St. Joseph Catholic Church to host traditional Latin Mass for newly ordained priest on Wednesday

I would like to invite the residents of Dubois County to a rare event at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Jasper on Wednesday, June 3rd at 6:00 PM: a Solemn Latin Mass offered as a First Mass of Thanksgiving for the newly ordained Fr. Daniel Kreilein, a parishioner of St. Joseph’s. Bishop Siegel plans to attend and preach. A light reception will follow, and all are welcome, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

This is a rare occasion for our community. The traditional Latin Mass has not been offered regularly in Dubois County since the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council were implemented in parishes across the country beginning in Advent of 1969. For more than fifty years, the form of worship that defined the spiritual life of this county’s founding generation has been largely absent from the churches they built.

As George Wilson records in his History of Dubois County, when Fr. Joseph Kundek arrived at Jasper in the spring of 1838, he found about fifteen families who had just arrived from Baden, Germany, families who could not yet speak or understand English, and who had already built a little log church near the banks of the Patoka. Within six years, Fr. Kundek had built St. Joseph’s at Jasper, St. Ferdinand’s at Ferdinand, St. Boniface’s at Fulda, and St. Pius’ at Troy. The Solemn Latin Mass is the same liturgy those Baden families carried with them across the Atlantic, and it is the Mass for which they built those churches.

St. Joseph’s Church still holds artifacts from this era, including altar cards and furnishings designed for this form of the Mass. On June 3rd, those types of items won’t be behind glass. They’ll be in use, serving the same purpose they were made for. For anyone interested in the living heritage of Dubois County, this is a chance to experience firsthand the sights, sounds, and ceremony that shaped the spiritual life of our founding generation, right in the church their forebears built.

Zach Webb
Jasper