For everything there is a season: 137-year old St. Mary's church's season is winding down

MUSCATINE, Iowa The old St. Mary's Catholic Church nestled on 417 Green St. sits tall among trees that havent come alive yet this spring. For the church, it will probably be its last spring intact.

The construction of St. Marys began in 1876, at the request of the communitys German Catholic population, and was complete in the fall of 1877. The first mass the building hosted was held two years later, in the cold of winter by the parishs first German-speaking pastor, the Rev. John Ignatius Grieser. It was under the guiding hand of Grieser that the church built St. Marys school and acquired its Pfeiffer pipe organ, which has become a part of the Organ Historic Societys database.

Now, nearly 140 years after it was built, St. Marys is about to be torn down.

Parishioner Coletta Logel, 81, is heartbroken over her churchs pending demolition.

Thats the only church Ive known, she said. She began attending St. Marys as a child in the 40s with her family. Though the parishes of St. Marys and St. Mathias, the other Catholic church in Muscatine, have been combined since 2000 and St. Marys has been out of use due to safety issues since last year, Logel says St. Mathias still doesnt feel like home. Not like St. Marys.

Everybody told me when I was so upset, Its just a building, Logel recalled, her voice impassioned by emotion. I know it is just a building. But in that building, it contains memories years. There is 70-some years of memories in that [building].

Those memories include her wedding. She wed Pete Logel as a sixteen-year-old girl while all the older women who she recalls always sat in the back of the church murmured about how her marriage would never work. That wedding, held before her god in her church, was the start of a marriage that would last nearly 60 years, until Petes death in 2006. St. Mary's framed her relationship with her husband, as it was from St. Marys that Pete was buried.

In between those times, Logel saw all five of her children baptized in St. Marys and a couple of them married there as well. Logels friend Maryann Hines four children were also baptized there.

Hines siblings, too, were baptized at St. Mary's as was she in mid- January, 1933. St. Marys was her church from birth.

Id still go when they tore it down if theyd leave us, she said. While she says she feels resigned to the churchs fate, the demolition of St. Marys still makes her sad. She recalls a time when there were 600 families in the church and she, too, has the memories of her childrens weddings in the building. Though she herself was not married there, the church did hold a nuptial mass for her and her husband Carl after they were wed on an army base in Georgia.

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For everything there is a season: 137-year old St. Mary's church's season is winding down