ANNUNCIATION (1883)

To some, Annunciation might seem a dreadfully old-fashioned church and school in what the 1980 federal census found to be the poorest neighborhood in Denver: 51.1 percent of the residents lived in poverty. Amid tiny, antique Queen Anne houses painted pink and turquoise, a cock crowed to celebrate the core city sunrise on the mornings I visited in 1988.

"Actually," explained business manager Della Garc¡a, "we're the richest parish in the diocese. We have more nuns than any other school. Seven Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth live over there in the old Bissell mansion."

Sister Therese Klepac gave me a tour of the Italianate mansion at the corner of East 36th Avenue and Lafayette Street. "Once," she explained, "it housed Amos Bissell, a pioneer banker. Since 1907 it has housed over 100 Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth who gave their lives to this parish, this school, this neighborhood." The old home, with its twelve-foot ceilings, saints, and statues, and cross country skis behind the refrigerator, holds stories:

On Halloween we have 100 to 200 trick or treaters. They've heard our convent is a haunted house, spooked by the spirit of Amos Bissell's widow. She was declared insane by Judge Ben Lindsey and dragged out. And cars of kids also pile up here on Halloween because we keep the lights on and have plenty of goodies. Besides, these kids know we're safe and that we love them.

"When the Capuchins first came here in 1970," Sister Therese said softly,

the church and the neighborhood were dying. Then the Capuchins and the parishioners worked together to restore the church. European immigrants built this parish, but the Hispanic and Afro-American parishioners restored it. Once we fixed up the church, people began fixing up homes and businesses around here. Folks began to feel that the whole neighborhood was worth saving. And people started to look at the history of this area and this parish.

Annunciation parish started in 1883 as St. Ann's, a small brick church at 38th and Delgany streets. Bishop Machebeuf donated the site on a ninety-acre farm he had purchased in the 1860s in what became known as Denver's St. Vincent's Addition, a tract between the South Platte River and the railroad tracks. The bishop sent Michael J. Carmody, his assistant at the cathedral, to serve as the first pastor of St. Ann's. At the dedication, Bishop Machebeuf led a procession of parishioners around the exterior and interior of the church, which he sprinkled with Holy Water.

The bishop's Holy Water did not prevent the fire that completely consumed the little church in 1885. A freight train parked across an intersection prevented the fire department from reaching the inferno. Nicholas C. Matz, the second pastor, rebuilt. Matz was succeeded at St. Ann's by Godfrey Raber, who started a parochial school. This school quickly filled with the children of immigrants who had settled in the Platte River bottoms.

In 1889, Father Raber swapped parishes with Henry Robinson, the capable cleric who had founded the first parish in Leadville. Upon his arrival at St. Ann's, Father Robinson found that his flock was moving out of the increasingly industrialized bottom land. As parishioners moved eastward, they found it difficult and dangerous to cross the growing maze of railroad tracks to get to the church. Father Robinson sold the church, school, and grounds for $7,300, constructing a new church in 1890 in rapidly developing northeast Denver. He renamed the parish Annunciation, the same name he had given his pioneer Leadville parish.

The partially completed church and a new school opened in October 1890. Ultimately expanded to become a large, three-story brick structure at the northwest corner of 37th and Humboldt, Annunciation School housed elementary grades on the first floor, a second-story junior high, and, as of 1913, a third-story high school. The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth operated this complex as the largest Catholic school in Denver with enrollment as high as 675 students.

After Father Robinson and his parishioners completed the church, it was consecrated in September 1907. Plans to build a large bell tower and steeple on the corner of 36th and Humboldt never materialized, but this massive red brick Romanesque structure with its glorious rose window over a triple Roman arch entry is still a magnificent sight. The Most Reverend Hubert Michael Newell, the late bishop of Cheyenne, grew up in Annunciation parish and helped to resurrect its past in a 1987 interview:

When I attended Annunciation church and school, it was a bastion of immigrant Irish, Italians, Germans, and Slavs. Father Robinson was a tall, gaunt, U.S.-born Irishman, a pious pastor who also served as vicar general for Bishop Matz. Toward the end of his life, Father Robinson was very hard of hearing and used an ear trumpet. We had to shout out our sins during confessions which became all too public. When Father Robinson died in 1913, a procession of school children escorted his body from St. Joseph Hospital back to Annunciation for the funeral services and burial at Mt. Olivet.

Michael Francis Callanan, a County Galway, Ireland, native ordained by Bishop Matz, served as pastor from 1916 to 1934. Father Callanan remodeled and embellished the interior with stained glass windows from Munich, golden oak pews, and ornate scagliola columns that burst into florid capitals and ornate arches carrying the ribs of the high vaulted ceiling. Annunciation is an old-fashioned, traditional church, jammed with neoclassical architectural detail and with paintings and statues. A pair of life-sized angels (if angels are about the size of humans) with folded four-foot-long wings perch atop the twenty-five-foot-high marble altar.

As the Annunciation year books in the archdiocesan archives indicate, Father Callanan was a traditional, hard-nosed priest capable of fire-and-brimstone rhetoric:

Our free parochial school deprives parents of any excuse for the non attendance of their children.

Satan never spat up from his burning, broiling lungs a thing fouler than [Martin] Luther.

At no slight inconvenience to themselves, the ushers are always in their place, rain, sunshine or storm. Our parishioners should show a fitting appreciation . . . by not giving them the glassy stare as a substitute for a dime when they modestly extend their gentle palms in humble supplication for the seat money.

Trying to support a magnificent church and one of the largest grade- and high-school complexes in the archdiocese was never an easy task. Annunciation served three of Denver's poorest neighborhoods: Swansea with its blue collar stockyards and smelter workers as well as Cole and Five Points, which have come to house many of the city's poorest Afro-American and Hispanic families. During the 1930s Denver Fire and Safety Department inspectors condemned the school three times for numerous undesirable and hazardous conditions.

"Then, miraculously, the Good Lord and Father Callanan came to the rescue," recalls Monsignor Thomas Patrick Barry, pastor from 1955 to 1970.

When Mike Callanan died in 1934, they found a little black box he left to the parish. Inside was gold mining stock he had bought at fifty a share. I think it was in the Mary McKinney Mine at Cripple Creek. Joseph Craven, the archdiocesan attorney, and John J. Sullivan of Bosworth Sullivan Investment Company sold the stock for $80,000. With the proceeds, the parish built a new high school [now the grade school] in the 3500 block of Lafayette.

Archbishop Vehr dedicated the new high school in the fall of 1951. Annunciation parishioners rejoiced in the brand new brick building. Before, the parish had educated its children in the old Bissell house and in the decrepit Irontown School, an abandoned public school the parish had leased for $50 a month.

Charles H. Hagus, pastor from 1934 to 1954, kept the church and school healthy with the help of the mining stock. Father Callanan, who had spent an estimated $100,000 on the church and school, had also left his estate of $3,112.95 to his beloved parish. Father Hagus, the son of a pioneer Colorado Catholic clan, had been baptized by Monsignor Robinson and had received his first Holy Communion from Father Callanan. To support the parish, Father Hagus launched bingo, after a statewide vote in the 1950s legalized charity bingo. Bingo buffs gathered in the the old Greek Orthodox Church at 3690 Lafayette, which Annunciation bought and renamed Hagus Hall. Hagus Hall has since been demolished and, in 1986, became the site of new HUD townhomes.

Some very capable assistant pastors made Annunciation a vibrant core city parish. Charles B. Woodrich, a former New York City advertising man, made the Sunday night $1,500 bingo games popular and profitable. "I went to Las Vegas," Father Woodrich elaborated in a 1987 interview, "to learn how to professionally stage bingo extravaganzas."

James Moynihan, a Denver native, worked with youngsters in the tough eastside neighborhood, bailing them out of jail, counseling them as parolees, and pushing sports instead of drugs and crime. Unwilling to give up on boys others called "rotten" and "hopeless,"

Father Jim befriended two national heavyweight boxing champions, Rocky Marciano and Sonny Liston, and brought them to the parish to promote athletics. Assistant pastor Donald A. McMahon wrote and directed musicals for the school's drama program and introduced youngsters to the fine arts.

Monsignor Barry, who followed Father Hagus as pastor, worked with assistant pastor Moynihan to build a $240,000 addition to the high school and replace the miserable little gym, equipped with one cold shower. When high schoolers reported for football practice one afternoon, Father Moynihan handed them sledges, crowbars, and hammers instead of footballs. Gleefully, they demolished the old gym. Students worked with plumbers, carpenters, and bricklayers in the parish to build the new gym, which was dedicated by Archbishop Vehr on March 1, 1961.

Archbishop Casey, on May 1, 1970, assigned Annunciation parish to the Capuchins, the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor (OFM Cap.), who have been in charge ever since. By the 1980s, 90 percent of the 519 families in the parish were Spanish-surnamed. This rich Hispanic heritage is celebrated with mariachi Masses and a procession and potluck feast on December 12, the feast of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. As of 1987, 190 pupils were enrolled in the kindergarten and elementary school. The high school was closed in 1968, and the old 1890 school was demolished and replaced, in 1970, by the Humboldt Apartments, a joint effort of the Archdiocesan Housing Committee, Inc., and HUD.

The Capuchins, the congregation, and their friends gave Annunciation Church a $50,000 face-lift between 1976 and 1982. Wall paintings and stations of the cross, almost invisible behind decades of dust, were restored by parish artisans working with preservation experts. Thomas More Janeck, pastor at the time, oversaw and fully documented a first class restoration. "The poor," said this brown-robed pastor, "need art and beauty, too." Street trees, flower gardens, and a grape arbor were planted, and the stone grotto of Our Lady on the north side of the church was spruced up.

In 1976, the parish acquired a venerable grocery store at the southwest corner of Humboldt and 37th, which parishioners brightened with an Aztec-style mural and reopened as the Twin Parishes Center, a joint venture of Annunciation parish and the large, suburban Shrine of St. Anne parish in Arvada. Twin Parishes Center offers employment counseling, a food bank, and emergency assistance.

Janeck, Annunciation pastor from 1976 to 1981, remains at the Humboldt Street friary but, since 1981, has devoted himself to a migrant labor ministry. In 1989, he also became chaplain to the Capuchin Poor Clare Sisters. Julian Haas, who became the fourth Capuchin pastor in 1986, and five other Capuchins in various ministries, now live at the Annunciation Friary at 3621 Humboldt. Sister Marie Michael Mollis, SCL, the pastoral assistant, and the other Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth live in the Bissell house.

Hollywood came to this historic parish in 1988, choosing Annunciation as the site of the television movie series, "Father Dowling Mysteries." Viacom Productions of Universal City, California, hired Father Haas as technical advisor for this Friday night prime time show. "What a great way to start our centennial!" Father Haas exulted in 1989. "For in 1990 we celebrate 100 years of Good News, the 100 years of Annunciation Parish on this site."

Summarizing the Franciscans' role, he concluded: "As sisters and priests, we are always listening to the Hispanic, black, and white voices of this neighborhood, trying to deal with their needs." Father Janeck, the former pastor, chimed in: "At Annunciation, we begin with faith to get things done when we do not have the wherewithal."