By Jonathan Turner
After 150 years, the pious parishioners of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 412 10th St., Moline, haven’t lost the faith.
As the only primarily Hispanic church in the Diocese of Peoria, St. Mary’s has taken many steps in recent years to grow and refurbish its four buildings.
St. Mary’s has made building improvements, including new flooring, windows, restored stained glass windows, pews, new altar, and the 30-foot-tall outdoor painting (installed in 2020).
Since pre-COVID numbers in 2019, they have increased attendance from 750 on Sundays to 1,150, Father Antonio Dittmer (pastor since 2017) said recently.
The church celebrated its sesquicentennial last August, since it was first organized as a parish in 1875. The Diocese of Peoria wasn’t formed at that time (begun in 1877), and St. Mary’s was the first Catholic church in Moline.
The current church building dates from 1927 and the school from 1922 (formerly St. Mary’s High School). After Alleman High in Rock Island opened in 1949, St. Mary’s school functioned as a grade school until 1998, when it was consolidated under Seton Catholic in Moline.
In 2017, when Father Dittmer came to St. Mary’s, there were just two Masses in Spanish, and attendance had declined.
“If it wasn’t for Father Dittmer, that would have closed his church,” member Guadalupe Castro said.
The priest, now 54, saw St. Mary’s was not serving the faithful.
“There’s this huge need and we’re not meeting that need,” he said of Masses in Spanish. “This is a unique opportunity. And I always say, I got my dad’s German eyes, but I got my mom’s Mexican heart.”
Dittmer (whose mother came from Mexican state of Coahuila) said: “I have a deep, deep love of Hispanics. And there’s a very simple reason for that, because my mom is Mexican. So I grew up listening to my grandparents speak Spanish, telling me and watching their love for the Lord seeing that transmitted to my mom. And obviously she married a German-American with a last name of Dittmer, which is my dad.”
“My Catholicism is very Mexican. Like Mexican devotion resonates with me,” he said. “They’re not being fed and we need to make sure that Spanish-speaking Catholics are nourished. So after a year, I really made some significant changes.”
“I know English enough that it doesn’t really matter,” Carmen Castro said. “But I prefer Spanish, definitely.”
Only one Mass a week in English
Dittmer said St. Mary’s is unusual among Quad Cities Catholic churches in offering most Masses in Spanish. Of the 10 services each week, only one is in English – the 8:30 a.m. Mass Sunday (one of four Sunday Masses), which is one of the lower attended.
“I got a chance to meet people like Eloy Jimenez, who works tirelessly here. Lupe and Carmen, who, if I had to pay them for all they do, we would go broke,” Dittmer said. “Maribel and her husband painted my house this year. They went to my house where I live. They painted the walls. We make it work.”
“Now we have more people coming to our church on Sunday than any other church in the Illinois Quad Cities. We are now the largest in terms of bodies at church,” he said. “We’re a huge church now.”
“I would always joke around that, churches of our size usually have a lot of full-time employees. I’m the only full-time employee,” Dittmer said.
“Because we can’t. I’m cheap,” he said. “We’re not wealthy. Still not a wealthy parish. The immigrant situation is you have people that come here and maybe they weren’t offered educational opportunities in Mexico, so they came here maybe just to sixth grade.”
“We pay our bills and that’s all we need,” Dittmer said, crediting the Bishop (since 2020), Louis Tylka. “He is so supportive of us and we’re just very grateful that he’s supportive. And so for me it was, we can make this happen. And we have and we do. And we went from like having a half a priest here because I was originally serving two parishes when I got here.”
And parishioners at St. Mary’s “are such unbelievably beautiful people,” Dittmer said. “They have such beautiful faith. It’s such an honor.”
The church has had a second, part-time, priest since July, Jacob Martini, who serves as chaplain at Alleman Catholic High School. Martini is a 29-year-old native of Ottawa, Ill.
Before St. Mary’s, Dittmer was pastor at a LaSalle church for four years.
Maribel Raya of East Moline and her husband have three children (now 35, 33, and 30), who went on to graduate St. Ambrose University in Davenport.
“My faith was really important to me. We were looking for a parish home especially that had an element of Spanish and a Hispanic culture to it,” Raya said. “So we found this as our home. And our children immediately got very involved. They were involved serving at Mass as altar servers. And it formed them so well that they went off to study at St. Ambrose University, they were also involved in the Catholic Church at St. Ambrose.”
The Castros live just a couple blocks from Christ the King Church in Moline, but connected to St. Mary’s since they moved to Moline from Guanjuato, Mexico, as did most of the families in the Floreciente neighborhood in which St. Mary’s sits.
“But this is our home. My home away from home,” Carmen Castro said. “I don’t prefer Christ the King. There are certain things that does not agree with me at Christ the King. All my life, this is my home, this is my church. Even though all churches are supposed to be beautiful and everything, I don’t see none of them. This is the prettiest one of all. The altar, everything is like the ones at home, like the ones in Mexico.”
Special celebrations
St. Mary’s old school gym hosted the popular Posadas in the nine nights leading to Christmas Eve. A Mexican tradition, posada means inn or lodging, and traditionally posadas are a celebration of the Christmas story, commemorating the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph’s search for a place to stay where Jesus could be born. Posadas in Mexico feature hot food and drinks, sweets, music, and piñatas, as did St. Mary’s.
“It’s big in our parish — very big,” Dittmer said.
For the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (another huge celebration), on Dec. 12, St. Mary’s had 500 people attend the three-hour service starting at 4:30 a.m.
“We had folkloric dances, Guadalupe dances. We reenact the apparitions,” Dittmer said. “We have somebody playing the Blessed Virgin Mary, another person playing Juan Diego, who is the recipient of these apparitions, and then a lot of songs in between.”
He also credited the four church choirs, including a children’s choir.
To help celebrate the St. Mary’s 150, Dittmer led a group of about 30 on a tour of Rome last March. He had lived in Rome for six years (1993-97 and 2003-4).
Jimenez has done lots of volunteering – from fundraising, to organizing hundreds of weddings, quinceaneras, and Bible study at the county jail.
“I felt compelled to do it,” he said through a translator. “My contribution to the church is to serve and to help. This is what I want to give, and I want to make sure that this parish, our property, looks beautiful, that this is a beautiful thing that we have.”
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