NO THREE HOLY WOMEN FESTIVAL THIS WEEK!

NO THREE HOLY WOMEN FESTIVAL

By Michael Horne

For generations, it was a tenet of the faithful at Three Holy Women congregation that the weekend after Father’s Day would be the time for the parish festival. Only the Second Coming, it was thought, could displace the divinely ordained event from the church calendar.

Alas, Jesus is still up in heaven, but it looks like this year the festival has gone to hell.

“Key players are not available this year,” the church staff tells Milwaukeeworld. Some, such as Rose Mastrogiovanni, were lost to death, which lets them off the hook. What’s everybody else’s excuse? Three Holy Women, formed from the merger of Holy Rosary, St. Hedwig’s and St. Rita’s churches, celebrated with one of the most distinctive and successful parish festivals in the city. Most old timers simply referred to it by its former name, St. Rita’s Festival, and it took place in front of the church at 1601 N. Cass St. and in the adjacent Cass Street Playground. It featured games of chance, including the inimitable “paddle game,” wonderful home-cooked Italian food, abundant music and a variety of other diversions. Where else could you buy a beer and have it served by Judge John DiMotto? The most notable feature of Ritafest was a religious procession that wound through the streets of the neighborhood to air out the plaster saints that had been removed from their niches for the occasion.

Church officials kept rather quiet about the lack of the festival this year, and the word has caused quite a shock in the Brady Street community.

One neighbor said, “they merged three churches and they can’t find anybody to run one festival? Why don’t we just become Lutheran? It’s less fun, but it’s also less work.” The inability to organize a committee in the absence of Ms. Mastrogiovanni is particularly perplexing since many parishioners of Three Holy Women are in the entertainment and restaurant business. These same people seem to have no problem organizing Festa Italiana each year. It's not like the church didn't make money on the event, either. Last year was the best ever, Rev. Tim Kitzke told me at the time. Also, it's not like the church doesn't need the money. Just this week a scaffold has surrounded St. Hedwig's noble Brady Street edifice in a reconstruction project that is still $200,000 short of its goal.

[I wrote quite a bit about the Three Holy Women Festival in 2005, which you can read here.]

The event has been whittled down to the traditional religious procession to St. Rita’s on Sunday, June 17^th following the 10:30 a.m. mass at St. Hedwig’s. Then we are all invited downstairs to the church hall for spaghetti and pull tabs, with the doors closing at 5 p.m. I find, for the first time, that I shall be otherwise engaged that weekend. Mark my words, people will be showing up at the site out of habit, and will be disappointed to find no action there. Talk about a lost weekend!