The Meaning Of The Saints


In the 2001-2002 addition to the church of Saint Edward the Martyr and Saint Winefride's Garden there are thirty four wooden statues, carved by the famous artist, J. Chester "Skip" Armstrong, representing the saints who are patrons of the parishes of the Diocese of Baker.

Each is holding in his or her hands a model of the parish church in that town. These are caryatids or load-bearing statues which are the pillars holding up the church.

The statues are a physical representation of the Roman Catholicism doctrine that the universal church of Jesus Christ is composed of various "local churches," each led by a bishop, a successor of the apostles. These bishops form the Apostolic College, whose head is the successor of Saint Peter, the Bishop of Rome, the Pope.

This local church is a full and complete manifestation of the church of Christ in a specific place. It is alive in the people of God who compose it, and structured in various parishes and institutions. Catholic tradition has each of these parishes given a patron saint who guides, guards and inspires the community which bears his or her name.

The thirty four statues in Sisters show a church whose saints are real people. They are from Judea, Italy, America, France, Hungary, Ireland and other countries. They are old, young and in between. They are bishops, laity and clergy. And these saints are a tiny fraction of the thousands of regular men and women of every age and every part of the world who have been acknowledged as saints.

These saints are present in the parishes which bear their names. Saint Edward the Martyr is a real person who has died, gone to heaven, and whose spirit is now with this community in Sisters, Oregon. He and the other patron saints are an essential part of the local church which is the Diocese of Baker. There are many more church buildings in Eastern Oregon than those represented in the Sisters' carvings. Some of them are mission churches, some were once parishes and are now missions. There are other parishes and missions which have come and gone in history, for the story of the parishes of the Diocese of Baker is a living, constantly changing story. Three of the parishes are represented in the garden by pillars which could not be carved because of the waterfall.

There is only one church of Eastern Oregon and each parish is part of that one church. By celebrating and honoring the patrons of all the parishes, the people of Sisters hope to strengthen that one church and its many manifestations.