HOLY CROSS (1957)

Colorado Governor Dan Thornton was the namesake of the planned Adams County community of Thornton. Four years after the town's first show home opened in 1953, area Catholics convened in the historic Riverdale Grange Hall 187 to organize Holy Cross parish, which Archbishop Vehr formally created on August 15, 1957.

Charles T. Jones was selected as the founding pastor. When over 800 began squeezing into the grange hall for the four Sunday Masses, he and members of the parish began "Operation Open House," with meetings in over 100 host homes to discuss church building.

Land was acquired on Eppinger Boulevard between York and Wigham streets, where a surplus Rocky Flats weapons plant structure was installed and remodeled as a church/school dedicated on October 13, 1957. The building was doubled in size and given a blond brick facing and a dramatic entryway wooden cross. Archbishop Vehr dedicated the new building on September 17, 1958. Franciscan nuns from nearby Marycrest Convent helped with religious instruction, to be followed in 1960 by the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati; lay teachers taught secular subjects until the school closed in 1975.

To assist the many young families of the parish in buying new suburban homes in Thornton, Holy Cross established a parish credit union. Bake sales in Thornton Shopping Center, Mexican dinners, street dances, and St. Patrick's Day galas helped sustain the parish, whose membership soon climbed to over 1,000 families, with 125 children on the waiting list for the school.

Father Jones stepped down as pastor in 1967, to be followed by various pastors over the years, including Martin Lally, who has guided the parish of over 800 households since 1986. Charles J. Chaput, a Native American Capuchin priest of the Prairie Band of the Potawatomis who served as pastor at Holy Cross during the 1970s, was appointed, in 1988, bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota.

A former parishioner, Pat Hillyer, became a prize winning reporter for the Denver Catholic Register, where she was appointed managing editor in 1988. In the parish's 1982 jubilee booklet, Pat reflected:

Holy Cross'[s] humble beginning was an unpretentious grange hall, several miles outside the city. There was no polished wood, lovely furnishings, or golden ornaments. But, there was a nucleus of warm, loving people, on fire to become a united community and bear fruit for the Master. They, and those who followed, sacrificed countless amounts of time, talent and treasure to build what today stands as a unique parish, where people are the most important ingredient.