Centenary celebration Chaffee Catholic church celebrates 100 years

CHAFFEE, Mo. --St. Ambrose parishioners in Chaffee have spent this year celebrating the church's 100th anniversary.

So far they've enjoyed special dinners and entertainment; a new church directory is in the works with photos from the past and present. They've gathered for a picnic with former and present members.

Next Saturday they'll celebrate with a talent show. The Rev. Ralph Duffner organized a talent show a year ago, said longtime church member Ann Whitfield, and it was such a hit they're doing it again.

In November Bishop John J. Leibrecht will visit, and a potluck dinner will round out the celebrations.

Whitfield has worshipped at St. Ambrose since she was 6, she said. She will be 90 in October.

"As I have grown up, the church has been a vital part of my life," she said.

Although she can no longer climb stairs to the choir loft, Whitfield said she sang up there for 75 years.

Her first job, she said, was at the church as a teacher with the Works Project Administration in the church basement. After a career that included banking and owning an insurance office, she retired at age 68, and continued volunteering at St. Ambrose.

"My only volunteer effort now is as part of the collection team," she said. "I enjoy that; it keeps my marbles crankin'."

Adella Frank raised her five children in St. Ambrose and treasures the Catholic education they received at the school.

"They had a good school. They had nuns," she recalled. "When I heard the nuns were leaving, I cried all afternoon."

Diane Eftink, Chaffee's city clerk, also remembers learning from the nuns at St. Ambrose's school and remembers them, she said, with a lot of love.

Eftink said she believes she received a well-grounded education in both the religious and scholastic senses. Since the school went only to the eighth grade, she went to public high school in Chaffee. When it came time to choose between math and algebra, Eftink said she was afraid to choose algebra thinking she may not be prepared for it, so she took the math class.

"I found that a lot of it I already knew," she said.

The school now has lay teachers, but this year, Eftink said, the church offered its first vacation Bible school for the children.

"It was wonderful," she said. "We had between 55 and 62 kids, and everybody was well pleased."

All three women say they cherish the sense of family belonging to the church gives them.

St. Ambrose has been in Chaffee for nearly as long as Chaffee has been a town. According to a history of the church provided by member Linda Dowd, the earliest settlers founded the city in 1905, and a year later Catholics in town applied to the bishop for a resident priest. Once a month Vincentian priests traveled on horseback from Cape Girardeau to take care of the spiritual needs of Catholic families in Chaffee.

The first permanent priest, the Rev. Anthony H. Rohling, came in the summer of 1907. When he arrived in Chaffee, he found he had neither a church building nor a rectory to live in, so he volunteered his services as spiritual director to the hospital sisters in Cape Girardeau and received his room and board there.

Construction of the original St. Ambrose began Nov. 3, 1907. The first Sunday after Christmas in 1907 the Rev. Frank Feeley celebrated Mass in Byrds Hall, the only place large enough to substitute for a church, and Jan. 1, 1908, Rohling celebrated the first Mass in the new building. Ten years later the school followed.

In 1942, the original church building burned. It was 12 years before another building replaced it. The parish worshipped in the school basement until after World War II. In 1954, the new building was dedicated. A new school was built in 1983 and a library added in 2000.

lredeffer@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 160