Building on Faith
Saint Paul’s Journey
Part Three:
Educating St. Paul’s.
Perhaps you have known the pleasure of the acquaintance of one who serves the Lord in all aspects of his life. Such a person seems calm in the face of stress or crisis. He may have a quiet story to share when really he or you should be on task. He is the embodiment of Peace and filled with the Holy Spirit. He is kind to all, smiles easily, and although nobody in town really talks about it much, many of us know he gives most of what he makes to the church. Folks in and outside the church know him to be a decent man.
Such a person must have been Mr. Thomas Quinn. Father Thomas Canning must have known him personally for Thomas Quinn was the original benefactor for Saint Paul’s School when Reverend Canning was the church’s third pastor. Though little else has survived about Thomas Quinn in our historical records, we know that Fr. Canning is buried in the Mt. Calvary Cemetery, one of only two Marist Fathers forever enshrined there.
The school Mr. Quinn launched by his benevolent generosity began with six classrooms. It was a modest red brick building shaped like a block letter “I”, surrounded by trees with a large grassy field in the back. Rt. Rev. Daniel M. Gorman, Second Bishop of the Boise Diocese, dedicated the school in September 1922. The Dominican Sisters, the first teachers of the school, were given the priest’s old house, which had been located about where the parish office stands today. A new rectory was built between the church and the school to serve as home to the missionary Marist priests. Soon the school had an enrollment of 124 students and the parish served a community of roughly 300 families.
The Parish of Saint Paul’s would have been familiar with nuns by now. The Sisters of Mercy had been serving the local Hospital since 1917, which was located directly across 16th Street. Theirs was a stereotypical black and white habit. The coif and shoulders were white and the rest was a long black dress and long black veil. The paradigm of nun changed with the arrival of the Dominican Sisters at the school in 1923. They wore long white habits, modest white coifs, and the only black was the veil that fell to the middle of their backs. So much white would have brightened a classroom for certain.
They taught at Saint Paul’s School until 1929 when the Holy Cross Sisters arrived. Again the nuns wore mostly black with a round white color, but the coif of a Holy Cross Sister was remarkable. A starched, pleated, round coif like the sheeting of a prairie schooner hid each nun’s face in profile and lit it like a sunny day in snow when she faced her students. They taught the youth of the parish until 1939 when the Benedictine Sisters came to the rescue, this time to stay late into the 1970s.
Saint Paul’s began to reach out in missionary work too. In 1924 an anonymous donor from Nampa donated the land and house, which is the present site of Saint Joseph’s in Melba. The Altar Society began in 1925 with six founding members.
In 1947 Bishop Kelly ordered that St. Paul’s church be enlarged to accommodate the ever growing community. The pastor at the time, Father Paulin, did so with great enthusiasm to the extent that the building which previously seated 400 faithful now accommodated 700. Bishop Kelly was pleased and was known to brag to neighboring Bishops that it was “the largest church in the northwest.”
The community that began in the little, white church on 14th Avenue was now growing by leaps and bounds. It was the golden age of Mother Church in America. The time of the “Catholic Fortress”, when almost every facet of life was served by the parish.
While in captivity, St. Paul wrote most of his epistles in order to encourage the early congregations he established and to “…ensure the doctrinal unity of the church.” The educators working in the early St. Paul’s parish took seriously this model instituted by St. Paul, both the teaching sisters and the priests charged with the theological formation of the entire community. Through their devotion and hard work, St. Paul’s parish became a thriving and well established Catholic community in Idaho.
? Michelle Tanberg
& Rusty Boicourt