SACRED HEART OF MARY (1867)

Sacred Heart of Mary, the oldest Colorado Catholic church north of Denver, and the Benedictine monastery next door, introduced not only Catholicism but also Old World culture to the gold mining town on Boulder Creek.

After its founding by the Boulder City Town Company on February 10, 1859, the settlement remained small for years. Isabella Bird, the English world traveler and author, described it in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains: "Boulder is a hideous collection of frame houses on the burning plain, but it aspires to be a `city' in virtue of being a `distributing point' for the settlements up the Boulder Canyon, and of the discovery of a coal seam."

Like other rough-hewn frontier towns, Boulder lusted after a veneer of civilization, seeking churches and schools as prized ornaments of culture during the rush to respectability that followed successful mining rushes. Boulder claimed the first schoolhouse in Colorado Territory, and the state university. The town, striving to become Colorado's cultural capital, welcomed the first visit of Joseph P. Machebeuf in January 1861. Afterwards, it was visited from time to time by Father Machebeuf or his assistant, Father Raverdy. Catholic services, according to the Boulder County News, were held in a hall above the City Drug Store at 14th and Pearl streets "every first and third sunday at 10 o'clock A.M. and Christian instruction at 2 o'clock P.M."

Father Machebeuf purchased 160 acres in south Boulder from Daniel Delehant for $500 on December 9, 1867, and a small frame church was built on this prairie hilltop under the supervision of Thomas McGrath, pastor of St. Joseph's in Golden. A pioneer parishioner, John DeBaker, made the pews, and Bishop Machebeuf donated vestments, sacred vessels, and twin pictures of the Sacred Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus to decorate the wall behind the altar. Machebeuf named this $600 white frame church Sacred Heart of Mary and asked priests from Golden to conduct Sunday services there.

In 1886, Bishop Machebeuf transferred the church and its site to the Benedictines from St. Vincent Abbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. These Benedictines agreed to care for all the souls in Boulder County. Their missions included flourishing new coal-mining towns such as Erie, Lafayette, and Marshall, as well as missions in the silver-mining town of Caribou, and St. Joseph Chapel in Ward (the building survives today as a county garage). St. James mission, which the Benedictines opened in Gold Hill, is now a private home. In Superior, a saloon was remodeled with a steeple and bell tower to become a chapel. South of Sacred Heart of Mary Church, the Benedictines constructed a five-room frame house ambitiously christened St. Bernard Monastery. They built a barn and a few outbuildings and began growing wheat and oats. The monastery, by 1889, had three Benedictines who, besides tending the farm, the monastery, and Sacred Heart of Mary, staffed Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in downtown Boulder and missions scattered around Boulder County.

In 1896, the Benedictines closed St. Bernard's to concentrate on their new monastery school in Pueblo. While Pueblo had mushroomed into the second largest city in Colorado, Boulder remained a small town of 3,330, according to the 1890 census. At that time, Sacred Heart of Mary had thirty-five member familys, primarily German, French, Belgian, and Irish.

Services were conducted twice a month by priests from Sacred Heart of Jesus Church until 1909, when Suitbert Rickert, OSB, became the resident pastor of Marian parish. Therese Stengel Westermeier recalled Father Rickert's Sunday services and catechism lessons in her 1973 parish history, Centennial of a Country Church. She reported that Father Rickert strove to civilize as well as Catholicize, telling parishioners that it was not correct to:

1. Make the Sign of the Cross as if fanning off flies.
2. Give a little bobbing curtsy instead of a proper genuflection.
3. Deliberately turn around to stare up at the choir or at those entering church.
4. Go to sleep or read the prayer book during the sermon.
5. Be in an ecstatic condition of devotion when the collection box approaches.

Therese also recalled the outdoor Corpus Christi celebration, when sawhorse and plank altars were draped with her family's "best white sheets." Catechism lessons were suspended in order to teach children "to walk properly" in the procession:

The boys were warned not to start any monkey-shines, such as poking a partner in the ribs to get him off balance. The girls were admonished not to giggle or gossip and to walk "gracefully" trying to balance a tissue covered shoe box, filled with flowers, dangling from our necks with one hand, and a wreath of smilax on our heads with the other.

Antoine Hintenach, OSB, the next pastor, arrived in 1911. To the delight of little Therese and her friends, he was "riding a motorcycle--something new to us country kids!" Father Hintenach gave sermons in both English and German, or sometimes skipped the sermon to conduct a pop quiz on the Baltimore Catechism. In 1913, he began building a new church next to the original 1872 frame structure. Parishioners hauled bricks and lumber from Boulder to build the $8,000 Romanesque landmark. Next door to the church, the old Benedictine monastery found a new use in 1934, when it became St. Walburga Benedictine priory. Sacred Heart of Mary Church struggled over the years to pay off the new church debt with old-fashioned barn dances, hoedowns, sewing circles, and basket socials featuring homemade candy, cakes, and pies. Children such as Therese Westermeier made novelties to sell at the annual parish carnival at Valmont Lakes and at the summer suppers under the trees in the churchyard. During the 1920s, Father Antoine and his parishioners dug water ditches to the parish cemetery so that it could be something more than a weed patch. Men of the parish cleaned it twice a year, on Memorial Day and on All Soul's Day. On May 25, 1930, the big cross was unveiled in the center of the reborn cemetery.

Benedictine priests Robert Murray (1938-1945), Kevin Clark (1945-1955), Francis Hornung (1955-1957), Baldwin Haydock (1957-1966), Joseph Hannan (1966-1971), and Edward J. Vollmer guided the parish. "Once we had eighteen Benedictine priests here in Boulder County," Father Vollmer, the former abbot of Holy Cross Abbey in Canon City, noted sadly in 1987. "Now, I'm the only one left." Father Vollmer reported in 1989 that the parish is doing well, thanks in part to a tithing program introduced in 1972:

All fund-raising gimmicks have been eliminated. Yet we have added a large activity room to the parish hall in 1977 and an adult education center in 1979, with more classrooms and a youth center in 1982. The rectory was remodeled in 1985 with additional office space, a conference room, a reconciliation room, and we became the first computerized parish.

For social activities we have potluck suppers, an annual golf tournament, parish picnics and cookouts, a St. Patrick's Day dinner dance, Mother's Day Breakfasts, a Spirits, Ribs and Parables Dinner Club, a Ladies Bowling Club calling themselves the "Holy Rollers," and a Double Nickel Club for all parishioners over fifty-five years old.

In 1973, Gene and Toni Crabtree and I started a clothing, bedding, and food drive for American Indians. That year, we hauled a truckload of these things to the Winnabago Indian Reservation near Omaha. The next year another truckload went to the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Other parishes, both Catholic and Protestant, have joined the drive and we now deliver over five large truckloads to St. Michael's Indian Mission each fall. In 1986, the Crabtrees and our parish continued the program for the poor in Juarez, Mexico. We are also working with the Sister Carmen Center in Lafayette.

The tithing program at Sacred Heart of Mary has made it a far more loving, sharing, and involved parish, which now sends at least $100,000 a year to the missions, especially the Indian missions.

Abbot Edward, as Father Vollmer is also called, celebrated his fiftieth anniverary as a priest and his eightieth birthday in 1988. Among his presents was the first assistant pastor that Sacred Heart of Mary parish ever had. "Father Andrew Kemberling and I were both ordained on June 11th," Father Vollmer noted of his associate, "but fifty years apart!"