Inside a tiny Minnesota town’s fight to save its historic Catholic church

DE GRAFF, MINN. – It was tacked to the inside of the glass doors of St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, a single piece of paper declaring that the 124-year-old building was “no longer a sacred place for divine worship,” in anticipation of its sale.

The unassuming letter, issued July 1 by the Diocese of New Ulm, sparked a frantic, last-minute scramble by a small group of parishioners fighting to save St. Bridget and keep it open as a Catholic church.

“This was the very last block between the church and the bulldozer,” said Brody Hale, a 39-year-old attorney and canon law consultant volunteering for the parishioners in this small town about 2½ hours due west of the Twin Cities.

In the race against a 10-day appeal window, Hale worked from 4 a.m. until nearly midnight drafting a petition to revoke the diocese’s decision. At the same time, Jean Byrne, a former parishioner who grew up in De Graff, rallied 25 people to sign on before driving to New Ulm on July 10 to deliver the appeal, mere hours before the deadline.

“I will do everything to save this church,” Byrne said.

For this town with fewer than 100 residents, the church casts a monumental shadow. Its entry in the National Register of Historic Places notes that the red brick building is “unusually large for a town like De Graff.” The Gothic Revival church could hold 350, and the cross at the top of the 3½-story spire towers over the surrounding cornfields.

But the church has been mostly empty for years. In 2022, the De Graff parish merged with one in Benson, about 10 minutes away.

Nearby Rosen has been fighting for years to stave off closure of its church, St. Joseph’s. A 150-year-old church near Winona held its final Mass last December. And in northwest Minnesota, the Crookston Diocese deemed a shuttered Catholic church in Terrebonne, Minn., too expensive to repair and ordered it burned down in 2016.

The Diocese of New Ulm cites the De Graff church’s deteriorating condition and declining demographics as the reason for its closure.

A July 16 diocese statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune acknowledged that decisions to merge parishes or close buildings are often painful, but said the church needed “significant repairs that require resources beyond what is currently available.”

The closure decree itself lists the need for a new roof and bell tower, asbestos abatement, major tuckpointing, and a new heating system.

“It is not fair to let a small community’s former parish church fall into disrepair, especially in places where, due to the sad shift in demographics and limited resources, it can no longer afford its upkeep,” Bishop Chad W. Zielinski of the Diocese of New Ulm said in the statement.

And they wonder why the diocese won’t accept their offer to save the church themselves. Some have formed the Society of St. Bridget of DeGraff, a nonprofit, and proposed to take over the building’s care entirely at their own expense, ensuring it would remain a Catholic church for occasional Masses, weddings and funerals.

Proposals from the group point to three churches in Missouri, California and Indiana that are now run by preservation societies.

With their appeal now filed, the parishioners face a 30-day wait for the bishop’s response. If the appeal is denied or ignored, they have 15 days to take their case to the Vatican.

Hale describes the appeals process as “gladiatorial combat” with an adversarial diocese.

But for residents of De Graff, the fight to save the red brick church is a fight for their own history, embodied in the building where the town’s baptisms, weddings and funerals took place.

Regan, 70, said he’s been a member of the church his whole life. He said he loved the way the sun would shine through St. Bridget’s stained glass windows.

He recalled how the town once had a lumber yard, insurance agency, two gas stations, two fertilizer plants.

Losing the church would be another blow.

“It had a history of being something,” he said of his hometown. “We just don’t want to lose everything.”