Our Lady of Angels: My Home Parish

Last Saturday I learned that my home parish, Our Lady of Angels in Sauk Centre, will almost certainly close this year. I’m not happy about that. At all.

There’s some detail here:

• “All Things New Update From Fr. Keven & Fr. Botzet” (January, 2026)
  Parishes on the Prairie
  • View Letter

And a little background on the Area Catholic Communities setup we have now:

• Letter from Bishop Kettler regarding Area Catholic Communities
  +Donald J. Kettler, Bishop of Saint Cloud (2019)

And there’s that video, from February 24, 2025.

Our bishop’s talk about positivity, hope, and the Church not being buildings, but people who follow Jesus? I see his point.

I see the point, but I’m still not at all happy about what’s happening.

Better Communication This Time Around

Even so, the situation now is better than what happened quite a few years back when several other parishes around here were closed.

From what I hear, quite a few folks went to church one day and learned that their home parish no longer exited. No talks, no communication, just: it’s closed.

I haven’t researched what happened, and so don’t have the full picture. But it sort of makes sense. We’re a rural area, at the far end of Stearns County from Diocese headquarters in St. Cloud. It just may not have occurred to folks — I’ll stop now.

The good news is that this time around, we are being kept in the loop.

Losing a place that’s been important for generations is hard, but at least we have time to get ready for the final loss of our parish.

Germans, the Irish, and a Little Local History

Happily, we can celebrate Mass over at St. Paul’s. That was the “German church” here in Sauk Centre.

In Sauk Centre’s early days, pretty much everyone was either German or Irish.

The Germans were, for the most part, fairly recent arrivals in this country: which accounts for their preferring priests who spoke German during Mass. They were also a bit better-off economically than the Irish: or so I’ve heard. At any rate, anyone celebrating Mass with the Germans could follow along: but unless they understood German, the homilies would have needed translation.

Now, the Germans understood English well enough. But, like I said, they liked their Mass in German.

The Irish might have preferred hearing homilies in Gaeilge, but they’d been using English back in the old country — and that’s another topic.

So — I don’t know details — the Irish ended up with their own parish, here in Sauk Centre’s south side. It wasn’t, on the whole, as prosperous as the German one, or so I understand, but we’ve done a pretty good job with the building and its fittings over the generations.

And the homilies in the “Irish church” were in a language the parishioners understood. Still are, for that matter, although a whole lot of not-Irish worship here; and the “German church” has long since stopped being so very German, and English is spoken in both.

Memories and a Photo

I don’t have more to say, at least for now, apart from this quick wrap up.

Our Lady of Angels is my wife’s home parish, the one she grew up in. We were married there, in the mid-1980s. That was before an addition put the church’s entrance stairs inside, and added an elevator for folks who have trouble with stairs.

The elevator’s out of order now. I don’t suppose it’ll be repaired. Not unless the diocese finds another use for the building. Which I hope happens.

If memory serves, the Marian garden, between Our Lady of Angels and what was the rectory, dates from that entrance-and-elevator construction.

Still More Photos

It’s been about three and a quarter years since somebody did remarkably little damage during a drunken spree in Our Lady of Angels church. I got some photos, after folks cleaned up the mess.

I posted them the next Saturday, but this seems like a good time to share them again, along with a look at our Polka Mass in 2019, Christmas season and Corpus Christi procession of 2015, and the Marian garden in 2013.

Looking at those dates, I realize that I don’t get out much these days. And that’s yet another topic.

More-or-less related posts:

• “We’re Back in Our Parish Church!” (October 19, 2025)
• “Our First Childbirth: Memories and a Few Thoughts” (August 30, 2025)
  • Baptism of Desire, Uncertainty, and Hope
• “Fear, Change, a Loving God: and Choices” (July 8, 2023)
  (Fr. Mark Botzet homily)
  • Looking at Four Decades, Two Millennia, and the Long Haul (Brian H. Gill)
    • Under the Circumstances…
• “My Church in Sauk Centre, Minnesota: Vandalized” (September 24, 2022)
  • This Could Have Been Much Worse
  • Justice and Statues, Saints and Art
  • Art Over the Altar
  • Wow! The Wheelchair’s Still Intact! — or — Unknown Motives
• “Polka Mass and Adoration” (December 13, 2019)
  • Our Lady of the Angels: Polka Mass