Parish thrives in Yakutat

St. Ann’s parish sits in one of the most isolated places in Southeast Alaska — Yakutat — a town ringed by water, mountains and glaciers, where the world, as parishioner Skip Ryman puts it, “forgot about us” more than once.

Two flights a day connect Yakutat to the rest of Alaska now. The population has grown from 255 in 1955 to about 650 today. Through all of it, St. Ann’s has kept its doors open on each Sunday at 10 a.m., often without a priest in the room.

The roadmap for how to do that was laid down by a priest in the 1970s, and Yakutat’s Catholics have followed a more formalized version of it ever since: when no priest can make the trip, trained lay people lead a service themselves.

St. Ann’s has always been a mission church. Historical accounts show Catholic missionaries pushed into Southeast Alaska between 1878 and 1900, and the Sisters of St. Ann arrived in the region in 1886 — the likely window for St. Ann’s own founding. As with many small mission churches of that era, an exact date is hard to pin down. What is certain is that Yakutat was seldom going to be a parish with a resident priest. Its population was too small, too scattered, and mission priests instead circulated among several Southeast communities, arriving in Yakutat only seasonally.

For decades, that meant Mass wherever people could gather. Elder Jennie Wheeler, whose parents Mike and Jennie Pavlik were some of those early Catholics, remembers the priest coming into people’s homes — Sunday services rotating between her family’s house and others. There was no church building yet, so the “church” was in living rooms. A traveling altar was used in these homes. In those days, clergy were flown in for free by the commercial airlines.

By the 1950s, the rhythm of the town itself reinforced the parish’s cohesion. Skip Ryman’s parents were part of that early congregation.

“We held rosary every Wednesday — we didn’t have telephones and there was very little radio, so the parish held a rosary service as much for a chance for friendship and company as for prayer,” Ryman said.

He credits those Wednesday gatherings with cementing St. Ann’s as a community, not just a congregation.

His own family’s roots in the church trace to his father, Frank Ryman. He came as the commanding officer of the US Coast Guard LORAN (long range navigation) Station in Yakutat, arriving there in 1955. He had lived an ecumenical life until an encounter during the Marines in World War II changed that.

“He was struck by how much peace the men found in Catholic service before they shipped out,” his son recalls. Frank Ryman converted aboard a warship. He later started a lodge and air taxi service in Yakutat — Skip was 10 when the family arrived — and helped grow the congregation.

For kids like Jennie Wheeler growing up Catholic in Yakutat, receiving First Communion involved being taught her catechism by her own parents. As a consequence, she didn’t receive First Communion until age 15. Over the years, the church began to grow and needed a building.

The congregation built its first church building in 1974. The church building grew in fits and starts after that. Fr. Gerald Clenaghan, an Oblate priest who had served in rural Canada before Yakutat, brought carpentry skills to the project — finishing the church basement, which had been used as a garage, and building the stairs that connected it to the sanctuary above. In the 1980s, then-Bishop Michael Kenny of Juneau allowed the upper part of the building to be extended, doubling the worship space.

The St. Ann parish church.
(Courtesy of Skip Ryman)

In 1975, the parish had a full-time priest for the first time — Fr. Clenaghan. He stayed two years.

“He brought with him the template for lay ministries that was used in Canada. That was the foundation of what we knew could happen,” Ryman recalled of his tenure. “He saw that we could model on what was being done in remote Canadian parishes by taking special training to be lay ministers.”

 When Fr. Clenaghan left, the diocese began sending a priest to Yakutat once a month, and Sr. Margaret McCarthy came as administrator in the 1970s and 1980s. She spent a week in town each month organizing the parish and running catechism classes in preparation for a visiting priest who arrived on Saturday for Sunday Mass.

 The parish carried on the faith and that schedule — a priest for one weekend a month — set the stage for what St. Ann’s does now. Parishioners went through diocesan training to become lay presiders, authorized to lead a communion service in a priest’s absence. Deacon Mike Monagle from Juneau’s St. Paul the Apostle parish helped guide that effort, and eight lay people were eventually trained, including Jennie Wheeler, the Rymans, John and Fran Latham, and Mary Kay Germain, who all continue to be active.

Attendance today ranges from four or five worshippers to a packed church, depending on the season, Ryman said. It is a small, dedicated core, but the building itself carries weight for the people who maintain it. “It was so hard to get, and we take good care of it now,” he said.

There has not been an adult confirmation at St. Ann’s in fifteen years, though catechism for youth continues: Jennie Wheeler has led it for years, using materials from the archdiocese, and this year Cherise Schmidt and Austin Pajak took over the instruction.  

 Practicing their Catholic faith means St. Ann’s functions like any other parish, Wheeler and Ryman said. They are part of the community for people in need. One upcoming effort is the sale of fried bread and maple bars to raise money, Wheeler said.

Fundraising has always been a community effort — rummage sales, donations sorted and shipped out, with summer clothing sent to California and heavier winter clothing to Anchorage. Twice a month, the parish also holds gospel missions with the Tlingit community, a relationship close enough that one visiting priest was formally adopted as an honorary uncle after his service to the community. This took place on nearby Knight Island, the Wheeler’s family homestead. 

Now that Fr. Balaraju Yandava is the pastor, he celebrates Mass in Yakutat twice a month. Fr. Bala is also the pastor of St. Joseph’s in Cordova. When a priest visits now, the routine is well worn: arrival in the afternoon, Mass the next morning, then departure — a full parish turning out for what has become, fifty years on, less an emergency measure than simply how St. Ann’s in such a remote location can celebrate the Eucharist.

Fr. Bill Zamborsky from the Diocese of Orlando in Florida (center) is pictured with (left to right) Skip and Rose Mary Ryman, John and Fran Latham. Over the years, many priests have visited Yakutat, a generous, welcome gift. Fr. Zamborsky is the most recent to visit. (Courtesy of Skip Ryman)