Background to Our Ozark Advent Adventure

My latest blog post at the National Catholic Register is about our attendance at two Masses on the First Sunday of Advent at St. Peter the Fisherman in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and it concludes:

Continuing the theme of paying attention, we drove back to our cabin again on the winding roads in darkness and pouring rain. As we navigated the twisting road, reminded by signs to slow down, watch out for deer, and be prepared for falling rock, we reflected upon the two Masses we’d attended and the glimpse of a parish community we’d experienced on the First Sunday of Advent in the Ozarks. We’d seen the universality of the Church with priests from Poland and Nigeria and Dominican Sisters from a congregation founded in Poland, the ageless celebration of the Mass in both forms of the Latin liturgy, and the welcome to the stranger that a parish community is prepared to give, knowing that visitors are sure to come to Sunday Mass.

We found out more about the two priests who celebrated Mass at St. Peter the Fisherman from the diocesan newspaper, the Arkansas Catholic.

Father Stanislas Swiderski was indeed born in Poland and he was a student of Pope St. John Paul II! Like Karol Wojtyla, he lived under the oppression of the Soviets:

Father Swiderski entered the seminary in 1956 and was ordained Oct. 11, 1963, just four days past his 24th birthday. He settled into the daily routine of ministering to the faithful and while he didn’t suffer direct persecution as a priest, things like traffic restrictions reminded him of the religious choke chain the Soviets held on the Poles.

Still, one of his earliest lessons was that official ideology and actual practice were often very different things.

“There were a number of high-ranking Communist officials, we called them radishes,” he said. “They were red on the outside and white on the inside. We would have parish missions or Lenten retreats, and there would be hours and hours of confessions. The leaders would usually come at night to make theirs so people didn’t know what they were doing. We called them Nicodemuses because of how he came to see Jesus at night.”

As much as he drew strength for his vocation from the devout, Father Swiderski also took note of those who received sacraments under cover of darkness. Rather than condemn them as hypocrites, he took hope from their example.

Re: his study with the future pontiff and saint, he said:

A landmark moment in his priesthood occurred in the late 1960s when Father Swiderski had the opportunity to study under Cardinal Karol Wojtyla at the Catholic University of Lublin. He remembers students flocking to the man who would become Blessed Pope John Paul II (the article was written before his canonization), as approachable and kind as he was brilliant in the classroom.

“He was charismatic, but not in an ostentatious sense. It was more the strength of his personality,” he said. “He was an inspiration in showing how much it meant for him to be with people. For me, it re-set my priorities as a priest and from then on my agenda was clear. I was to be available to the people for whatever they needed.”

Please read the rest there.

Father Christopher Okeke had also come to Mountain Home, Arkansas from a country fraught with political unrest, Nigeria:

Born in 1954, Father Okeke grew up the second of three sons in Amanze Obowo in the Imo state of Nigeria. He was 5 years old when his father died and eight years later, during the civil war in Nigeria in 1967, his mother died. Eventually, he and his brothers went to an orphanage, raised by the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy in Avutu.

“The lesson I got from them is what made me who I am today. Because of their way of life my mind went towards becoming a priest,” Father Okeke said. “It was a promise I made to God — if he would keep us alive during the war, I would be a priest.”

It was more than a promise though; almost divine providence, given the story of his names. His mother had three children, while others did not survive. In hopes that he would live, Father Okeke was named Anabochi, meaning, “If I stay ‘til tomorrow, I will be her child,” he said.

“The name I answered during my baptism was Christopher. Then the bishop said, ‘Do you know what Christopher means? Carrying Christ over the sea.’ That’s why when you look at St. Christopher you see Christ on his shoulder and he will be looking at him,” as the patron saint of travelers, Father Okeke said. “So my bishop connected my first name and my second christened name — ‘If I stay ‘til tomorrow that I would take Christ to people.’” 

I also found out more about one of the sisters from the Polish Dominican order, Sister Joachim Celinska, OP:

Growing up in Poland under Communist rule with two sisters and two brothers, her parents were members of the national underground and raised their children in the Catholic faith.

As a teenager, Sister Joachim loved Pope John Paul II and prayed his vocation prayer daily for an increase in vocations.

"I prayed every night, not realizing that Jesus had a plan for me," Sister Joachim said. . . .

"I was sitting in an empty church and had a very strong feeling. I was to give up everything I have and follow Jesus. And I did," she said. "I'm happy and would never choose another way."

She entered the Dominican Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in 1987, two years before communism fell in Poland.

I had no idea that there would be a Polish community in Mountain Home, Arkansas: it would not have entered my mind that a priest and two sisters would come from Poland to serve such a community! I've always attended rather non-ethnic or nationalist parish churches, although we do have some parishes with European backgrounds, Czech and German mostly, and of course the Vietnamese and Hispanic communities are strong here, but otherwise my experience of parish life has been rather generic. Wichita may be the larger city, but the Mountain Home community may be more cosmopolitan in some ways.

Sister Joachim concluded her interview with a wonderful statement:

"America is a beautiful country. God really loves this country because he's given freedom. We know what it's like to live under oppression. I wish and pray for all American people to take advantage of that freedom and thank God for freedom of religion, so they can express their faith freely."

A Dollar's Worth of Arkansas Legal History

While my husband finished his coffee at Heidi's Ugly Cakes in Norfork, Arkansas, I walked down the street, passing by three ferocious dachshunds at one house, to the Terrapin Trading Company, a crafts and used bookstore. All of the books were on sale for $1.00 and I bought a history of colonial Arkansas focused on the administration of civil law during the French and Spanish period before Arkansas was included in Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase: Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686-1836 by Morris S. Arnold, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1985. I finished the book while we were on vacation and found it fascinating.

Morris S. Arnold is a scholar, author, attorney, and marvelous writer. He describes how French law, specifically the Custom of Paris, was administered in colonial Arkansas by the commandants of the military installation at the Arkansas Post. This was civil law as opposed to English common law, mostly concerned with contracts, wills, and administrative justice enforcing such arrangements.

As the more remote part of the French Louisiana territory, Arkansas never quite developed as King Louis XIV and his successors hoped. There were some bourgeois and even noble pioneers, but the area was mostly inhabited by hunters and trappers, who had little regard for authority, either civil or religious. In fact, one of the Jesuits sent to serve in the area left because of the demonstrated irreligious and even blasphemous attitudes of its denizens. Although the Jesuits did not establish a very successful mission in the Arkansas Post, the Anglo-American colonists feared the influence of the Jesuits on the local Native American population, because they had seen how well the Jesuits, in other areas, had evangelized the Indians. In this case, neither the French, nor the Spanish ever invested the necessary effort to assist the growth of Catholicism in Arkansas--never building or consecrating a building as a chapel, for example, so that the Jesuit or sometimes Capuchin missionaries sent there were never able to make a firm foundation.

First the French and then the Spanish administered justice in the Louisiana Territory. Arnold really misses an opportunity when he mentions the first Spanish representative, named Alexandro O'Reilly. Oh really, O'Reilly? I knew that Irish surname meant he must have belonged to a family that fled Ireland in the Flight of the Earls. Sure enough, he was.

The last part of the book is about the conflict between French civil law and American/England common law once Jefferson purchased Louisiana. The French inhabitants did not want to adopt elements of the English Common Law like trial by jury or vive voce evidence, etc. They began to "drop out" of the legal system as established by the United States, and even language came between the two groups. The French were in the minority and the new Americans in the Louisiana Territory looked upon them as "backward European savages"! Arnold states that the Americans were rather glad the French opted to drop out of the new civil society and administration. The French mostly dealt with legal issues within their communities, looking to a "village elder" to make decisions.

Arnold is an expressive and impressive author. I enjoyed his clarity of thought and his way of demonstrating how the details of legal contracts and administrative processes exemplified the cultural and historic background of the French/Spanish colonial era in Arkansas. He makes the distinction between civil law and common law clear to the nonspecialist. I was just surprised that he let an opportunity like a man named O'Reilly representing the King of Spain to go without taking advantage of it. I look forward to  reading another of his books, Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Cultural and Social History. Perhaps he redressed this lapse in that book, of which I've ordered a copy--it will be more than a dollar's worth of history, however!

Heidi's Ugly Cakes

So yesterday I posted on the strange story of a group of Cubs baseball fans unable to use their cellphones to find out what was happening in the seventh game of the World Series. They had gathered outside Wrigley Field and the WSJ writer noted that no one "seemed" to have a simple little piece of technology, a portable transistor radio.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I drove to Norfork, Arkansas and stayed at a "getaway cabin" just yards away from the White River.

It was indeed a getaway: quiet, far off the road, no phone service, no wifi, no clocks in the cabin except on the microwave. We enjoyed seeing the Milky Way and hundreds of stars at night so far from any light pollution. We did buy an inexpensive AT&T phone so we'd at least have phone access. There was a television and I brought a transistor radio.

As I said, I like access to the internet and posting on this blog and sharing on social media. My husband wanted to post pictures on facebook, check email, etc. So we did leave the cabin a few times to find free wifi at restaurants and coffee shops. We drove to The Printing Press Cafe and Ice Cream Parlor in Calico Rock, for example, and visited another coffee shop in Mountain Home called the Angler's Cafe.

In Norfork, however, we found Heidi's Ugly Cakes after several people told us we should try it. We need to go back and have some cake next time. The story of how the proprietor opened the little cafe and how it came to be named "Heidi's Ugly Cakes" is part of the attraction. Heidi's cakes are ugly just because they aren't bundt cakes or layer cakes--they are not "fou-fou" as she was quoted in a newspaper story framed and posted inside. Her cakes are baked in glass (Pyrex) baking dishes. She also makes different sandwiches, small fried fruit pies, and other treats--we split a delicious cinnamon roll, sweet and spicy. Her mother-in-law, who encouraged her to find a way to sell her cakes, called them "Heidi's Ugly Cakes" and even gave her a sign with those words. Heidi sold her cakes to a restaurant and they were very popular items on the menu there.

That restaurant closed however, and Heidi's mother-in-law died. An admirer of her cakes, however, wouldn't give up. He wanted Heidi to open her own place. He found the location--it's right next door to a liquor-cigarette-bait shop--and even raised some money to open the place. Norfork is a small town but many people wanting to fish for trout on the White River avail themselves of services there, so Heidi's is a busy place. She was a welcoming hostess and a very busy cook and baker. She put on fresh coffee for us and then told me to "cheat" and pour our coffee while it was still brewing. The half-and-half was in the fridge with the cakes. She even told us we could use her wifi when the cafe was closed: "just sit out there on the bench and surf the web, honey."

Or, we could watch the river flow on by and hear the fish jumping.

Pictures copyright 2016, by Mark U. Mann. All rights reserved.

Railroads, Printing Presses, and Calico Rock

My husband and I are on a brief vacation, staying in a cabin near Norfork, Arkansas; the cabin we're renting is a stone's throw from the White River. While the river is streaming, the internet isn't, so we drove to Calico Rock and ate lunch at the Printing Press Cafe & Ice Cream Parlor. The cafe has free internet--when we arrived a big group of bikers was in line to order their lunches. Service was really pretty quick and the food was delicious.

As you might surmise from the name of the cafe, it is located in a building used by the previous newspapers of Calico Rock. This was one of those towns that had been built up for the railroad and declined when the railroad stopped stopping there.

There was a historical museum next door to the cafe filled with displays about the old "Jot 'Em Down" stores, when people bought groceries on credit and the clerk jotted down their purchases; the former school houses; how the Calico Rock High School girls' basketball teams won year after year; the hunting and fishing in the area, etc. The community is trying to maintain its history. We'd highly recommend the Printing Press Cafe and Ice Cream Parlor if you're near Calico Rock, Arkansas.

Photos copyright Mark and Stephanie Mann, 2016.

Travel Highlight: St. Elizabeth of Hungary

My husband and I travelled to the Ozarks to celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary last weekend. We stayed at the Big Cedar Lodge outside Branson, and left that sanctuary of rest and relaxation to drive to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. There we visited the Crescent Hotel and then crossed the street to this fascinating church, St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The parish church was originally built as a memorial chapel and then expanded, with two architectural styles combined. The memorial chapel is byzantine, while the nave and sanctuary are romanesque-gothic.

The church is unique because you enter through the bell tower and descend to the church.

The interior of the original chapel is dominated by a great crystal chandelier, a late 20th century gift.

And here is a view of the nave and sanctuary--there is a balcony (you can see the rails to the left and right) with additional seating so that the church has room for 200 worshippers.

The statuary in the church came from the former parish church dedicated to the Sacred Heart and a hospital, Hotel Dieu, while the benefactor, Richard Kerens (who had built the original chapel in memory of his mother) imported many fine furnishings, according to the parish website:

The existing chapel became the vestibule of the church, with all the exterior construction material of dolomite limestone supplied by local quarries. Kerens imported marble altars and mosaic flooring from Italy. Paintings depicting the Stations of the Cross were donated by the parishioners. Four pieces of statuary taken from the Sacred Heart Church and Hotel Dieu – statues of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and two kneeling angels – were moved to the new Church. These fine pieces of turn-of-the-century statuary still have their home in the interior of the church today.

Here's a picture, taken with my cellphone camera (my husband took the other pictures either with his Canon or Fuji) of one of the Stations of the Cross, which are sometimes combined with the Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

Here's some more detail about the church, addressing its architectural uniqueness. Catholics are a minority in Arkansas (only 6% of the population) so a beautiful church like this, with such care and devotion on display throughout its small footprint--the grounds contain additional statuary and a lovely view of the residential area surrounding the church--is really a blessing.

 

You can see the Crescent Hotel to the left in the photo above. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, pray for us!