WEST BEND (AP) — It was 100 years ago that a Catholic priest named Paul Dobberstein began breathing life into West Bend’s Grotto of the Redemption.
The German immigrant had prayerfully overcome a near-fatal bout with pneumonia while at seminary. Upon his commission to Iowa in 1898, he set his heart toward thanking the Mother of God for her healing intercession.
“He promised he would build a shrine for her,” said the Grotto’s executive director, Darcie Kramer.
Fourteen years of simply gathering rock and stone would follow before Dobberstein, a one-time geology student, officially began cementing his vision into place in 1912. It took five years to complete the first of what is actually a collection of nine smaller grottos, or man-made caves, that outline mankind’s redemptive history from Adam through Jesus Christ.
Dobberstein had about 80 percent of his project finished in 1954 when he collapsed while working atop scaffolding at the age of 82.
The Grotto was reportedly once paid a visit by Walt Disney himself, who had a notion he might be able to duplicate Dobberstein’s achievement on a bigger stage. But once he saw the Grotto in person, the American dreamer par excellence quickly realized he was looking at a one-of-a-kind attraction.
As true today as it was then, the Grotto of the Redemption remains the largest creation of its kind in the world.
While Dobberstein may not have set out with that specific goal, he clearly had a sense of what is required to stand the test of time. He once wrote: “Spoken words are ephemeral; written words remain, but their duration depends upon the material on which they are written; but if carved into bronze or sculpted into stone they are wellnigh imperishable.”
No one understands that more than the people of West Bend, the northern Iowa town of fewer than 800 people where the Grotto’s 100th birthday party was celebrated over the weekend.
As many as 100,000 tourists a year came to see Dobberstein’s monument in its mid-20th-century heyday and upward of 40,000 continue to do so today.
“It’s how people recognize West Bend,” said Mayor Marilyn Schutz. “It’s a huge asset to the community.”
Visitors from all but two of the 50 states had already paid a visit in 2012 as of last month. School field trips are common, but not just from Catholic schools. Public school students also regularly visit to study the geological treasure chest that is the Grotto, which includes petrified wood from Arizona and a 2,200-pound stalagmite from New Mexico’s Carlsbad caverns, along with rock and stone sent from across the globe by missionaries Dobberstein had contacted about his work.
At the very outset of the collection process, Dobberstein traveled to South Dakota via horse and wagon and walked the rock-strewn hills himself to gather his building blocks. His journeys expanded to places that are now nationally protected lands or parks. He once got lost in a cave and had to be hospitalized after finally making his way out — with the rock sample he had been looking for firmly in his grasp.
Keeping the search for his raw materials as cheap as possible was vital. Dobberstein did not want to accept funding from the nearby Saints Peter and Paul parish. They had their own concerns, including the construction of the church building that now sits alongside the Grotto.
And besides, this was Dobberstein’s promise to keep, not theirs.
He bought the land where the Grotto sits from his own pocketbook. He sometimes melted down old Coca-Cola bottles with crayons to form homemade rocks when his resources were spread thin. And he and just one assistant, longtime sidekick Matt Szerensce, hand-crafted most of what is now 85 by 155 feet at its base and 40 feet tall at the tip of the cross of Calvary.
Until Father Louis Greving arrived on the scene in 1946 to take over the 74-year-old Dobberstein’s pastoral duties, no plan for any of it had ever been put down on paper.
It was simply the internal calling of a man who ultimately traveled hundreds of thousands of miles and spent almost every ounce of his free time puzzling together his three dimensional mosaic to God out of individual pieces too numerous to quantify.
“You start counting and let me know when you are done,” Kramer said.
The donations that began to trickle in with the earliest visitors to the Grotto lie behind the acquisition of the more than 60 Italian marble statues used to tell the Grotto’s redemption story. The replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta alone, which depicts Mary holding the crucified body of her son, cost more than $2,200 in 1955. It’s placed at the Grotto’s summit.
But it is a place immediately below that sorrowful scene — the empty tomb of Jesus — where people are drawn to offer something else entirely: their hopes and their prayers.
Roses, rosary beads and written intentions are regularly left behind by the pilgrim portion of the Grotto’s stream of tourists. They fill an open sarcophagus where the message “He is risen” offers assurances of sins forgiven, courage, and love eternal.
Father Dan Kirby from the Diocese of Des Moines took a trip to the Grotto earlier this month and gave thanks for Dobberstein’s “miracle” because of its unmistakable testimony regarding promises fulfilled.
“It’s a holy reminder that there is a God, that there is something beyond ourselves,” Kirby said. “That is a great reassurance.”
In 1992, a 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Dobberstein himself was erected behind his life’s work.
He’s holding a pickax in one hand and a rock in the other. The statue is a foot-and-a-half taller than the Grotto creator himself, and that is clearly as it should be.
As with Walt Disney’s impression many years ago, it takes little more than one look at the Grotto of the Redemption and Dobberstein’s 56-year legacy to understand that a 5-foot 6-inch priest could only be remembered in one way.