SUBURBAN LIFE Your Community Press newspaper serving Deer Park, Kenwood, Madeira, Sycamore Township and other Northeast Cincinnati neighborhoods
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | BECAUSE COMMUNITY MATTERS | PART OF THE USA TODAY NETWORK
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Cincinnati parish pushes back when new priest brings change Dan Horn Cincinnati Enquirer USA TODAY NETWORK
Jenna Beall Mueller and Adam Mueller stand in front of their 2015 Shasta Airflyte Reissue camper with their three dogs Margot, Dewey and Gus on August 27 in Pleasant Ridge. The couple purchased the camper in June in the midst of the pandemic as a way to travel safely. MEG VOGEL/ THE ENQUIRER
1 COUPLE, 3 DOGS AND A CAMPER NAMED CHANICE Couple takes to the road during the pandemic
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Andrea Reeves | Cincinnati Enquirer | USA TODAY NETWORK
hose of us with a penchant for wanderlusting have suff ered in our own unique way these past months. Penned in by not only our four walls, we feel hemmed in by the invisible boundaries on the map that COVID-19 has drawn for us, dictating where we can – and where we mostly cannot – explore, experience, trailblaze. Airplanes? Hotels? Europe? Forget it. Jenna and Adam Mueller of Pleasant Ridge found a solution to pandemic travel challenges (along with a lot of other people), and they call her Chanice. Chanice the Shasta. Dressed in turquoise and white, Chanice is a 19foot-long replica 1961 Shasta Airfl yte camper, carbon-copied from the 1961 blueprints. Only 1,941 were made (to honor the year initial production began on the camper), and the Muellers managed to track one down for sale in Dayton this spring. She’s a dead ringer for the true vintage model, and the Muellers often get compliments from folks who are certain of her age. “We’ve had so many people stop and just like randomly taking pictures of it. ‘Oh we’re sorry we’re not being weird, but, like, we grew up with one of these things, like exactly the same color,’” said Adam. There are updates, of course, like air conditioning (“Thank God,” says Adam). (Oh and Chanice? It’s taken from one of the cou-
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ple’s favorite movies, “Uncle Buck,” which happens to be the nickname they’ve given the truck that pulls her.) Jenna took inspiration from her love of tinyhome shows to organize and deck out the woodpaneled interior in fi tting retro fashion. Adam took his love of tinkering and sunk it into the new hobby of owning and maintaining a camper. Plus, he grew up camping. She did not. A camper, they’re discovering, is a wonderful compromise. Chanice is a means to go on the adventures Jenna and Adam missed during the pandemic. Traveling is a big part of what makes them happy. But it’s something that became an impossibility during these See CAMPING, Page 3A
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Parishioners at St. Anthony’s Church in Madisonville are used to being asked why they do the things they do. Why do they play African drums and clap to gospel music at a Catholic Mass? Why do they stand for the entire service? Why do dancers in white dresses and colorful sashes lead the procession into church? For years, they’ve given the same answer to all those questions. “It’s the St. Anthony way,” said Gloria Parker-Martin, a parishioner there for 25 years. But now the way is changing, and so is one of Cincinnati’s most diverse and progressive Catholic parishes. The arrival of a pastor with a more traditional approach has brought a new way of doing things that has riled some parishioners and divided St. Anthony’s congregation. The changes at St. Anthony’s are part of a broader debate in the American church over the role regular Catholics, or lay Catholics, should play in the day-to-day operation of their parishes. But they also have ignited an intensely personal fi ght over what it means to be a religious community and what it means to be Catholic. At St. Anthony’s, the community has for years been guided by the belief that lay Catholics can and should be empowered to do important work in the parish, including, at times, work typically left to priests. “The way we did it meant a lot to me,” said Kay Brogle, a parishioner for 30 years. “What it becomes, we don’t know. But it isn’t what it was.” Disagreements between pastors and their fl ocks are neither rare nor unique to Catholics, but what’s happening at St. Anthony’s isn’t a typical disagreement. Since arriving in 2016, St. Anthony’s pastor, the Rev. Jamie Weber, changed several long-time practices at the church, replaced the elected parish council with his own appointees and removed dissenters from the choir and the list of Sunday lectors. Some parishioners, meanwhile, challenged Weber’s decisions, sometimes openly in church, and aired their grievances last month in a half-page ad in The Enquirer declaring they’d lost their parish to an “authoritarian model of church leadership.” See ST. ANTHONY, Page 4A
The front entrance at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in the Madisonville neighborhood on Sept. 9. SAM GREENE/THE ENQUIRER
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