Arlington Heights minister encouraged understanding between faiths
The Rev. Rowland Koch, who died recently, was a lovely man. When I knew him, he was pastor of the Congregational United Church of Christ on Kirchoff Road.
I remember him as the gracious host for a long series of meetings of the AHEAD Committee, a group of clergy and laypeople in Arlington Heights working together to encourage ecumenism.
In the 1960s, our town needed encouragement to be ecumenical. There was still some antipathy between Lutherans and Catholics, part of a long history dating back to the middle of the 19th century when many Germans came to Arlington, escaping the wars and rumors of wars in their native country.
People told me stories of rumbles featuring snowballs between the kids at St. Peter's and those at St. James whenever a heavy snowfall provided ready ammunition.
Apart from the snowball fights, there was not much commerce among the churches. Koch was breaking new ground when he spoke of ecumenism to a group of interfaith women at St. James Church in December 1967.
For one of the Presbyterian women in that church basement, the Mass celebrated by the Rev. Robert Strzelecki after the program took her back to childhood days when she “half-knelt, half-sat in old St. Mary's Cathedral on special occasions, conscious of the strange language, the incense, the beauty, the dimness, the mystery around her and the strong longing within.”
Born of a mixed marriage, Emma Wolfinger as a child wondered where she belonged, wondered, “Must I always reject half my heritage?” Now, she had heard two Protestant clergy, Koch and the Rev. Leon Haring from her own First Presbyterian Church, talk of the need for understanding among churches, and a Catholic priest was saying Mass for the mixed group of Protestant and Catholic women. Perhaps this was the moment for healing of the rift she was conscious of all her life.
The moment arrived for Communion at the Mass in the school basement at St. James. The Protestant women watched their Catholic counterparts go to receive, and wondered if they would be welcome at the Communion table. They were told, “Do whatever you wish.”
Emma Wolfinger had been wishing for 45 years. She got up from her seat, walked up to the temporary Communion table, and received Communion from “the hands of a young, sincere Catholic priest in the Roman rite and,” she recalled, “I had relinquished nothing of my Protestant treasure.”
Those early days of ecumenical experimentation were giddy for people like Emma Wolfinger, and never would have happened, at least not so early, but for ecumenical pioneers like the Rev. Koch.