ST. PETER (1903)

Nathan C. Meeker, former agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, founded Greeley, the utopian dream of Tribune editor Horace Greeley. The Union Colony, formed in New York to recruit immigrants of means and morals, decided early that the Greeley colonists should worship together at a "Union Evangelical Church." Two Irish servant girls, however, had other ideas.

Maggie and Annie Flynn threatened to leave the household of James Freeman to find work in Denver where they could go to Mass. Freeman, a prominent attorney and state senator, was not a Catholic, but he prized the services of these hardworking sisters, who cooked and cared for his family.

So Freeman arranged for Father Raverdy of Denver to celebrate Greeley's first Mass in the living room of his home at 1202 7th Avenue. After Father LePage became pastor at Fort Collins, he regularly took the train to Greeley to conduct Sunday services at Senator Freeman's place.

Maggie and Annie Flynn saved their pennies to help Father LePage build, in 1884, at 12th Avenue and 6th Street, a tiny brick sacristy. David Boyd, a Greeley pioneer, reported in his 1890 A History: Greeley and the Union Colony that "this building, such as it is, was erected by a few, mostly servant girls."

Greeley did not count any known "cat lickers" among the "saints" who first settled at the junction of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre rivers for Colorado Territory's first great communal effort at irrigated farming. Indeed, the anti-Catholicism of many early residents was reflected in Boyd's history, where he explained that Greeley was a temperance town and wrote on page 294:

Catholicism, at least Irish-Catholicism, and whisky go in harmony together. It is farther [sic] worthy of note that scarcely any Germans were among the original colonists. . . . We put them to too much trouble to get their lager beer.

Father G. Joseph LaJeunesse, after becoming pastor at Fort Collins, acquired a new Greeley church site at 9th Avenue and 10th Street for $500. He used the small five-room cottage as a rectory while constructing, next door on 10th Street, a $3,000 church that was dedicated in August 1899. Ten years later, this church was sold for around $13,000 as part of the site where the stately Weld County Courthouse was built in 1917.

Thirty years after its birth as a mission, St. Peter parish was formally organized in 1903 with the arrival of the first resident pastor, J.A. Bastien. After Father Bastien and another short-term, ailing pastor, St. Peter's received an energetic young Irish priest as a 1903 Christmas present. Andrew B. Casey formed an Altar and Rosary Society, a choir, a Young Ladies Sodality, a Sunday School, and a Newman Club to serve the State Normal School (now the University of Northern Colorado).

Father Casey bought lots from the Union Pacific Railroad in the middle of Greeley's finest residential section. After a slow start, Catholics aspired to build a fine structure on a fine site. They succeeded-- thanks to some unexpected help from non-Catholics. Father Casey, in a letter to Bishop Matz, reported that "the Protestants are all very kind to me and turn out for everything I have, otherwise, with the few Catholics here it would be impossible to do as well."

For Christmas Mass in 1909, Father Casey used Newman Hall, as he christened the basement of the unfinished church. On May 8, 1910, Bishop Matz dedicated the monumental new St. Peter's. Standing on a nine-foot-high concrete foundation topped with eight feet of rusticated white stone, the gray manganese brick edifice featured a wealth of stone trim framing a variety of Gothic, rose, and roundel windows. Inside, under a soaring rib-vaulted ceiling, elegant furnishings were showcased by electric lights installed in graceful Gothic curves. The exterior rose seventy-four feet over the cruciform 118-by-fifty-foot nave. Although architects Ward and Patterson planned a 135-foot-high steeple atop the corner bell tower, it never materialized.

In 1914, Father Casey exchanged Dan, his nine-year-old sorrel horse, for a new Maxwell "gasoline burner" to speed him to the missions at Eaton, Keota, Kersey, Johnstown, Milliken, Nunn, Severance, and Windsor. In his horseless carriage, Father Casey visited even the remotest corners of Weld County to say Masses at such places as the Kerchoff family's E-K Ranch. This hectic schedule, according to a sixty-one-page typed parish history in the archdiocesan archives, led to the death of the forty-one-year-old priest on May 16, 1916.

St. Peter School, a handsome two-story red brick structure across 12th Street from the church, was dedicated February 23, 1927, under the pastorate (1916-1929) of Raymond P. Hickey. This red-headed Irishman was the first priest to complete all of his seminary training at St. Thomas's in Denver. Father Hickey had bought a house, in 1922, to open the school and added grades each year until 1927, so St. Peter Grade School could send graduates on to Greeley Catholic High. Although the Sisters of Loretto had opened the school in September 1923, they withdrew and were replaced in 1927 by the Sisters of Mercy. The forty-three-year-old

Father Hickey, like Father Casey before him, died young of overwork, expiring in the rectory on April 29, 1929.

Fortunately, the next pastor of St. Peter's enjoyed a much longer life. German-born, Regis College-educated Bernard J. Froegel became one of the first priests in the archdiocese to celebrate his golden jubilee of ordination. Father Froegel, who became Monsignor Froegel in 1949, is fondly remembered as "the priest with his pockets full of candy."

Not only children benefitted from Father Froegel's kindness. For German prisoners of war, held at agricultural camps in Greeley, Ault, Galeton, Kersey, and Pierce, Father Froegel procured German prayer books and ministered to the POWs in their own language. To the long list of Weld County missions served by St. Peter's, Father Froegel added not only the POW camps, but also Ault, Gilcrist, and New Raymer. This handsome, square-jawed priest celebrated his golden jubilee five months before his death on October 31, 1953.

Father Froegel's assistant, Robert F. Hoffman, succeeded him. A native of Sterling and a graduate of St. Thomas Seminary, Father Hoffman retained architect Karl Schwartz for a $75,000 remodeling of the church. This young clergyman also built a new rectory behind the church and spent $12,000 to remodel the house at 12th Street and 9th Avenue as a convent for the Sisters of Mercy. A year after Archbishop Vehr awarded Father Hoffman the purple robes of a monsignor in 1959, he was reassigned to St. Mary's in Colorado Springs.

Even though St. Peter's seating had been enlarged from 320 to 400, the next pastor, Robert V. Nevans, a Denver native and St. Thomas's graduate, began work on another Greeley church. And after St. Mary's was completed in South Greeley in 1965, Father Nevans took charge there.

At St. Peter's, Father Nevans was followed by the Rev. Owen McHugh, a graduate of St. Thomas's and of Catholic University. Father McHugh and his constant companion, Sallie (a golden retriever), soon endeared themselves at St. Peter's. He took a special interest in Greeley Catholic High students and Newman Club students from the University of Northern Colorado, who fondly called him "Daddy-O."

In 1973, the Paulist fathers took over the parish, which closed its school in 1986. That year, the Paulists withdrew from the parish, which returned to archdiocesan priests and underwent "Urban Renewal." Fathers Leonard and Peter Urban had grown up in Wallace, Kansas, and gone to the seminary together. They shared a commitment that made Greeley's core city parish and university work attractive to them.

Father Leonard is a writer who contributes a column to the Denver Catholic Register and authored Look What They've Done to My Church (Chicago: Loyola Univeristy Press, 1965), a reflection on the post-Vatican II church in which he finds a broad historical continuity amid the changing approaches to Catholicism.

As Father Leonard told the Greeley Tribune of July 11, 1986, upon his arrival at St. Peter's, "We are very concerned and always have been about social injustice. We want to awaken people to the Gospel message, to help people both physically and spiritually poor." Pursuing that goal, they have opened parish properties to Right to Read, with its English language instruction, to the Mercy House that feeds and financially assists the poor, and to Guadalupe Center that provides room and board for the migrant and the indigent.