By Charlene Scott
Dodge City Daily Globe
January 5, 2008
http://www.dodgeglobe.com/stories/010508/loc_20080105005.shtml
Archivist Tim Wenzl has compiled a most unusual book that tells the stories of 317 deceased priests and bishops who served the 28-county area that now is the Catholic Diocese of Dodge City.
The book is "Priests on the Prairie, Southwest Kansas Territory." Each page is devoted to a different priest who is listed according to the day of the year he died, Jan. 1 through Dec. 31. The pages are in a binder, so the stories of other priests can be added to the book after their deaths.
"There are some amazing men among these priests," said Wenzl. "The book includes not only diocesan priests, but religious order priests. Many priests from foreign countries have served the diocese: German, Irish and French. In the future, biographies will be added for priests from Burma, Africa, India, Ecuador, the Philippines and Vietnam."
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| Doctor Atif Qadeer talks about his feeling about the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Friday afternoon in his office at the Dodge City Medical Center. Qadeer, a native of Pakistan, learned of the assassination while visiting some of his family in Wichita. Photo by Michael Schweitzer |
"Priests on the Prairie" has a limited printing of 300 copies - and 100 copies have been sold and shipped. The Knights of Columbus in southwest Kansas provided a grant for the book's publication. An additional 100 copies are currently available.
"When I read this book, I thought immediately of 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' a classic work from the 1930s by James Agee and Walker Evans," wrote Bishop Ronald M. Gilmore in the new book's introduction. "Our famous men of this book are the priests who have served us in southwest Kansas stretching back to the time of Juan de Padilla in 1541. They are all here with their spare, tantalizing stories: something of their work, something of their manner, something of their irreducible humanityÉ. These good men must not be forgotten."
Several readers, including priests, have informed Wenzl that they intend to read a page a day, corresponding with the date.
"It will take a year to read the book that way," Wenzl said with a chuckle, "but the reader can meditate each day on the life of a different priest and pray for his soul, asking him to pray for them."
The book begins with the stories of three priests who died on Jan. 1: Fathers Basil Heim, OFM Cap, born in Bavaria; Patrick Downey, born on a farm near Wright; and John P. Kowal, born in Boston.
Heim served for 20 years in Kansas and was known for his escapades with "Old Kate," the horse that pulled his buggy to many prairie missions. He died in 1949.
When Downey learned that older men were being accepted into the priesthood, he entered the seminary at age 46 and was ordained at age 52, serving the diocese for 16 years. He died of a bone marrow disease in 1997.
Kowal was another member of the Capuchin Order who served in Kansas. He was ordained at Falls Church, Va. in 1957, and also served as an army chaplain in Vietnam, where he celebrated 15 Masses at different sites on Christmas Day 1968. He died in 2002 in Ulysses.
Most of the men who served in southwest Kansas were young when they were ordained. Fray Juan de Padilla, OFM shot to death with arrows by the Kansa tribe was only 28 when he left Spain for Mexico in 1528.
"During 1529 and 1531, he accompanied the expeditions of Nuno de Guzman to Nueva Galicia and Culiacan, and prevented the oppression of the natives while acting as military chaplain," Wenzl wrote.
A cross marks the spot where de Padilla offered a Mass near Dodge City on June 29, 1541, the first Mass celebrated in the area that became the state of Kansas. De Padilla served as a chaplain on the expedition led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.
"They had the Mass because they were happy to have crossed the Arkansas River safely," Wenzl explained. "Fray Padilla named the river for Saints Peter and Paul, because it was their feast day, June 29th."
Another priest who worked with Native Americans was Father Valentine Sommereisen, who was born in France in 1829 and died in Hays in 1897.
"He was a missionary to the Indians and learned the Sioux language," Wenzl said. "He accompanied General George Custer and his Seventh Calvary as an interpreter on an expedition to Yellowstone in 1873."
Father Francisco Lombardi, born in Italy in 1867, was a missionary in China during the Boxer Rebellion. "Once, he and other priests recovered the bodies of three bishops and two priests who were impaled on posts," Wenzl wrote.
A friend of Mother (now "Saint") Katherine Drexel, Father Lombardi worked among Italian coal miners in southeast Kansas. He also ministered to Choctaw Indians at St. Agnes School in Antlers in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Drexel was a financial benefactor of the school.
Wenzl also writes about the first bishop in Kansas, Bishop John Baptiste Miege, a French Jesuit who lived at St. Mary's Mission for the Pottawatomie. The tribe included 3,500 Indians 1,500 of them converts who resided in small villages on 30 square miles of land.
Miege was plucked from the St. Louis University faculty and appointed in 1850 as vicar apostolic of Indian Territory East of the Rocky Mountains, a vast territory that extended from the western border of Missouri to the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian border to Texas. Miege died July 21, 1884, at Woodstock, Md.
Wenzl also relates the story of Bishop Stephan Appelhans, SVD, who was born in 1905 in Pfeifer and grew up in Spearville, where he offered his first Mass as a priest in 1932. He was ordained a bishop and appointed vicar apostolic of Eastern New Guinea in 1948.
Less than three years later, Appelhans died with six others in an airplane crash in New Guinea. A Requiem High Mass was celebrated for him at St. John the Baptist Church in Spearville.
The book is dedicated to the memory of another bishop, the Most Rev. Marion F. Forst, the second bishop of Dodge City, who, at the time of his death on June 2, 2007, was 96, the oldest living bishop in the United States.
"He was one of only five remaining bishops who had attended all four sessions of Vatican II," said Wenzl.
"As I wrote this book, I thought to myself: 'When was the last time anyone thought of these priests?' I believe the greatest value of the book is the documentation of these men's lives in a format that can be used and appreciated."
To obtain a copy of the book, which sells for $30 (including postage and handling), send a check to Priests on the Prairie, PO Box 137, Dodge City, KS 67801.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.