachusetts. After three years at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, he was ordained by James Cardinal Gibbons on June 19, 1907. Like so many other early Colorado priests, Father McDonough came west because of failing health, hoping to recover in high, dry, sunny Colorado.

Father McDonough, thanks to the kindness of Park Hill Methodist Church, held the first Catholic meetings and services in the Methodists' large building at East 23rd Avenue and Dexter Street (the structure still stands as an apartment building with storefronts that include Park Hill Drug). Respecting Father McDonough's special devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, parishioners chose that name. In 1912, the parish purchased six lots at Elm Street and Montview Boulevard--at a reduced price--from parishioner Lawrence Purcell. Later, Robert Sullivan donated two adjoining lots.

Following a whirlwind of bazaars, card parties, and socials to pay for construction, Bishop Matz dedicated a $25,000, neoclassical, two-and-a-half-story building of grey pressed brick on June 29, 1913. The basement served as a parish center and the first floor as a church; Father McDonough lived on the second floor. In 1915, Blessed Sacrament launched its famous Easter Monday Ball at the Brown Palace Hotel, a fund-raiser that helped pay for a school staffed by the Sisters of Loretto and for constructing, in 1923, a $23,000 three-story brick rectory next door.

During the prosperous 1920s, when Park Hill emerged as one of Denver's most prestigious neighborhoods, Blessed Sacrament had Denver architect Harry James Manning design a $250,000 neo-Gothic cruciform church with twin spires soaring over Montview Boulevard. This cathedral-sized fantasy, frosted with Art Deco and Tudor elements, was to remain only a beautiful drawing in the parish files. The crash of 1929 and depression decade of the 1930s shattered the dreams of Blessed Sacrament parish. Manning died in 1933, and his associate, William E. Andress, was asked to scale down the project. The basement and ground floor of the church were completed on September 15, 1935, and consecrated by Bishop Vehr. Father Fred, the person most responsible for the new structure, lay ill that day, but on Christmas Eve, he was cheered by the news that he had been made a monsignor. He died the following year on December 23, 1936.

One of the pallbearers at Monsignor McDonough's funeral, Harold V. Campbell, succeeded him as pastor in 1936. Campbell, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, had studied at St. Thomas Seminary in Denver where he was ordained in 1924. After his first assignment as an assistant at Holy Family parish in North Denver, Father Campbell served as a founding organizer of Catholic Charities, as a chaplain at the Mullen Home for Aged, and as pastor of the Shrine of St. Anne in Arvada.

Although never completed, Blessed Sacrament remains an interesting example of perpendicular Gothic, a phase of the English Gothic style. Despite several remodelings, including two updatings of the sanctuary for liturgical purposes, surviving original elements include the Gothic grand entry (which was to be crowned with a glorious rose window and two spires), a narthex, and exquisite stained glass windows from the studios of Franz Mayer of Munich. The $60,000 Indiana limestone church seats 400. Instead of being 164 feet long with eighty-six-foot-wide transepts and eighty-nine-foot-high towers, it measures 122 feet by fifty feet and is thirty-two feet tall.

Rather than pour more money into finishing the church, Father Campbell concentrated on expanding the school. In 1942, the parish completed a convent at 1901 Eudora to house the ten Sisters of Loretto teaching in the grade school. In 1944, Father Campbell and his parishioners celebrated retirement of the entire parish debt of $115,500. Five years later Father Campbell's work was acknowledged by Pope Pius XII, who promoted him to the rank of monsignor. Monsignor Campbell dedicated the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine at the corner of Montview and Elm later that year.

Meanwhile, Monsignor Campbell and Archbishop Vehr began planning a new Catholic high school to serve all of East Denver. With the post World War II population boom, Park Hill, Montclair, and Aurora attracted thousands of newcomers, many of them Catholic. To meet the growing demand for a Catholic secondary school, Blessed Sacrament and the archdiocese undertook to build the first unit of a secondary school, named in honor of Colorado's first missionary priest and bishop, Joseph Projectus Machebeuf. Construction began in November 1949. When completed and opened to students in September 1951, the $255,000 junior high school contained seven classrooms, offices, a cafeteria, and a full-sized gym that doubled as an auditorium. Blessed Sacrament, which ultimately gave a half million dollars to build Machebeuf, helped complete the second stage in 1958, expanding it from a junior to a senior high school. The original 1949 structure is now Blessed Sacrament Middle School for grades six, seven, and eight.

The convent was expanded in 1959, making room for forty sisters. Machebeuf quickly became one of the largest Catholic high schools and hired famed football coach Pat Panek, upon his retirement from East High in 1966, to develop an athletic program. In 1971, the congregation bought the old Lawrence Higgins family house, a bungalow at 1912 Eudora Street, as a parish center. To further accommodate growth, Campbell Hall was erected on the south side of the church in 1979. It was named for Monsignor Campbell, longtime pastor, who had written to Archbishop Vehr in 1964 requesting retirement: "I am suddenly old and the parish needs youth." Monsignor Campbell subsequently became auxiliary chaplain at St. Joseph Hospital, Denver, where he died December 21, 1967. Monsignor Edward A. Leyden served as pastor of Blessed Sacrament from 1964 to 1970, guiding the parish through the difficult years of integrating Park Hill and its schools.

After Afro-Americans began moving east of Colorado Boulevard in the 1950s, the Denver public schools built a new elementary school, Barret, at 2900 Jackson Street, to keep blacks from attending Park Hill Elementary School. Black families, who were moving into Park Hill in search of better neighborhoods and better schools for their children, brought suit. The result, in the U.S. Supreme Court case Keyes v. School District No.1, was a 1973 order that Denver public schools be integrated. While many white families moved out of Park Hill, others stayed, and Monsignor Leyden at Blessed Sacrament joined with ministers of St. Thomas Episcopal, Park Hill Methodist, Montview Presbyterian, and other neighborhood churches to pursue peaceful integration. These churches spearheaded creation of the Greater Park Hill Community Association, which staged block parties to introduce new black neighbors to the older white residents. On a block by block basis, Park Hillians came to accept the fact that blacks and whites could live in the same place and work toward common goals of a safe, attractive neighborhood with good schools and churches.

Blessed Sacrament welcomed blacks under Monsignor Leyden and his successor as pastor, Michael A. Walsh, (1970-1976). Many blacks also attended Curé d'Ars, a second Park Hill parish that had been formed in 1952. During the 1970s, the parish sold the former Loretto convent to the Jesuits, who use it as a Western Province novitiate. Sister Ellen Kerr, BVM has served as principal of Blessed Sacrament School since the 1970s with help from Sister Sheila Dougherty, BVM, while Sister Mary Bernard, CPPS, serves as pastoral assistant and bookkeeper. Sister Mary Paraclete, SLG, a black nun, handles parish outreach.

Leo R. Horrigan succeeded Father Walsh as pastor in 1976. Father Horrigan, a native of Imogene, Iowa, was reared in Denver and studied at St. Thomas Seminary before going to the North American College in Rome, where he was ordained in 1959. After earning an M.A. in education at the Catholic University of America and working for six years in the Denver archdiocesan chancery, Father Horrigan moved to Blessed Sacrament and into the old rectory with the ghost of Father Fred. "Blessed Sacrament," Father Horrigan reported in 1987,

continues to be a vibrant social and spiritual center for Park Hill. We're still working closely with other churches and Temple Micah, Park Hill's Jewish synagogue, to preserve the neighborhood and make integration work.

Blessed Sacrament's location across the street from a masonic temple and only a few blocks away from five Protestant churches, typifies the diversity of Park Hill, a neighborhood that has become nationally prominent for its relatively smooth integration of blacks and whites, of elegant mansions and modest bungalows. Father Horrigan pointed out in 1987:

Blessed Sacrament School, which is preschool through eighth grade, and Machebeuf High School are healthy examples of how ecumenism and racial integration can work. Our student population is one-third minority and one-third non-Catholic. We've grown from thirty-four families in 1912 to 582 families today. Father Fred's ghost, who still inhabits the third floor of the rectory, seems to be satisfied that we are continuing the work he started out to do on his bicycle seventy-five years ago.