ST. THERESE (1926)

Although it is the third largest city in 1980's Colorado, Aurora was for decades a small, stagnant farm town on the eastern outskirts of Denver. Franciscan friars from St. Elizabeth's in Denver began saying Mass in Aurora's Sable Schoolhouse in 1903. After the Sisters of Mercy established a novitiate in 1915 at East 14th Avenue and Dayton Street, Mass was offered there daily. When the novitiate closed in 1922, East Denver's St. James' was the nearest Catholic church, and Aurorans began agitating for a parish of their own.

Bishop Tihen obliged them, asking Henry A. Geisert to establish Aurora's first parish in 1926. It was named St. Thérèse of Lisieux in honor of the Little Flower who had been canonized on May 17, 1925. Father Geisert bought the two-story frame house, which had served as the Sisters of Mercy novitiate, and six adjacent lots for $15,000. The home's parlor was converted to a chapel for the sixty or so Catholic families in Aurora, who supported the church by holding dinners and bazaars in Murphy's Garage. These popular fifty-cent dinner carnivals raised as much as $500 a night. Daniel A. Barry, who succeeded Father Geisert in 1932, was a handyman who built confessionals into the church and remodeled much of the rest of the old house. During the 1930s depression, St. Thérèse's survived, though Sunday collections rarely brought in as much as $50.

Aurora boomed during and after World War II. Louis J. Mertz, pastor from 1946 to 1954, saw the town's population skyrocket from 3,437 in 1940 to over 50,000. Rapid growth around Stapleton, Lowry, and Buckley airfields led St. Thérèse's to offer five Sunday Masses for an estimated 500 parishioners by 1949. That year, the parish purchased forty-eight lots on Kingston Street. John K. Monroe planned a $95,000 church, which was dedicated on July 2, 1951. A $310,000 grade school and convent came next. School children squealed with delight as four F-80s of the Colorado National Guard buzzed the school as part of the dedication ceremony on September 23, 1955.

The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth were teaching 663 pupils by 1960, when a $176,698 addition gave the school a new library and brought the number of classrooms to fifteen. In 1966, the parish received a new pastor, James B. Hamblin, better known nationwide to the readers of the Junior Catholic Messenger as "Father Jim." He added a $209,318 gymnasium to the flourishing school.

With the construction of three new Aurora parishes between 1954 and 1979, St. Thérèse's membership stabilized at around 900 households. The parish has maintained the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, plus an extended day care program, a credit union, a blood bank, scout troops, and a broad spectrum of programs in what has grown to be a two-block parish complex.