A Catholic-Mennonite Family Story

John D. Thiesen

I'm not really sure how I first heard of the Bridgefolk movement, whether it was stories in the Mennonite press or whether it was from Eric Massanari after he attended the 2002 gathering. In any case, my interest was provoked by the spate of articles (well . . . maybe two) in the Mennonite press during 2002 about Mennonite-Catholic dialog, both official and the unofficial, more personal approach of Bridgefolk. My own experience of Mennonite-Catholic "dialog"–going back almost 60 years, begun 15 years before I was born—seemed to be quite different from either the official meetings (obviously) or the reported Bridgefolk activities. And surely my experience is not unique among Mennonites. Or is it? (I'd like to know; that's one of the main motivations for my interest in Bridgefolk.)

Mennonite-Catholic interaction was part of my environment before I was even there; it wasn't my own choice to explore that interaction. In contrast, for many other Mennonites whose stories I've heard or read, the Catholic interaction was something they chose or became involved in as adults. I grew up in a family with a decades-long Mennonite-Catholic history and I'm interested in knowing 1) how common that kind of long-term familial history is among Mennonites and what others' experiences have been in such situations, and 2) how that kind of familial experience compares with those who have come to an involvement with Catholicism without that kind of familial background. I haven't ever met anyone with a familial story like mine (although there are lots of Mennonite-Catholic marriages of more recent decades), so I'm hoping for additional stories to put alongside mine.

I don't know exactly where to start with my story, what context to give and what to gloss over—a typical dilemma for historians. So I'll just plunge in. Much of my story revolves around my maternal uncle, Jake Kroeker. The Kroeker family (my grandparents and mother) were Mennonite refugees from Crimea during the early part of the Russian Civil War. They fled to Wernigerode, Germany, where my uncle was born in 1921. In 1926 the family moved to Chicago, and in 1936 to Newton, Kansas. It was only in 1936 that they came back into a concentrated Mennonite community, after having been in diaspora for more than 15 years.

My uncle experienced the seldom-discussed class aspects of the local Mennonite community in Newton during the Depression. The family was poor and my grandfather was an alcoholic, so my uncle was at the bottom of both the economic and social status hierarchy. They belonged to First Mennonite Church in Newton, a congregation with a mixture of town residents and farm families. Although my uncle maintained some respectful memory of the congregation's leadership, he had nothing good to say about the Mennonite farmers for whom he had worked as a hired hand during his high school years.

Uncle Jake flew model planes as a youth, and once the US got fully involved in the war in 1942, he ended up in the Army Air Force (as it was called at the time). I'm not sure whether he volunteered or was drafted, but either way he entered the US military as an "enemy alien" (German citizen). His eyesight wasn't good enough to be a pilot, so he ended up as an aircraft mechanic. He was eventually posted to the island of Tinian in the Pacific (from which the atomic bomb was launched to Hiroshima) as the ground crew chief for a B-29 named "Ernie Pyle." At the same time that he was in the U. S. military, he had first cousins in the Canadian army and in the German army (and possibly even in the Soviet Red Army).

Although Uncle Jake had been baptized at First Mennonite Church, his religious identity seems to have been fairly weak. On Tinian, he recounted, the only one of the available chaplains who reached out to the men, who came to them in sometimes hazardous settings, was the Catholic priest. This was the beginning of a longer process about which I don't really know all the details, but sometime in the next few years he converted to Roman Catholicism. Remember, this was long before Vatican II, and I think it was before he met his wife (a female Catholic college graduate, which I think must have also been unusual for the late 1940s). He was married in 1950 and they had two children, my cousins, one born in 1951 and the other in 1962. My older cousin went through parochial school in Wichita from kindergarten through a couple of years at the local Catholic college, Sacred Heart (now so blandly called Kansas Newman; my aunt was a graduate of Sacred Heart and was public relations and development director there). My younger cousin had what I think of as a more secular upbringing, going to suburban public schools.

My parents seem to have been fairly heavily involved in the life of my older cousin, their nephew, in his childhood. Then when I was born in 1959, the relatives with whom I interacted the most, other than my parents and grandparents, were the Kroekers in Wichita (I'm an only child, so there weren't siblings in this picture). This means that I grew up very well aware of a different format of doing religion. I would have gone to mass an average of maybe 2 or 3 times a year with my Wichita cousins. I think this must be highly unusual among Mennonites. I grew up with this big gap in what otherwise would have been a sort of hermetically sealed Mennonite (plus maybe a little bit of small-town Protestant) environment. (As I found out a couple of years ago in a conversation with my cousin, the same was true for him. His Mennonite uncle and aunt provided a big hole in his pre-Vatican II Catholic world picture.)

My home congregation, First Mennonite in Newton, was what I would label fundamentalist: a strong emphasis on correct doctrine, an attitude of guilty-until-proven-innocent in matters of theology. At First Mennonite it was legitimate to ask whether Catholics were "saved" and even to class Roman Catholicism among the "cults." These were alienating things to hear when Catholicism was part of my lived experience, as it was not for other First Mennonite participants. In Newton outside of Mennonite circles, I heard quite a bit of open, small-town, anti-Catholic bigotry, even more so than open racism (although the two were connected by a significant Mexican population in town). These experiential dissonances gave me what seems like a different perspective on Mennonite-Catholic dialogue than I think is motivating other Mennonites involved in Bridgefolk.

Living on a Mennonite-Catholic family boundary has made much of Catholic practice seem routine, distinctly un-exotic. The vocabulary of piety, the wide variety of forms the liturgy can take (from Latin to mariachi to suburban mega-church wannabe to stiflingly mundane going-through-the-motions to deeply moving funerals), some of the political struggles, the parochial school stories, the material culture–these are all familiar/familial. When my cousin's best friend grumbles, "It's going to take nine novenas to get this car fixed," I know exactly what he means and can laugh with him in his exaggerated frustration. I understand, at least intellectually, the aesthetic attraction of the liturgy and spiritual practices of Catholicism for some Mennonites, and also the attraction of a tradition of peace-mindedness of the Mennonite world for Catholics. But living on a Mennonite-Catholic boundary has made me aware that lived reality in both worlds can take on a certain harshness, and also that it can have an old-shirt comfortableness that is something different than the more ideal attractions of either world.

From my personal theological or experiential "location" which is more centrally in the Mennonite world than the Catholic (as a denominational archivist, I'm one of the keepers of Mennonite collective memory, after all), I feel the value of ritual and liturgy in life, and find relatively little of it in Mennonite life, especially of any contemplative variety. I enjoy the sounds and rhythms of traditional religious language, while at the same time I want to avoid the doctrinal baggage that comes along with traditional language. I intend to have it both ways: to take pleasure in the tradition while holding it lightly as the metaphor that it is, while also saying that there is something ineffable but real behind the metaphor. Maybe you would say that this is just going through the motions, but going through the motions is better than not having any motions to go through. And I don't believe that there is such a thing as just going through the motions.

The concrete image around which I've been thinking lately is of a jar of muddy creek water. At a meeting where I was present a couple of years ago, someone had scooped up a jar of muddy water, probably from the local creek, and left it to sit for a couple of days. It was the centerpiece of a small meeting space. The water started out as the usual muddy liquid one finds in local streams and ponds, but after a couple of days the silt had settled to the bottom and left a layer of clear water above. It was obviously a visual image for contemplative spirituality in general, but it is an image I keep coming back to. How can I find time and space to let the silt settle out, and what will I/we see in the clear water?