A first-time visitor is tempted to call this a place where time stood still. Then you realize that in this southern Indiana hamlet, they never got the clock started.
Just driving into town can be an exercise in historical disorientation. Oldenburg sits at the bottom of a shallow bowl, and in midsummer the road is solidly flanked with 8-foot stalks of corn. So until you are virtually upon it, only a pair of steeples hint at its presence. Then as your car begins to descend to the valley floor, the rooftops of its houses and shops disclose a hamlet clustered around a church and convent, like peasant cottages of a medieval town. Finally, the road makes one last turn into Oldenburg and automobiles pop into view, breaking the fantasy that you have been magically transported from Middle America to Central Europe. Nor are such daydreams limited to newcomers.
Touring Germany a few years ago, Darlene Vicars, the town`s beautician, was trailed by a persistent deja vu. ”Every picturesque little village we came to looked like it had to have been modeled after Oldenburg,” Vicars said.
Right in the middle of her hometown, though, there is a sight that Vicars and her fellow citizens never thought they would live to see. On Pearl Street, just behind a section of Holy Family Catholic Church that dates to 1846, there is a block-long stretch of open field. To an outsider, the scene is totally unremarkable. But with their minds` eye, Oldenburgers still can see the Franciscan monastery that long stood there. Looking at the vacant lot gives them a painful reminder that no matter how slowly the town`s clock seems to move, even this half-hidden corner of the world is not immune to change–or controversy. The making of the bucolic patch of green has split the town.
On a recent Sunday morning, several hundred residents gathered for an outdoor mass and town picnic just across the street from the vacant field. For the occasion, Rev. Gabriel Buescher–Father Gabe, because Oldenburg`s clergymen invariably are known by nicknames–had set up a temporary altar out behind the 1878 building that houses the volunteer fire department and the village`s town-meeting hall.
The services began with an old-country hymn, ”Grosser Gott,” and closed with ”God Bless America.” Afterward, women of the community put their potato salads and peach cobblers on public display, while menfolk tapped a keg of German beer.
By midafternoon, folks started strolling over to Ron Koch`s Brau Haus for a nightcap or two. But not Father Gabe. Much as he dearly loves Ron`s sauerbraten and goulash, for more than a year now the Father hasn`t set foot in the place. For almost as long, Koch has been returning the noncompliment.
”The man has a perfect right to disagree about the old monastery,”
Father Gabe said of the reason for his boycott. ”But when someone plays dirty pool with me, I put his name down in my bad-boys book.”
”I`d be a hypocrite to step up to the communion rail in Father Gabe`s church,” Koch countered, adding that it is not a lack of faith or difference of religion that keeps him away. Oldenburg`s adult population, he reports, is 98 percent German, Catholic and beer-drinking, a statistic that describes Koch`s preferences no less than anyone else`s.
So while fellow townsmen worshipped in the lee of their pumper and rescue truck, Koch drove over to a nearby town to attend mass at the Catholic church there.
In his homily, Rev. Owen Gehring, who was visiting his birthplace on a sentimental journey, alluded to the feud between Oldenburg`s innkeeper and pastor and to the passions, dividing friends and neighbors, that were unleashed by the struggle over the monastery`s fate. ”Way out west, I kept hearing about the dispute troubling our little town,” said Father Owen, who heads a ministry to New Mexico`s Indians. ”Let`s pray that this mass, under the canopy of God`s heaven, serves to heal our wounds.”
All things change, Father Owen reminded the congregation, advising them to remember this if they were still troubled when seeing the empty field where the monastery used to stand. Walking around Oldenburg on his first day back, Father Owen recalled, he had to accustom himself to the fact that his father`s paint store was no more and that new owners had remodeled the Gehring family home.
Only time will tell whether Father Owen`s sermon had its intended effect. But it takes a well-practiced eye to find evidence of his thesis along Oldenburg`s streets, and even some fellow clergymen have trouble realizing the efficacy of the precept.
”It`s like what they say about still being able to `feel` an amputated arm or leg,” said Rev. Greg Friedman, who studied theology in that now-vanished monastery. ”Looking at where it used to be, it still seems like I should be able to walk down the long hallway to my room and look out the window again.”
During his novitiate, his order still enforced a strict rule of separation from distractions of this world, recalled Father Friedman, who is posted to the Franciscans` provincial headquarters at Cincinnati, about 40 miles down the road. Radios and televisions were forbidden, which worked an unusual hardship on a young cleric such as himself, whose love for the Cincinnati Reds was exceeded only by his devotion to God. Yet on a hot summer night, Father Greg could keep up with Pete Rose`s exploits by cocking an ear to hear the ball game`s broadcast as it drifted up to the monastery`s windows from the open door of King`s Saloon directly across the street.
Like the town hall, which it adjoins, King`s Saloon is hardly a recent addition to the local skyline. Antiquarians estimate it was sometime around 1850 that lettering proclaiming the structure`s function was carved above the doorway that, a century and a quarter afterward, would be Father Greg`s link to the outside world. In another community, residents would likely reward such bricks-and-mortar longevity with a historical marker. If that were policy here, most of the facades in town would disappear under a blanket of bronze plaques. In Oldenburg, they call some buildings ”new” even though they were built when Lincoln was struggling to save the Union.
”That old monastery was so much a part of folks` lives, they thought they couldn`t live without it,” Father Gabe said, confessing his failure to take account of the kaleidoscopic condensation of past and present that marks Oldenburg`s collective mentality.
Sitting at a picnic table after the outdoor mass, 75-year-old William Hoelker, the reigning local historian, explained that Oldenburg was settled by a company of refugees fleeing the revolutions that convulsed Germany in the early 19th Century. When they got to these parts, the Protestants among them went three miles up the road to Batesville. The Catholics remained here.
Thus, tucked away amid the region`s otherwise all-American culture, there was created a tiny ethnic enclave to which were transplanted the religious antagonisms of its founders` homeland. Ever since the Reformation, a Lutheran community in Germany has regarded with suspicion its Catholic neighbors of the next village over and vice versa; that way of looking at things found a second home in an obscure corner of the Hoosier state.
When the Franciscans made Oldenburg the site of a pair ofreligious training facilities, the town`s psychic exemption from the world around it was guaranteed. In 1851 a convent was established across the road from Holy Family Church, and 20 years later the men`s branch of the order began to train novitiates here as well. Row after row of simple crosses in the convent cemetery mark the more than 2,000 Sisters of St. Francis of Oldenburg who went out to serve the needs of the church, then returned to their mother house to pass their last days.
To support themselves, the sisters established a large dairy farm and orchard on the edge of Oldenburg that is worked by hired hands from town, just as their ancestors once tilled the soil of Germany`s monasteries. Upwards of 100 other townsfolk, in a village of 400 or 500, were employed in the convent`s kitchens and laundry, and the Franciscan monastery similarly gave work to the community. So in the absence of any smokestack industry, Oldenburg became a factory town devoted to the production of Catholic clergy.
”The only air pollution we`ve got is the smell of burning incense,”
observed Hoelker, the community`s self-called chronicler.
Because the town and its clergy were so closely linked, the convent and monastery used to recruit a considerable number of their members right in Oldenburg. Father Gehring recalls how proud he was the first time he walked up the street in his flowing brown monastic robes and stood on the front porch to visit with his mother and father–his novice`s vows prohibiting him from entering a lay person`s home.
Indeed, the sight of clerical garb was so common on Oldenburg`s streets that the town virtually forgot what side of the Atlantic it was on or what century it was living in. For generations, its young people have entered their classrooms by passing through a doorway, in a wing of the church building, whose arch is inscribed ”Holy Family School.” Alongside, a plaque was recently installed that alternately proclaims the premises ”Oldenburg Elementary School.”
”I had the new sign put up a year or so back,” explained Kathleen Placke, the principal. ”The Cincinnati Zoo had a touring exhibit going around to the public schools, but it never made it here. After searching all around town, the driver got confused and went back to tell his superiors: `They don`t seem to have a public school in Oldenburg.` ”
In a way, he was right. Alternately, you could say that Oldenburg did have a public school, it was just that the town chose to operate it on an Old World model. As in Central Europe, Oldenburg`s teachers were recruited from the convent and supported at taxpayer expense.
Ninety-year-old Sister Paschal now spends her days tending to that cemetery where four generations of her predecessors lie. But 50 years ago, she did her practice teaching in the school that sits directly across Main Street from the convent. Each payday, she recalls, she got a check from the local school district that she would endorse over to her order and in return for which she taught the young people of Oldenburg their reading, writing and catechism.
”Once in a while, a non-Catholic family would come to town, so their kids would be bused over to Batesville,” Sister Paschal recalled. ”We heard there were Protestants over there.”
Recently, a sharp decline in religious vocations made it increasingly difficult for Oldenburg to keep its school rooms staffed with nuns, and in 1985, when its last religious principal retired, Kathleen Placke was imported from Batesville to be her lay successor. When she made a preliminary report to the county school superintendent about how things were done in Oldenburg, it was quickly decided to speed the pace of social change.
”When I told the superintendent that religious instruction was being given in the middle of the school day, he hit the ceiling,” Placke reported. ” `We can`t be allowing that; the feds `ll murder us if they ever found out!` ” he said. ” `You`ve got to get them to clean up their act over there!` ”
Accordingly, Oldenburg`s children now make a daily intramural pilgrimage in honor of their elders` belated discovery of the principle of separation of church and state. As soon as their school buses arrive, they march over to the church`s wing of the building for religion classes, then retrace their steps to the school proper for secular studies. Protestant kids no are longer exported but are welcome to wait in the auditorium until classmates finish practicing ”Hail Marys.”
Yet there is a limit to how much change any community can absorb, so when the Franciscans announced a proposal to tear down their 90-year-old monastery, the town was profoundly shocked. Along with Holy Family Church and the convent, the monastery had for so long anchored their psychological landscape that most Oldenburgers simply could not imagine its absence. But even more than their female counterparts, the Franciscan Brothers had experienced a precipitous drop in membership, and over the years had consolidated novitiate training and theological curriculum with programs offered in their houses elsewhere. In the end, Oldenburg`s monastery, which at its high point had 70 to 80 residents, was home to only three elderly Franciscans–and an estimate of $1 million to rehabilitate the structure.
Given all the other of this Earth`s problems to which they have to tend, church authorities felt they had no alternative other than to free themselves from such a costly liability. Yet what might seem air-tight logic in the Franciscan Provincial headquarters in Cincinnati, or the archbishop`s chancellery in Indianapolis, is less compelling from the perspective of a bar stool in King`s Saloon or Koch`s Brau House.
”You see that white house up on the hill there?” asked William Hoelker, pointing to a structure on the rim of the valley. ”It originally stood on the site of the convent and was moved all the way up there, without losing a single brick, when the sisters built their house. Now I ask you, If our ancestors could do that in 1850, how come with all the modern technology, they couldn`t find a way to save our monastery?”
Trying to answer that question cost Father Gabe`s predecessor both his health and his post as Oldenburg`s pastor, and he was transferred to a less-demanding post. ”At my age, had I realized what I was inheriting, I would have taken another option, too,” said the 72-year-old Father Gabe, who took over Holy Family parish in 1985. ”It also didn`t help that the archbishop raised their hopes by announcing he was sending in a new man who could take a fresh look at the issue.”
Looking back on it, Ron Koch is now convinced that it was all a sham and that the the monastery`s demolition was already a done deal before Father Gabe came to town. But when the newly arrived priest proposed a truce, Koch accepted it, agreeing that he and his allies in the save-our-heritage campaign would avoid a court fight in return for a six-month reprieve during which the parish would entertain constructive suggestions for converting the monastery to an alternate use.
”My father-in-law had led the preservationist movement, and I loved that man as much as I love my wife, so I felt obliged to take over when he died,” Koch explained. Yet the same sentiment that inspired Koch to challenge Father Gabe also proved his Achilles` heel, for Koch is a Batesville boy who years ago fell in love with an Oldenburg girl–which is to say, he is an outsider.
It didn`t help his cause when Koch went up to Indianapolis to enlist the help of the state capital`s preservationist society. He would have been better advised to listen to William Hoelker`s lectures on Oldenburg`s longstanding attitude toward the world beyond its village limits. During the Civil War, Hoelker recalled, Oldenburg proposed constituting itself as a ”free state,” on the model of the great cities of medieval Germany, so the town might sit out the struggle of the blue and gray that was being fought all around it.
In the end, Father Gabe persuaded the parish council to reject Koch`s idea for turning the monastery into a combination museum and bed-and-breakfast for tourists he hoped it would attract.
For Father Gabe, it was a victory for the old-time principle that Father knows best. For Koch, the defeat meant and end to his dream to put Oldenburg on the tourist path.
”The only viable proposal Koch could come up with was to take over the collection of some odd ball who had the world`s greatest collection of eggs and wanted to make our monastery some crazy kind of study center,” the Father said. ”But there was no way we were going to share our dining room with a bunch of egg-ologists!”
Notwithstanding their previous agreement to avoid a legal battle, when the wrecking ball took its first swipe at the monastery`s tower, Koch and his allies were in an Indianapolis courtroom, vainly seeking a last-ditch injunction. William Hoelker shut himself up in his own home; he couldn`t bear seeing the demolition. But Darlene Vicars, the town`s beautician, was there and reports that the destruction wasn`t limited to bricks and mortar.
”Folks on the Father`s side of the quarrel were laughing, actually laughing,” Vicars recalled sadly. ”My friends were crying, but we tried not to let the others see our tears.”
A year later, that division in Oldenburg`s body politic is just beginning to heal. Father Gabe was pleased to see William Hoelker show up for the outdoor mass and thinks that, with enough patience, other die-hards will come around, too. For her part, Sister Paschal thinks it`s time for all of them to stop acting like a bunch of squabbling schoolboys.
Pointing to those graves she faithfully tends, the Sister notes that we are all pilgrims temporarily passing through this vale of tears. All we can do is to make the little bit of the world directly around us a bit better place to live during our time here. So she modestly proposes that both sides try taking a step in the other`s direction.
Why doesn`t Mr. Koch try coming back to mass one Sunday? Sister Paschal asks. Maybe afterward the Father will respond by dropping by the Brau Haus just to see if Ron still has Wiener schnitzel on his menu.
