Maryknoll Church Talks |
| 4 July--I was scheduled to leave Phnom Penh at 8:00 AM this morning but some problems arose at the Deaf Development Program and I had to delay my departure until 8:00 PM in the evening. Luckily I had that flexibility, but it meant that I missed an appointment I had in Bangkok. And arriving in Bangkok at 9:20 PM, I just stayed at the airport instead of going to the Maryknoll house. I would have had a bed there but I would have been in the house for only five or six hours and it would have cost about $45 to go and come and then pay the departure tax, so I just slept on the airport floor. The new airport is nowhere near as good as the old airport for sleeping (there is no carpeting in the new facility), but I found a good place behind a huge statue of a the garuda Indrachit that kept me out of the bright lights and the flow of passenger traffic.
5 July--I went to the United Airlines desk at 5:00 AM to get my onward boarding passes. I could get them for Bangkok to Tokyo and from Tokyo to San Francisco, but for some reason the system wouldn't give them to me for the rest of the journey. I tried again at the service desk in Tokyo and again they wouldn't give me boarding passes beyond San Francisco. I started getting paranoid at that point, thinking I may be on some U.S. government blacklist. When I got to San Francisco, though, I was able to put my frequent flyer card in a check-in kiosk and the next two boarding passes popped out OK. I flew San Francisco to Denver, and then Denver to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was an unwieldy routing, giving me five sectors to fly instead of the usual four. In Cedar Rapids, I picked up a rental car I had reserved and then drove two hours south to the small town of Fort Madison, Iowa where I was welcomed by the priests of St. Mary and Joseph Church. |
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Maryknoll Church Talks |
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Fort Madison, Iowa |
| The first mission talk was in eastern Iowa, in Fort Madison, a Mississippi River town of 11,000. I arrived on Thursday night and had Friday to do a little work and look around the town. | |
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Fort Madison is on the southeastern corner of Iowa, on a beautiful stretch of the Mississippi River. Much of the current town dates from the 1880s. The white steeple in the center of the picture is that of St. Mary and Joseph Church where I stayed. |
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I offered to take the morning mass at nearby Sacred Heart Church which is now part of a cluster with St. Mary and Joseph, and after mass Joe Pietz asked me if I would do a radio interview. Iowa has many low-power Catholic radio stations, and Joe is the manager for KDME FM-95, a 100-watt station broadcasting to the Fort Madison area. I had a half-hour interview with Joe. |
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This is a replica of the original Fort Madison which was in operation from 1804-1813 on this site. The fort was established to provide protection for a trading post that made goods available to the Indians. The riverboat in the background is a gambling casino. |
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In the evening, we went up the river just outside of town to a cabin owned by friends of Fr. Jerry Stouvenel where we could watch the day fade over the river. |
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Ss. Mary and Joseph Church |
| Fort Madison is an area with about a 40% Catholic population, and up until a few years ago, there were three parishes in the town. Now, however, St. Joseph Parish near the center of town has been merged with St. Mary's Parish to form Ss. Mary and Joseph Parish, and the third church, Sacred Heart remains distinct but without a resident priest. Two priests, Fr. Jerry Stouvenel and Fr. Troy Richmond, live at Ss. Mary and Joseph and cover both that church and Sacred Heart. They also serve a third church, another St. Mary's, in Montrose, Iowa, about fifteen miles down the Mississippi River. | |
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Ss. Mary and Joseph is where the two priests live who minister to the cluster of churches in Fort Madison. |
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Sacred Heart Church is only 1.3 miles from Ss. Mary and Joseph, a reflection of the early period when the twon was about double its present size, with a much larger Catholic population. Both of these churches are beautiful huge edifices in good condition and very indicative of the architectural style of the early 1900s. |
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Oswaldo Ojeda is a seminarian who is staying at Ss. Mary and Joseph Church during the summer break from his studies at Conception Seminary in Missouri. He has planted a small garden behind the rectory. |
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