Diamond Jubilee-75th Anniversary 1892-1967
Father Peter Claver, the Spanish Jesuit “slave of the slaves,” who spent 44 years teaching and baptizing hundreds of thousands at the Caribbean port of Cartagena in the 17th Century, was raised to sainthood in 1888. That same year, St. Paul’s Archbishop John Ireland adopted St. Peter Claver as his patron for a special “congregation of converts” who had been his friends for many years, since his return from the Civil War in which he had served the cause of freedom as a chaplain with the Union Army.
After the war, young Father Ireland had held convert classes for Negroes who then attended St. Paul’s downtown Cathedral and other nearby churches in the fast-growing city. By 1888, Archbishop Ireland decided to seek - like St. Peter Claver - larger numbers of converts. He assigned Father (later Bishop) John Shanley of the Cathedral staff to rent a Swedenborgian church on Market Street across from Rice Park for a six-week “converts’ mission” to be conducted by Father John R. Slattery, rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary at Baltimore.
The converts’ mission was a success, and a curious development followed. Nine of the persons who attended the services were already Catholic converts and these became charter members of the new Congregation of St. Peter Claver, using the rented church under the direction of Bishop-to-be Shanley. The nine founders were Colonel Samuel E. Hardy, Samuel Matthews, John Talbert, Mrs. Julia Talbert, Mrs. Alice Watkins, Joseph Banks, Mrs. E. J. Edwards, and the Misses Edna and Elizabeth Buck. In time, they were aided by Sisters Emiline, Josepha, and Hyacinthe from St. Joseph’s Convent and by Cathedral priests such as Bishop-to-be Patrick R. Heffron and Father John Thomas Harrison.
The congregation grew in numbers and influence. Colonel Hardy, who was an early convert of Father Ireland and who founded the first Negro newspaper west of Chicago, helped organize the Negro Catholic Congress and was elected vice president at the first session held in Washington, D.C. in 1889. He also organized voters into an independent political movement called the Citizens’ League and was its president for three years. Until his death in 1906, the Colonel helped a succession of priests at St. Peter Claver’s by directing numerous clubs and sodalities.
Neighbors "Object" to New Parish Site
It was in 1891 that the growing congregation on Market Street asked Archbishop Ireland for permission to build a new church away from downtown, in a new neighborhood. They bought land at Rice near University, where some neighbors “objected” (it was a residential section in 1892, since the Minnesota State Capitol was not to be built there for some years) so they bought a piece of property near the southwest corner of Farrington and Aurora.
When he gave permission for St. Peter Claver’s, which might become another “national” church for Afro-Americans, Archbishop Ireland explained that he regarded the idea as a “temporary expedient” to help promote conversions to the Church.
For himself, the Archbishop said, “I know no color line.”
History indicated that the Archbishop was more than a civil-rights leader a century ahead of his time. He insisted on social rights as well as civil rights for everyone.
Among Archbishop Ireland’s preserved essays, sermons, and addresses is one issued in 1891 on the 28th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Archbishop proclaimed: “I am ahead of my day!”
“I Would Blot Out The Color Line!”
“I would blot out the color line,” he repeated. “I would break down all barriers…
“I would open to the Negro all industrial and professional avenues – the test for his advance being his ability, but never his color. I would, in all public gatherings and all public resorts, in halls and hotels, treat the black man as I treat the white.”
Meanwhile, plans went ahead for a new Church of St. Peter Claver on Aurora at Farrington.
Another illustrious convert joined Colonel Hardy in signing the documents of incorporation for the new church. Frederick L. McGhee, born in 1861 in Mississippi, attend Knoxville College in Tennessee with the help of the Freedman’s Aid of the Presbyterian Church, studied law in Chicago, and passed the bar in St. Paul, where he was baptized by Father Harrison in 1891, after which his family followed him into the Church.
He was renowned as an orator and for many years led a movement to test civil and political rights of Negroes through court cases.
Also signing the legal papers with Editor Hardy and Lawyer McGhee was Father Edward Casey, from the Diocese of Springfield in Massachusetts, who had volunteered to be St. Peter Claver’s first full-time pastor. Father Casey directed the construction of a new $12,000 church in the summer of 1892 and set about to raise the money with bazaars and picnics and lectures throughout the diocese. In three years, the debt was reduced to $3,500.
In the first years on Aurora, Father Casey gained many new converts. He organized elaborate classes of instructions for non-Catholics, with Sunday-night sermons by celebrated bishops and pastors – billing names like Ireland, Lawler, Cleary, Dolphin, Heffron, and Byrne. In a few years, the church membership surpassed 300.
In 1895, Father Casey was transferred to St. Mark’s Church in St. Paul and was succeeded by Father John F. Gleason from St. Joseph’s Church on the southwest corner of Carroll at Virginia (since replaced by the “new” Cathedral). Father Gleason finished the lower floor of the church and fashioned an assembly hall large enough for bazaars and entertainments. He also established a literary study group under the title “Toussaint L’Ouverture Society” in 1896.
Father Gleason was succeeded by Father John F. Andrzejewski, who organized the parish choir with director Claude Jackson and organist Emma Porter, a graduate of St. Benedict’s Academy at St. Joseph, Minnesota.
In 1897, “Father Andrews” was succeeded by Father Thomas F. Printon, newly ordained. In these years at the turn of the century, the state capitol was built near by, as was the new Cathedral of St. Paul, and the neighborhood expanded in all directions. The parish membership was racially integrated.
In 1902, St. Peter Claver’s got its first rectory and a new pip organ, which Father Printon paid for by touring the archdiocese to raise funds. He sold tickets at one dollar apiece to raffle the parish’s unused lots at Aurora and Rice. Father Printon also reorganized the sodality as a men’s club, started a court of Catholic Foresters, and began St. Monica’s women’s guild as an altar society.
In 1910 Father Printon was appointed pastor of St Andrew’s at Como Park, and his successor at St. Peter Claver was a particular protégé of Archbishop Ireland.
Father Stephen Theobald, “The Little Giant”
Archbishop Ireland’s teachings on almost all subjects – citizenship, patriotism, democracy, mortality, “The Church and Modern Society” – spread his fame afar, across the seas to other continents.
In Georgetown, British Guiana, a young man was beginning a remarkable pilgrimage that would lead him to Europe, back home as a lawyer, then to Canada as a journalist, to the North America and St. Paul as a priest and ambassador of racial justice and love.
He was Stephen Louis Theobald, born in British Guiana July 5, 1874, and educated there at St. Stanislaus’ College, conducted by Jesuits – the order of St. Peter Claver. From the Jesuit school he went to Queen’s College, and then to Cambridge University in England for his law degree. After being admitted to the bar, he went from Georgetown to Canada, where he worked on the Montreal Star. Among his friends in Montreal were Jesuits to whom he confided his interest in becoming a priest; and they agreed that Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul would welcome an inquiry about this delayed vocation.
At the time, there were said to be two colored priests in the United States. Archbishop Ireland admitted Mr. Theobald to the St. Paul seminary and took the 31-year-old lawyer-journalist under his wing; and within five years this exceptional protégé was ready for ordination and a brilliant career as one of the seminary’s most famous graduates.
Archbishop Ireland ordained Father Theobald on June 8, 1910, and assigned him to his staff as a canon lawyer and pastor of St. Peter Claver’s in 1910 a mixed congregation of almost 400 colored and non-colored members in a 20-year-old church.
In 22 years, Father Theobald became almost a legend. He was described as short in stature, saintly, artistic and tasteful, scholarly, forthright and diplomatic, and beloved. He was known for his gifts of speech and of logic, and he became nationally prominent for his writings and lectures in the field of race relations, especially within the Church of which Archbishop Ireland often thundered: “There is no room for prejudice in Christianity!” Father Theobald, softer-spoken but equally tough-minded, dared to take on the sullied memory of slave-owning bishops and opportunists in Church history as he fought for Catholic principles and practice within the fold.
Father Theobald, Civil Rights Authority
Father Theobald was a national delegate to conventions for the Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he helped organize a federation for a “Catholic” NAACP. In 1917 he was in the background of a nationwide movement against exclusions in schools and seminaries and was spiritual director for committees that called on leading churchmen. He wrote articles for publication and labored to correct errors in the written history of race relations – especially American Church history of ante-bellum times, though he admitted that the telling was painful for him.
Thus, the little priest became a giant among his people everywhere. Following Archbishop Ireland’s death in 1918 and through the episcopacy of Archbishop Austin Dowling, Father Theobald traveled widely in the cause of civil rights. One historic night in 1931 he stood on the speakers’ platform at St. Louis University in Missouri and drew applause while attacking that city’s color line and the prejudicial laws in that state. He criticized racism in sisters’ hospitals. And, he preached that the Church will be the only institution that can get at the roots of racial discrimination by insisting on the essentials of life and on the immortality of the human soul. He urged productive harmony and peace, insisted on constructive and conservative cooperation, decried propagandizing in protest and seeking questionable notoriety in headlines. The Church, Father Theobald maintained, works quietly and persistently for justice, right, and peace.
St. Peter Claver became a lively center. Non-parishioners came in crowds to hear Father Theobald’s sermons and to attend his novenas. He was especially devoted to St. Therese, the Little Flower, and had a first-class relic of that French nun.
Death Did Not Halt Father Theobald’s Work
In his 23rd year as pastor of St. Peter Claver’s, Father Theobald was stricken with peritonitis. Following an appendectomy, he died in St. Joseph’s Hospital July 12, 1932, with Archbishop John Gregory Murray praying at his bedside with his friend since seminary days, Father (now Monsignor) John J. Cullinan, who was to lay the cornerstone of the new church almost a quarter century later.
More than 100 priests and five bishops attended Father Theobald’s funeral, and more than 1,000 mourners were turned away from the church that was overfilled for his Funeral Mass.
Father Theobald was eulogized by the national magazine America, and in death St. Peter Claver’s legend lived on.
In his will, Father Theobald left a piece of property that had been given to him years earlier. His “beneficiaries” were Sisters of St. Peter Claver, an international mission-aid society of nuns with a Motherhouse in Rome and an American outpost in S. Louis, Missouri. Their specialization was raising funds for the Church in Africa.
The Sisters came to St. Paul to look at the property left them by Father Theobald. It was a business plat, and the sisters decided that they could not use it. So they sold it and bought a headquarters at 123 West Isabel Street on St. Paul’s West Side.
Since 1938, they have been publishing magazines and letters from missionary priests – and now a children’s story magazine in English and Polish editions. The magazines are called “Echoes From Africa” and “African Youth,” but their mission work now extends to India and Japan and other lands, as well.
Father Theobald over the years had founded a League of the Sacred Heart, summer vacation schools, sodalities, missions near and far, and dozens of clubs and societies, old and new. In his pastorate he had renovated and installed many things – three marble-top altars, a new pipe organ in 1917, Stations of the Cross, new Communion rail, sanctuary lamp, baptismal font, and a mural of the Ascension by Joseph Lalonde.
His successors, Father Joseph Lord and John Sullivan for short terms in 1932, and Father Charles J. Keefe from 1933 to 1942, continued the work and added a St. Aloysius boys’ club, a men’s glee club, a liturgical study club, the Children of Mary, and sodalities for ladies of all ages. It was Father Keefe also who started the parish novenas to Blessed Martin De Porres, whose name and sanctity were becoming as world famous as was his contemporary, Father Peter Claver. Martin had been a lay brother, not a priest, a male nurse in Peru in South America, next door to Colombia, where Father Peter Claver from Spain had won his heavenly reward.
Brother Martin, however, had a special blessing. He was colored.
The people of St. Peter Claver’s now began 20 years of prayers of his canonization.
Parish’s 50th Anniversary During World War II
In 1941, plans were laid for celebrating the 50th anniversary of the church, with Hugh Schuck as co-chairman with Father Keefe. The first event was a recital at the Catholic Youth Center by Mrs. Veronica Lucas.
The Golden Jubilee Year, 1942, found the nation at war. Parishes as well as families were dislocated, and in midyear Father Keefe was transferred to the Church of St. Anne at Le Sueur, to be succeeded by Father Jerome Luger, who had been an assistant at St. Mary’s church, St. Paul.
Father Jerome Luger then assigned a new committee for the remainder of the jubilee year under Charles Graham, co-chairman. They were David Payne, Frederick Schuck, and Jon M. Whitaker; Mmes. Louise James and Mary McFarland; and the Misses Rita Rhodes, Estelle Luckie, and Marie Rhodes. A large jubilee book of text and pictures was published as a historical souvenir.
After World War II, St. Peter Claver’s was threatened by clearance plans for a new approach or Mall to the state capitol. The old neighborhood was starting to move westward, away from the little frame church on Aurora at Farrington.
In its way, history was repeating itself for Archbishop Murray, who now faced a decision similar to that of Archbishop Ireland more than a half century earlier: Should there be a new St. Peter Claver’s? It was a grave decision to be made.
Archbishop Murray had a policy of requiring that, wherever possible, a new parish would first build a school before building a new church. This was most important in the final decision about St. Peter Claver’s, which had been without a parish school since the beginning of 1892.
Father Theobald had wanted to build a school, but the struggling parish of working people would need miracles to provide the money and the sisters to make this dream come true. Once a friend bequeathed him a large legacy, enough to start a school but not to endow it or assure expenses. He died before any such miracle happened. But by the late 1940’s, the wondrous ways of the Lord were working anew.
Father Jerome Luger favored a “shining new” school “to brighten the outlook, to bring cheer to the environment” of his people. He envisioned a school also as a recreation center, after class hours, for the community. And, with Archbishop Murray, he laid plans carefully. In 1947, three Oblate Sisters of Providence – Mother Barbara, Sister Anthony (a sister to D’Jalma Garnier), and Sister Celine came from Baltimore and moved into a duplex house at 327 Fuller behind the old church. They lived upstairs and taught catechism downstairs; and they also made a parish census, and home visitations, to study the prospects for a new student body if a school were to be undertaken.
The sisters’ census was encouraging – about 300 children in a newer neighborhood to the west would be available as pupils.
It was decided to move westward. First, the school would be built, followed by a convent, then the church, and finally a rectory. It proved to be a ten-year plan.
“Go West, Go West“ - Almost Two Miles Away
A site selected at St. Anthony Avenue near Lexington Parkway was found to be marshy (old-timers recalled a former bog and “Sandy Lake” south of the property), and so St. Peter Claver’s new home was established just north of the rejected land, which later became a low-lying freeway strip.
Thus the new parish site was a block destined to be shared for some years with several other buildings on Lexington to the west, Central on the north, Oxford the east boundary, and St. Anthony along the south side.
The first building, in accordance with Archbishop Murray’s dictum, was St. Peter Claver’s School – a $250,000 classroom structure with a parish hall and temporary chapel, as well as eight regulation-size bowing alleys in the basement, to help support the tuition-free school and to provide needed recreation.
The new parish plant began to take shape when the school was opened in 1950. Staffed by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, whose Motherhouse is in Baltimore, the eight-classroom St. Peter Claver’s School was heralded as open to all regardless of purse or color – or creed. Many Protestant children comprised the 300-member student body at the start of the second half of the 20th Century.
“Perpetual Rummage Sale” Was Started in 1950
Father Jerome Luger borrowed $250,000 for his school and, looking ahead, saw a $5,000-a-month operating cost. He thought about starting a “fund,” and he asked volunteers to hold a two-day rummage sale as a starter – which may become the longest rummage sale in the history of the world. Know as the famous “Worn-A-Bit Shop,” the sale has run continuously since 1950, providing a large share of the annual budgets for the school. Among the originators of the first Worn-A-Bit Shop (it has moved around town over the years) were William Schmidt, Harry Keller, Cecelia Keller, Isabel McNellis, Frances Schmidt, and Margaret Bartchert. The headquarters was a brick store building at 436 North Smith Avenue near the High Bridge.
Along with used clothing and furnishings of every description (“if you don’t need it, we want it!”), the Worn-A-Bit Shop has collected hundreds of volunteer workers from throughout the archdiocese. Now, about 50 women, with some men volunteers, contribute their services on regular schedules. More than 10,000 donors contribute materials to the rummage sale every year. Hired workers make up to 60 truck pickups daily, collecting rummage for the sale.
All year long, the pastor writes 10,000 thank-you cards, plus Christmas cards, as reminders to the contributors to keep the supply coming.
The “Luger Lanes” Bowling Alleys
Father Jerome Luger, who established Worn-A-Bit stores by doing his own merchandising and carpentry and advertising and bookkeeping and hauling – to make payments on a quarter-million-dollar mortgage and tuition bills that some families did not have, also went into the bowing business for the Lord. Located on the ground floor of the new St. Peter Claver’s school building, the “SPC Lanes” opened in 1950, an instant success, and were jammed almost constantly from 6 p.m. to midnight Mondays through Saturdays and from noon to 7 p.m. on Sundays. The bowling boom lasted ten years, and the SPC Lanes were closed in 1965.
Managers from 1950 to 1956 were Lyman Myers, J.W. Lee, and John L. Brown (for about twelve years), assisted by Ralph Jones. The SPC Lanes originated the traveling bowling league for the Catholic Athletic Association for boys and another for girls. Among the bowling organizations that remained with SPC until the end, after other lanes were opened in competition, were the “Twin Cities Ladies” – Gladys McFarland, Mrs. James Lee, Nilee Lewis, Irene Jackman, Estelle Luckie, Mildred Jones, and Nancy Norman, to mention a few.
The rummage and bowling enterprises were supplemented by many fund-raising efforts, including concession stands at the Minnesota State Fair – in 1953 pies and cakes in the 4-H building. Along with fundraising, the parish developed a social movement – even an autumn golf tournament and dinner begun in 1954 by Jimmie Lee, the first and only Negro umpire and cage official in Minnesota for 28 years, and continued as an annual event at Phalen Park each fall.
Parish groups reached out to welcome visiting organizations from other places in the archdiocese, some from distant suburbs. Inter-church picnics, study clubs, and a library project for St. Peter Claver School were launched in 1966 with new friends from St. Mary’s of the Lake parish at Plymouth northwest of the Twin Cities. The youth club continued to visit high schools, confraternities, and interracial rallies. St. Peter Claver through its “sidelines” had opportunities to meet good neighbors far and wide.
The Lord Giveth And Taketh Away
For four years after the school was opened, the sisters made the long, round trip westward each day and home again. Then in 1954 an increase of $64,000 in the parish debt gave them a new convent at Central and Oxford – split level with a chapel, ten private cells, a library, community room, dining room, kitchen, and visiting parlor. The sisters moved in on Christmas Eve, 1954, but they felt a great loss.
On October 31, All Hallows Eve, Father Jerome Luger had died of heart disease, without seeing his parish plant to fruition.
Father Jerome’s brother, Father Arnold Luger from Ss. Peter and Paul’s in Glencoe, Minnesota, was appointed pastor of St. Peter Claver’s and took up the work of completing the parish plant. From his pastorate in Glencoe, “Father Arnold” had been especially interested in the work of his brother, Father Jerome, and the work went on apace.
The summer of 1956, the occasion of his 25th anniversary as a priest, Father Arnold Luger ordered excavation to begin for a new $180,000 Church of St. Peter Claver at the corner of Oxford and St. Anthony, as his brother and his parishioners had planned. The cornerstone was laid in October, and construction was completed by April 20, 1957, in time for the Easter Vigil Service. At 8 p.m., Father Arnold Luger and his flock celebrated the Blessing of the New Fire at the new church doors. That night the following were baptized and received into the Church: Angeline S. Antkowiak, Curtis R. Brown, Elizabeth R. Cooper, Charles J. Fleming, Lou Marlene Parker, and Louise N. Kewaygoshkum.
Parish Helps Set “World’s Record”
That Holy Season, Lenten Self-denial banks helped raise funds for a new $2,500 organ for the new church. The children’s sacrifices during that “first Lent” netted $87.90 for the organ fund, and this humble note in the parish chronicles brought to mind a history-making event:
In 1952, several years before Archbishop Murray’s death and that of Father Jerome Luger, Archbishop Murray had been cited in an announcement by Pope Pius XII that the Archdiocese of ST. Paul was the world’s leader in per-capita parish-school enrollments. St. Peter Claver’s school children were a part of that world’s record, achieved through the people’s faithful determination to carry out their shepherd’s good purpose.
Now in 1957, Archbishop Murray’s successor, Archbishop William O. Brady, blessed the new Church of St Peter Claver before an evening Pontifical Mass April 28; and that same week work began on a new split-level rectory next door on Oxford Street. It would have a suite of rooms for two priests and one guest, two offices, a kitchen, dining room, living room, and housekeeper’s quarters, and would cost $55,000.
The spiritual and temporal pulse of the parish continued to flourish. The regular Blessed Martin Novena was embellished by organ recitals, and bingo was added to the fund-raising schedule – in a rental hall at Seven Corners, open to friends from everywhere.
As if to answer anyone still wondering about building a new parish plant two miles from the old site, city engineers ordered immediate demolition of the old church at Aurora and Farrington. Men of the parish helped remove the salvage. The two lots on which the church had stood were bought in 1960bfor the new offices of the Builders’ Exchange of St. Paul.
The new church and new organ brought new choirs into existence on a New Sunday schedule of High Masses at 11 a.m. The children’s choir sang at the High Mass twice a month, the senior choir and high-school choir each once a month. The new rectory was blessed in October, in time for the winter; and that fall the school children were blessed with a new hot-lunch program as the now-completed parish plant continued to hum.
Another year, 1958, brought more good news. Archbishop Brady gave $25,000 of annual archdiocesan collections for Negro and Indian Missions to St. Peter Claver’s building program. The Boy Scouts of America planned a new troop for the parish. Monsignor Francis J. Gilligan of neighboring St. Mark’s blessed a new church-lawn statue, a De Nardo sculpture of St. Peter Claver, given by Albert McFarland in honor of his wife. The McFarland’s and their son, Walter, were converts.
A new Catholic Interracial Council for the Twin Cities was formed at St. Peter Claver that December, with Father Luger as its first chaplain, and began its work of socializing and providing dozens of scholarships to high schools and academies in St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Father Arnold Luger, civic-spirited like his predecessor brother, joined forces with other community leaders in public affairs. He helped obtain a depression of the freeway past St. Peter Claver’s after early plans had called for the roadway to be built on concrete stilts above the elevation of the church roofs, higher than the playground an entire plant.
A New Saint For the World
By 1962, the fancy of an atomic age was taken by the sainthood of an older friend, Dominican Brother Martin de Porres. Father Arnold Luger went to Rome for the canonization by Pope John XXIII.
Called “the co-patron of our parish,” St. Martin de Porres had for many years been answering prayers for his friends. Father John Wirth, the parish’s first assistant pastor, led the celebration at home. Father Luger asked all parishioners to receive Holy Communion and to take part in the Family Rosary and in a procession at the Cathedral on May 6, coinciding with Blessed Martin’s canonization. Father Wirth wrote in the parish bulletin: “In doing this we will be expressing our gratitude to Almighty God for His answer to our prayers.”
Father Wirth continued, “God granted us the privilege of seeing this truly great and worthy man enrolled among the canonized saints of the Church. In a special way, the organization of St. Martin de Porres points out to one and all the true universal aspect of the Catholic Church. It proves once again that her all-embracing charity transcends the barriers of race and classes. No race, no color, no condition in life is a barrier to admission into that Church which Christ founded or that eternal abode which he made possible…It is our hope and prayer today that as this devotion to St. Martin continues to spread, hate and prejudice will soon be stamped out and in their place will be found true Christian justice and charity to one and all.”
Father Luger’s letters from Rome continued to emphasize the breathtaking experience and privilege of being present in Rome for the canonization ceremony along with 100,000 others. When he returned to St. Peter Claver, Father Luger presented formal accounts of the canonization. The usual novena devotions to St. Martin on a Tuesday evening after his return were preceded by a short ply on the life of St. Martin, done by the school children.
The raising of St. Martin to the altars was the highlight of a quarter of a century, more exciting than the canonization of St. Therese, the Little Flower, which had been joyfully celebrated by Father Theobald in 1925.
The Tuesday evening novenas begun by Father Keefe so many long years ago to Blessed Martin were now re-named to SAINT Martin de Porres.
Renewal – And the Church
Along with the changes wrought with the Vatican Councils of the 1960’s was the death of St. Paul’s Archbishop Brady in Rome. He was succeeded by Archbishop Leo Binz, from Dubuque, who appointed a successor to Father Arnold Luger, who had finished his brother’s work at St. Peter Claver and was now transferred to ST. Jude’s at Mahtomedi on White Bear Lake in January, 1965. His successor at St. Peter Claver’s was Father Edward S. Grzeskowiak from Immaculate Heart of Mary parish, at Minnetonka, widely known as a civil rights spokesman, having been a member of Minnesota Governor Freeman’s Human Rights Commission since the 1950’s. Father Grzeskowiak also had been a professor at Nazareth Hall for 27 years.
Father Wirth’s successor as assistant pastor in 1963 had been Father Raymond Marschall, who after sever years became assistant pastor at St. Joan of Arc’s in Minneapolis. His successors in 1965 were Father Dennis Lally, soon assigned to St. Thomas Aquinas’ in St. Paul Park, and Father Edward J. Flahavan from the staff at Nazareth Hall.
In the Diamond Jubilee Year of the parish (1967), a new idea in lay action was introduced to St. Peter Claver’s with an “all-purpose” umbrella organization “to promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, and material welfare of the people as members of the church and also as members of the community.”
Called the St Peter Claver Action Club (SPAC), the group’s constitution offers a new approach to the organization and function of parish activities. Membership is open to adult members of the parish, spouses of members, and adult non-members whose children attend St. Peter Claver’s School.
The first major efforts of SPAC have been to cooperate with parish organizations and activities, to assist with the Plymouth St. Mary’s of the Lake inter-parish projects, and the 7th Jubilee celebration.
In an ecumenical spirit and with the civic mindedness of Archbishop Ireland, the new St. Peter Claver has taken on a larger role in its community, formally participating in service with organizations such as the North Central Voters’ League, the NAACP, and the Urban League. The parish is alert to national and local “anti-poverty programs,” has had a day-care center in the school (in space made available by the removal of the bowing alleys in the summer of 1966) and has helped conduct the famed Project Summer program for children and adults of the total neighborhood. St. Peter Claver also partakes in urban renewal planning for the new Summit-University community rehabilitation, the largest residential undertaking of its kind in the nation’s history. Parish members have show new zeal for government service, with at least three parishioners candidates for the public office in recent elections.
The ideals of Archbishop Ireland and Father Theobald endure in the Church of St. Peter Claver.
Saint Martin de Porres, pray for us.