A Prayer for the Painted Church

by Alice Ross

The once beautifully painted 1912 church that Ed Janecka had been attending since childhood was in serious decline 20 years ago.

“It was starting to leak and didn’t look its best,” Janecka recalls, so he approached church leaders about restoring Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church, and they said, “Go ahead. Do anything you want.”

Okay, now what? He sat in the back of the church and said a prayer for the project that was now squarely in his lap.

“Basically, I said, ‘Give me some help here,’” he remembers. The church, built in 1912 by the Czech ancestors of Janecka and others in Dubina, Texas, (pop. 200) had once been intricately painted inside with colorful angels, oak leaves, vines, frescoes, and stenciling. All of this was later painted over, but as a young altar boy, Janecka had seen faint traces of the original paintings when sunlight hit the church walls just right.

“I knew it was there,” he says.

His prayer that year was quickly answered when the entire congregation decided to pitch in and restore the church to its former glory. About eight months later, the work was done.

“My great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of the community. Our ancestors brought their faith and heritage with them, and this is a vital part of it. I wanted to bring it back the way it was,” he says.

Other parishioners felt the same, most of them descended from the original settlers of Dubina. The Czech immigrants had arrived on a cold, sleeting November day in 1856 and huddled under a grove of oaks (a “dub” in Czechoslovak) as shelter for the night while the men built a fire for warmth. It was the first Czech settlement in Texas.

“People kept one another alive and awake that night,” says Cathy Chaloupka, who joined the church after moving back from Houston and discovering that one of her ancestors was an original Dubina founder. She’d seen the church as a child but hadn’t seen it renovated. “It was instant attraction. You know you belong, you feel it in your heart as soon as you walk in on Sunday morning,” she says.

Once again, angels peer down from the ceiling and colorful frescoes and stencils decorate archways as they did prior to being painted over in 1952.

“We had pictures of how it was originally painted,” Janecka explains. “We’d set up scaffolding after church, do a little paint removing. It was like an archeological find—a hand here, a leaf there. We cleaned it, put the angels back the way they were,” he says.

About 50 to 70 volunteers, mostly parish members, took part in the restoration. They uncovered an area of stencils, made copies, took pictures of the colors, covered the angels, and then had a professional painter spray-paint the whole church. Then the parishioners came in and repainted the stencils where they were originally.

The Dubina church is one of more than 20 painted churches in Texas, all of which—from the outside—look like any country church built around the turn of the last century. Inside, however, a visitor is met with a joyous profusion of color, with nearly every surface graced with elaborate murals, foliage, flowers, and stenciling. These paintings, along with Czech and German inscriptions on many walls, are echoes from the homeland of a people trying to preserve its culture and faith in a new, rough country.

Most of these churches are listed on the National Register of Historic Places today, and the parishioners at Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church in Dubina hope their turn will come this year. Meanwhile, the congregation of 170 or so can come together for worship every Sunday morning knowing that a community, working together, can answer a prayer.

Alice Ross is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

first appeared: 1/26/2003