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Staff Writer

This Sunday will be a special occasion for the St. Katharine Drexel Catholic Church.

The congregation will be celebrating the Ramsey church’s fifth anniversary.

The event will include a special Mass, a skit performed by the youth group, a photographic timeline and a PowerPoint presentation followed by a sloppy joe lunch.

Mass starts at 10 a.m. with lunch following at 11 a.m.

Although the church’s first sermon was given Jan. 31, 2005, it held off celebrating until March 7.

“We are excited to be celebrating five years” but church members were hoping to hold the event in their new worship space at the parish office as well as celebrate closer to St. Katharine Drexel’s feast day March 3, said Rev. Paul Jaroszeski.

The church is in the process of constructing temporary worship space in the warehouse it is leasing.

The congregation worships at PACT Charter School right now and has its other gatherings in parish office space, said Mary Jo Olson, who is one of the founding members of the church.

“We outgrew the meeting space,” she said. “We were stumbling over each other. We had more people coming for the Generations of Faith meetings than meeting space.”

When the church rented additional warehouse space, for a total of approximately 11,000 square feet, the church board suggested building a worship space in the warehouse.

Although the space will not be finished in time to allow the church to celebrate the anniversary, having the room will eliminate some of the wear and tear on the equipment.

Every Sunday, church members and staff would haul all of the altars, vestments, tables and other supplies to PACT for the Mass, Olson said.

Once services were over, they would have to tear it down again and haul it back to the parish office.

The congregation owes a debt of gratitude to those who have hauled the items over to PACT over the years. It will good to be able to leave them in one place, Olson said.

Looking back

“It’s gone so fast. When looking back, it feels so fleeting but we have accomplished so much,” Olson said.

St. Katharine Drexel Catholic Church got its start with an announcement of a new church in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Archdiocese’s newspaper, “The Catholic Spirit,” around 2003.

The news article said a new parish was being formed in Ramsey, said Olson.

According to the Catholic Spirit, St. Katharine Drexel was the first new parish in the arch­diocese in 30 years.

Although members of St. Stephen’s Catholic Church in Anoka, Olson and her husband Dennis decided to switch.

As a child, Olson attended a mission church in southwest Ohio.

“I liked the idea of a small church where everyone knows each other,” she said.

Her husband also grew up in a small church.

“The idea of building a new church appealed to both of us,” Olson said.  

Olson served on the building search committee, helping the fledgling church find a temporary space to worship while it grew a congregation and could plan for a permanent home.

They looked at a number of buildings and decided on the new PACT Charter School building, located at 7250 E. Ramsey Parkway.

In the first year of St. Katharine Drexel, the small congregation held “getting to know you” meetings at Central Park and sent out mass mailings.

Since January 2005, the church has grown from 50 families to 250-plus families.

Although Olson thought most of the congregation would come from Ramsey, the church has parishioners from everywhere, including Elk River, Anoka, Coon Rapids and other communities, she said.

Parish Pastoral Council Chairman Mike Stuedemann and his family came to the church in 2007.

Jaroszeski, their former priest from St. Patrick’s of Cedar Creek in Oak Grove, told his family about the new church, Stuedemann said.

“I wanted the opportunity to build something for us and successive generations,” he said.

“I like community-based feel and how truly welcoming the community is.”

Looking forward

As the church grows, it wants to move forward with building a permanent church building.

St. Katharine Drexel’s has a 35-acre property located near Central Park, but all major building projects are currently on hold while a study is done on the whole archdiocese, Jaroszeski said.

The church is planning a fund-raising campaign for the $2 million it needs to build the 11,000 square foot church.

“We need to have 50 percent in the bank and the remaining 50 percent pledged,” Jaroszeski said.

One of the parish’s fund-raising events is the annual Party in the Park.

The fourth annual party will be June 12 and it will includes performances by Ice Cream, The Sweet Colleens, Erin Rogue, Section 30 and Martin Zellar.

The success of the church and its Party in the Park is because of the parishioners.

“The church is blessed with a great congregation that has a high rate of volunteerism and that is caring,” Olson said.

“The people are amazing here. We have over 70 percent of our community involved in volunteering for the church,” said Jaroszeski.

St. Katharine Drexel’s will be putting that volunteerism to good use in the future as the staff and parishioners work with the Lord of Life Lutheran Church group on a project to help the homeless.

The future is bright because of all the work Jaroszeski, the parish staff and the parish community has done in the last five years, Stuedemann said.

And St. Katharine Drexel continues moving forward with its mission to see Christ in all and be Christ to all, he said.

Patron saint

According to her biography, Katharine Drexel was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1858.

She was responsible for creating many schools on Indian reservations as well as for African American schools in the south, said Jaroszeski.

Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People and dedicated her life and her inheritance to improving the lives of American Indians and African Americans.

She was responsible for opening 63 mission school in the western and southern United States as well as founding Xavier University in New Orleans, La., in 1915.

Drexel was beatified by Pope John Paul II Nov. 20, 1988 and canonized Oct. 1, 2000.


Tammy Sakry is at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it