CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — Father Bart Doyle of St. Bridget’s, accustomed to celebrating 8 a.m. Mass for what parish secretary Eileen Halpin gently calls “a faithful remnant,” looked out from the altar Sunday at the largest congregation he has presided over since the 2019 funeral of Donny Skoglund’s aunt, and noted with some unease that he could not name roughly twelve of them.
The crowd of 19 — up from a recent Sunday average of 6 — represented what Halpin, who keeps the parish ledger in pencil and has since 1994, called “a 217% increase, give or take, attributable almost entirely to the Lutherans wanting a look.”
“They came in two cars from First Lutheran,” Halpin said. “Marlys Tewksbury asked me at the door whether we still do the wafer or if it’s bread now under the new fellow. I told her it had always been the wafer, Marlys. She wrote that down on a Casey’s receipt.”
Father Doyle, who had prepared a homily on the parable of the lost sheep without anticipating the literal arrival of any, adapted on the fly to acknowledge the visitors — three of whom, by Halpin’s count, crossed themselves in the wrong direction, and one of whom said “amen” with the cadence of a man guessing at a game show.
Reverend Pete Krieg of First Lutheran, reached Sunday afternoon at the Hen House Diner, said he harbored no concerns about defection on the grounds that the same parishioners had also attended the Mormon open house in Cedar Rapids in 2014 and visited the Hare Krishna table at the state fair “every August since the Reagan administration.”
“Marlys is what I’d call denominationally curious,” Krieg said, refilling his coffee. “She’ll be back next Sunday. She just likes to see how other people are running things. Last spring she sat in on a Quaker meeting in Iowa City and reported back that, quote, nobody said anything for forty minutes and she found that suspicious.”
Halpin reported that Sunday’s collection plate brought in $84, a figure she attributed to Lutherans who, unfamiliar with the parish envelope system, had simply placed cash in directly, in one case a folded twenty with a note reading “for the new pope, if he needs it.” Father Doyle, asked whether he expected the surge to continue, said he was “cautiously realistic,” a phrase he attributed to his late mother and declined to define further.
As of press time, Marlys Tewksbury had not committed to returning, citing a standing 9 a.m. obligation next Sunday to see what they were doing over at the Methodists.