This coming Sunday, March 29, we celebrate Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week. As Dehonians, on Palm Sunday we also celebrate the beginnings of the SCJ presence in the United States. It was on Palm Sunday in 1923 that Fr. Mathias Fohrman, SCJ, first celebrated Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Lower Brule, SD.
Fr. Mathias was a Luxembourg-born SCJ from the German Province who immigrated to the United States to serve the Church here. One-hundred-and-three-years later the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation continues to be served by an international pastoral team that includes SCJs and religious sisters from DR Congo, Indonesia and the Philippines. Just as Dehonians did in 1923, Dehonians will welcome the start of another Holy Week with the people of South Dakota.
The pastoral team is pictured above following last week’s Chrism Mass at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Sioux Falls.
