RURAL CLUTIER — As the sound of hymns sung by some 150 parishioners escaped the slightly ajar doors to rural Clutier’s St. Wenceslaus Oratory last Sunday, June 7, the Prince of Peace (Catholic) Cluster celebrated the annual Corpus Christi Mass and procession for the first time under Father Michael McAndrew.

The Feast of Corpus Christi, also known as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, celebrates the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. As part of the traditional celebration, the Eucharist is carried publicly in solemn procession as a witness of faith. The tradition has become relatively uncommon in Iowa.

The celebration at St. Wenceslaus this year — which closed as a church to become an oratory in the 1990s — seemed to indicate both a desire to remain rooted in that which came before while embracing all that is to come. McAndrew, currently assigned to the Circle of Saints Cluster of Tama, Chelsea, and Belle Plaine, will soon become one of four priests serving the newly-created Marshalltown Area Pastorate which will include Prince of Peace’s St. Paul Parish in Traer as well as St. Joseph Parish in Chelsea, St. Patrick Parish in Tama, St. Michael Parish in Belle Plaine, and St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Marshalltown.

St. Paul’s current fellow cluster parishes of Sacred Heart Parish in La Porte City and St. Mary of Mt. Carmel Parish in Eagle Center (rural Waterloo) will no longer hold weekend Mass and will join the Independence Area Pastorate.

Moments before he entered St. Wenceslaus’s nave Sunday morning, McAndrew paused to take a selfie with his three acolytes. Inside, John Svoboda could be heard singing a hymn in Czech.

Right around 11 a.m. — roughly an hour into Mass — the Corpus Christi procession began. McAndrew, bearing the Holy Eucharist under a canopy held by four bearers, was led from chapel to chapel around St. Vaclav Cemetery by a group consisting of crossbearers and flag bearers, a small band comprised of mostly area children playing a solemn march, and a pair of cluster first communicants, Zoey Kopriva and Isabella Torres dressed in white dresses and veils in recognition of the important sacrament they were now able to receive. With help from several other children and the cluster’s coordinator of religious education, Sarah Kopriva, the younger Kopriva and Torres dropped handfuls of colorful flower petals all along the path. Most of the parishioners also elected to join in the walk which first visited the yellow west chapel (sunrise), then the pink north chapel (midday), followed by the purple east chapel (dusk, the completion of the day).

At the last chapel, McAndrew read the Prayer of the Farmer to Mary:

“O blessed Lady of the fields, who loved the land where Jesus walked, and who watched the tiller of the earth and the shepherd of the flock go out and return from Nazareth, and who loved the rural folk of the village, look graciously on the fields and pastures of this your adopted land. Make our homes sanctuaries of love; make our fields rich for the harvest. Help us to understand the dignity of work and the merit it acquired when offered in and through your divine Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.”

Around 11:45 a.m., the procession made its way back inside the oratory, the fourth chapel, where Mass ended with the Benediction.

At the conclusion of the service, the sun finally began to break through the thick cloud cover and the sound of meadowlarks and dickcissels could be heard calling from the cemetery’s western edge. The humidity, which had remained at bay throughout most of the morning, started to swell. Generations of families, mostly Czech, gathered briefly on the sidewalk outside the oratory to greet one another and reminisce about another year gone before packing up for the annual potluck held in Traer in support of St. Wenceslaus and all it continues to symbolize.