At fledgling Waconia parish, an ox horn announced Mass would be held

In the mid-1800s, the parish of St. Joseph in Waconia had a procedure for letting members know their traveling priest hadn’t been waylaid by weather or sickness.

According to parish tradition, an ox horn was blown in the evening, alerting the congregation of Mass the next day. The sound was familiar until the parish’s pastor lived on-site, and its first church bell was dedicated in 1863.

An ox horn may also have gathered a small group of mostly German immigrants for Mass in 1857 in farmer Sam Schmitt’s log cabin, two miles from the new city of Waconia, said Father Stan Mader, pastor of the parish of 1,250 households, located 25 miles west of Minneapolis.

The following year, a seven-member committee carried out plans for a church, including selecting the site not far from Lake Waconia. The parish was called St. Joseph, though three committee members were named Herman, Father Mader noted.

Parishioners completed a log church in 1859 for 30 families. The first pastor, Benedictine Father Bruno Riss, initially visited monthly, a parish history states.

By 1875, the parish needed more room for its 110 families, and parishioners built a second, brick church, the history states. Two years later, Franciscan friars who lived in Jordan assumed parish leadership, serving there until a diocesan priest became pastor in 1909.

By 1898, the parish had 160 families. They built a Romanesque-style church of yellow-tone Chaska brick that seats at least 950, under the direction of Franciscan pastor Father Rufinus Moehle.

According to a written account of the parish history, he warned parishioners during the summer of 1904 not to choose the dance pavilion over Sunday Mass. One Sunday he exclaimed in German during his sermon, “Waconia will be punished and ‘ere the summer has ended.” The priest’s prophecy apparently came true when an August tornado destroyed most of Waconia, killing four parishioners and removing part of the church roof.

In the 1980s, the parish preserved the 1898 church’s architectural heritage through repair, restoration and painting. In the next decade it built a narthex, with a gathering space off the west entrance. In both the narthex and the church, stained glass windows feature St. Joseph and objects related to him. Their patron also appears in the church’s sanctuary dome painting, and his statue is on the high altar.

The parish’s school is nearly as old as the parish itself. In 1860, St. Joseph opened a one-room log school, followed by a larger one in 1880. Franciscan sisters from Wisconsin first staffed the school, until Sisters of Christian Charity of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, arrived. They ran the school from 1888 to 1982, when they left St. Joseph because of declining vocations, according to the parish history. Today, St. Joseph Catholic School has about 150 students and integrates the Catholic faith with courses on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, an approach it calls C-STEM.

St. Joseph’s parish boundaries include the town of New Germany, and they extend to the boundaries of St. Victoria in Victoria, St. Boniface in St. Bonifacius, Ascension in Norwood Young America and St. Bernard in Cologne, Father Mader said.

During the Year of St. Joseph, which continues through Dec. 8, many parishioners have made a consecration to the saint, Father Mader said. The parish also is displaying its history and planting a garden around its life-size St. Joseph the Worker statue outside the church.

Father Mader said he’s always liked St. Joseph because his own father was a carpenter and farmer. “There’s something about the humility, the working with the hands; that shepherding quality has always struck me,” he said.

St. Joseph is one of the Bible’s most fantastic saints, said longtime parishioner Bernie Rauen,78. He “never said hardly a word, and if you look at his life and what he did and what he went through and what he was asked to do by the Lord, that’s as good as it gets.”

Editor’s note: This is the seventh story in a monthly series on 10 places in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis with connections to St. Joseph.