In honor of Elizabethtown the movie

Yes, I am getting excited. Rubberboots Girl, I wish you were home so we could roadtrip to E-town to see the movie together. A few times, even. For the first time we can sit in silence and enjoy the movie. The second time you can talk through it and tell me which scenes correspond with all your close encouters. The third time we can pick out all the scenes that are supposed to be set in E-town but are actually in another town.
Anyway, in honor of E-town the movie, I am continuing my sometime postings about E-town and my brief life in Kentucky. Today is a paper I wrote in 2004 for my Eucharist class. The assignment was to write about a vivid liturgical experience-good or bad- and why it was such. There were specific elements required, like cultural make-up, that stick out a little bit. Anyway, if you are by St. James in E-town, tell them we sent you!

Here in this Place

While not a singular liturgical event, the life in the parish of St. James in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, has had the most impact on my experience of Eucharist and life as a Catholic. Frequent relocations have in the past several years brought us to new states and new parishes. None of the three other parishes we have attended in the past five years can measure up to the St. James experience.

St. James is located in the heart of what the Kentucky Catholics in that area refer to as the Holy Land of Kentucky. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, hundreds of English and Irish Catholics left religious persecution in Maryland (of all places) for the sanctuary of the Kentucky wilderness. A small city, Bardstown, was emerging as a major gateway to the west, an important city west of the Alleghenies. Louisville was yet a tiny town on the Ohio River as the Falls of the Ohio were not navigable. Any freight or travelers that wished to continue beyond Cincinnati to the Mississippi river had cross Kentucky on land through Bardstown. While the English Catholics were settling the area around Bardstown, exiled French priests arrived to minister to them. In 1808, the Diocese of Bardstown was established at the request of John Carroll, covering the western territories from Detroit to New Orleans. Around this center for the Catholics of the west, religious communities formed and monasteries were established. These include the Loreto Sisters and the Trappists (of whom Thomas Merton was the most famous). The Kentucky part of the original diocese of Bardstown eventually became the Archdiocese of Louisville in the mid-1800s.

It is in this place that the ordinary Sundays at St. James are important events. Entering the Church building on a weekday when it was not in use would be unremarkable. The post-groovy church architecture was likely worthy of comment during its construction, but in recent years it is just another church built in the 1980s with a sloping roof. The interior is likewise unexceptional in tan and brown brick. The rows of pews are arranged semi-circular about the altar. The large baptismal font with a running fountain lends some atmosphere, but not more than at a New Age store. It is by no means a bare or an ugly church; it is simply not a beautiful or majestic church like those dedicated as Minor Basilicas in this country. However, on even ordinary Sundays when the pews are full, the space is transformed.

In the minutes before Mass there seemed to be a building anticipation of an extraordinary event. The congregation then feels completely engaged as the Mass begins. I could feel myself being absorbed into the mass/Mass. The pews contained only hymnals. The missellettes that are normally used to cue the responses and follow the readings were absent. These were probably eliminated from the church due to parish budgeting; however the effect was our careful hearing of the dialogues and readings. This was Liturgy of the Word as Lectio Divina. Cantors and choirs were successful in encouraging singing, no matter how poor. The anticipation continued to build to the Eucharist itself, and very few left immediately after communion. Even after the Mass ended and the priest and deacon (there was always at minimum a priest and a deacon celebrating) processed to the vestibule, people would linger in the pews and the church. Regardless of which priest or if a visiting priest said the Mass, the charged environment was the same every week at St. James. The Body of Christ was more than just food for the journey, but a living, breathing organism. This was a real example of the Church as Body of Christ.

The rich parish life of St. James no doubt is a result of an engaged people. Every summer without fail the archdiocesan seminary sends a student to St. James for positive (and possibly misleading) experience. The RCIA program is active and visible. There is strong support for the grammar school, and St. James has always been one of the greatest contributors to the Archdiocesan stewardship appeals, even in the recent years when many people elsewhere in the diocese withheld contributions to protest the sex-abuse scandal that was yet to be settled. The city of Elizabethtown and the parishioners of St. James are not wealthy or poor on average. An industrial city, Elizabethtown had more in common with industrial towns of Indiana than the dirt-poor agrarian towns of East Kentucky or the wealthy horse farms around Lexington. While the parish is largely white, there are people of color visibly involved in the parish as well, including a Vietnamese priest and an Indian Deacon. Nearly half of the parishioners are native to Kentucky, while others are relocated northerners or associated with Ft. Knox. To look at them, the parishioners of St. James are as unremarkable as their church building. However, to be with them is another story.

The parishes I attended before St. James were affluent churches in suburban Philadelphia. In these churches of several thousand parishioners, the church building holds at least two thousand for each Mass. The Masses then never felt invalid, and the parish life certainly was there, but the feeling was not the same as I would come to feel when we moved to Kentucky. The energy was simply not there. Since leaving Kentucky for Mississippi last year, we have yet to feel that same energy in the parish at Brandon.

So what was the source of this engaged people of St. James? The parish priest, Fr. Sullivan, and his associate, Fr. Do, certainly have the personalities that one would associate with priests that are able to maintain parish involvement. This would be regardless of where they were assigned, though. The people of St. James make their jobs that much easier. My husband always said that it was a characteristic of Southern communities to have devout and devoted people in their churches. However, we have since attended other Southern parishes that did not have the same energy as St. James. To understand the parish of St. James as well as many of its close neighbors, I look to the 200-year history of the Catholics in that area. In attendance at St. James are quite a number of descendents of those early pioneer Catholics, Spaldings and Williamses and Dandts to name a few whose names most frequently appear in histories of the area. Within these families there has been a tradition of piety and defensive faith in the face of the adversities faced by these pioneers. Obviously heritage alone cannot possibly be the reason why there is a certain energy to the Mass. As well, as I previously wrote, only a portion of the parish is descended from these pioneers. But could it be contagious the piety and desire for a perfect Eucharist? Among the oldest neighbors of St. James are several communities of religious, including the famous Trappists of Gethsemani. Only some of the parishioners of St. James ever come in contact for even a day with any of these monasteries or motherhouses. However, do these communities with even their prayerful existence impact the religious lives in the region? It is almost chicken and egg, the communities of religious and the larger Church communities of the area. Who influences whom?

It would be nice to pinpoint a precise reason or reasons why the weekly celebration of the Eucharist at St. James is extraordinary. If that were possible, the formula could be applied everywhere. However, it is likely that there are several contributing factors, such as the Catholic heritage of the area, the concentration of communities of religious in proximity, outstanding charismatic priests, and generally pious people. Whatever the cause or causes, the Eucharist celebrated at St. James truly is the Body of Christ.