ST. MICHAEL (1920)

Craig, at the end of the Moffat Railroad, became the seat of Moffat County. It is one of the largest and emptiest of Colorado's sixty-three counties, from which Mary E. Lewis wrote in 1986:

Father Joseph H. Meyers, a most saintly man, of Steamboat Springs came to Craig and various ranches around the community to say Mass. My father, Joseph Biskup, would help him get to wherever he needed to visit or say Mass. Yost's pool hall was used a few times for Mass, as was the old courthouse. . . . Our first church was a small white frame building, first used to house the 1st and 2nd grades. . . . It was sold to the city for a library when the new school building was built.

Father Michael O'Beirne was the first pastor of St. Michael's and he had living quarters in the back of the church. Father was a large man and kept a big white horse in a shed behind the church. . . . to ride to nearby ranches to visit parishioners and to say Mass.

The church has a small steeple with a bell in it. My father would ring the bell one half hour before Mass time and again five minutes before. . . . In 1923, Father Francis J. Brady came from Rifle and supervised the building of the new church. It was dedicated in 1925. Many of the parishioners dedicated their time and various talents in helping build the church. . . . Money making projects included . . . the annual Harvest Dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes (how many hundreds I peeled!) and gravy, corn on the cob, coleslaw and pie.

Father Slats, as Mary Lewis and other parishioners called Paul Slattery, became the first resident pastor of St. Michael's in 1935. He stayed sixteen years in the small isolated parish where most pastors remained only a year or two. Father Slattery persuaded the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, which took over the Moffat Road, to give him a free pass enabling him to minister to the faithful all along the line in private homes and section houses as well as at St. Brendan's in Grand Valley (now Parachute), at St. Mary's in Rifle, and at the Community Hall in Silt.

John V. Anderson, assigned to St. Michael's in 1958, felt it was still a frontier region. "I have found that there are at least fifteen Catholic families living in an oil camp 63 miles northwest of Craig," he wrote to Archbishop Vehr, seeking permission to take a portable altar out to the oil field workers at Powder Wash. "That was wild country," he recalled twenty years later, "with wild cats, wild mustangs, and wild people. I said Mass outdoors and heard confessions in the can--that was the only private place!"

In 1953, Craig erected a $25,000 rectory and basement parish hall. Robert Syrianey and his parishioners also spent $10,000 to remodel the 1920s brick church.

During the 1973-1983 boom in coal, oil, and oil shale, St. Michael's grew into a parish of almost 400 households, thriving with Sister Mary Ann Flax, CSJ, as the pastoral assistant and Cathal Longwill as pastor.