In its 126 years in Highland, has stood witness to many changes in the neighborhood. On Saturday, it will engage in one of the area’s most recent trends: the craft-beer boom.
Five nearby craft breweries will pour at the parish’s , from noon to 9 p.m. in the church parking lot. It’s set to be a bustling brew festival. The Rev. Luke Barder said as many as 2,000 attendees are expected.
“This is telling of the neighborhood,” he said. “The young adult community, they’re community-oriented, they like craft beer, they like local food.”
It’s also telling of the parish. “Every week, we get young adults walking into the door,” Barder said. “That’s basically how Oktoberfest started — it was a bunch of young adults talking about ‘What can we do?’ … and it turned into a Highland community-building event, and that’s why we do it.”
Elizabeth Frels and her husband, Jason, both 29, moved to the neighborhood three years ago and started attending St. Dominic. She wasn’t Catholic before, but she felt so at home at the parish that she converted. Now she’s helping organize Oktoberfest.
“I can’t tell you the influx of young adults (at the church),” she said. “As the neighborhood changes, the parish changes, too.
“I think a lot of that has to do with Father Luke coming in about a year ago and changing the game. I think his first orders of business were buying a bike rack and updating the website.”
In addition to the 32-year-old Barder, the Dominican Order novices — friars who come to St. Dominic for their first year of training — add a youthful vibe to the parish. (Novices are often in their 20s or 30s.) In fact, one of those novices was having a beer with a parishioner a few years ago when the two of them came up with the idea to host the church’s first Oktoberfest.
But the parish, Barder said, mirrors the neighborhood, “Up until just recently, (St. Dominic) had been a highly Hispanic parish because the neighborhood was mainly Hispanic,” Barder said. “But we still have a large Hispanic population that comes — people who have been anchors in this parish forever — (who) now live out in Thornton and Northglenn and beyond.”
Given its influx of parishioners, St. Dominic is bucking a national trend. A Pew study published in May found that the number of U.S. adults who identified as Christian fell about 8 percentage points between 2007 and 2014; the number of those identifying as Catholic dropped 3.1 percentage points, to 20.8 percent of the population.
Dominican friars, though, are well-suited for this sort of adversity, Barder said.
“Our whole raison d’être,” he said, “is to be where the people are.”
The friars are out there, said St. Dominic parishioner Jackie Youngblood, president of the West Highland Neighborhood Association, whose boundary includes the parish. You see them out jogging in the park, going to other festivals in the neighborhood and meeting people for coffee, she said.
Because the parish sees about 500 people at weekend Mass, a significant number of those attending Oktoberfest are coming from outside the church, Barder said.
“It’s mainly neighbors; they just walk over there,” Youngblood said. “And I’m kind of surprised, because I’ll look and I’ll see some of the neighbors I think are anti-Catholic, and they might be, but they’re not anti-beer and sausage.”
For the businesses sponsoring St. Dominic’s Oktoberfest, the beer festival is an opportunity to contribute and to get exposure within the Highland neighborhood, said Kristen Lewis, owner of Brewshine BBQ, an easy walk across Speer Boulevard from the parish. Brewshine opened just before last year’s festival, and plenty of neighbors walked through her door after eating Brewshine’s barbecue at Oktoberfest. “I love how nice people are in this community,” Lewis said.
If you go
What: St. Dominic’s Oktoberfest festival
Where: St. Dominic’s parking lot at West 29th Avenue and Federal Boulevard
When: Noon-9 p.m. Saturday
Cost: Free admission; Oktoberfest mug, including four pours, $25
Breweries: Diebolt Brewing, Factotum Brew House, Joyride Brewing Co., Call to Arms Brewing Co., Prost Brewing Co.
More info:
