SACRED HEART (1924)

Homesteader Tom Klausner arrived two years after Roggen was platted as a ranching and railroad town in 1908. The Klausners traveled by spring wagon to wherever the nearest Mass was being offered.

In 1914, they rounded up enough Catholics to coax Bernard Froegel of Brighton to say Mass in the Roggen School. In 1920, the growing band of Catholics purchased an abandoned schoolhouse in the sand hills five miles east of town. To get the building into Roggen, they used planks and teams of horses and mules. Not until March 1921 did they finish dragging the church to its present location. Then, planks were laid across bricks to create pews for the first services. Before Bishop Tihen arrived for the dedication on June 10, 1924, parishioners handcrafted permanent pews and plastered and decorated the interior of the frame structure.

M.C. Klausner, Tom Klausner's brother, conducted catechism classes, while his wife prepared the First Communion groups. Although some Protestants were scandalized, parishioners laid out a baseball diamond next to the church for after-Mass games. Despite dust, debt, drought, and twenty-five-cents-a-bushel wheat during the depression, Sacred Heart parish endured, sharing a pastor with Holy Family Church in nearby Keenesburg. Sisters of Charity came from Denver to teach catechism in the summers, and an addition was attached to the rear of the church in 1930. Sacred Heart parish raised $7,346 in the winter of 1943 to build on land donated by the Charles Buchholzes a new church, a feat that Archbishop Vehr called "the miracle of the diocese."

The archbishop assigned architect John K. Monroe to help plan the new church and appointed Charles P. Sanger the first resident pastor. Archbishop Vehr dedicated the Romanesque church on June 10, 1947. As parishioners donated much of the labor and materials, this exquisite structure with its domed bell tower and coffered ceiling was built for only $29,000.

While undertaking their new church, this energetic congregation also bought a home for $2,480 and moved it a mile and a half to rest beside the old church. It was used as a convent, and the old church was divided into two classrooms where two sisters, Adorers of the Blood of Christ from Wichita, Kansas, opened Sacred Heart School in 1946. Enrollment reached sixty-five during the 1950s, but two decades later declining numbers and rising costs led the parish to close its school. Robert L. Breunig, pastor since 1985, reported in 1988 that Sacred Heart and its missions at Keenesburg and Wiggins are alive and well.