Looking around at the life-sized sculptures, 8-year-old Xavier McKeown, from Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, was impressed. 

“It’s really cool how the artist made everything so big and detailed,” he observed. 

Welcome to Reflection Park.

McKeown was there with his mother and three younger siblings the day the Register visited. “My family prays the Rosary every day during May and October,” he said. “It brings the Sorrowful Mysteries to life like you are walking with Jesus.”

After driving for miles on country roads alongside wide open fields, a 34-foot bronze crucifix at the intersection of County Highway 19 and Highway 5 comes into view. It is 4 miles outside the small town of Vesta, Minnesota, and 130 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Most travelers are on their way to somewhere else. 

Many pull in, curious or attracted by the power of the image. But more and more people arrive intentionally as word spreads. 

The park is the creation of Michael Dolan. He began the project in 2016 when he had the large crucifix commissioned and erected on the edge of a field on his 640-acre farm. He grew up in the area but now lives half the year in Minneapolis and half in Arizona. His brother Kenny immediately began tending to it, ultimately building a walkway and two parking lots and beautifying the area with flower gardens, lawn, trees, benches and a picnic table. 

Bishop John LeVoir of the New Ulm Diocese came out to dedicate it. Michael eventually added four more 20-foot sculptures representing the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary: Agony in the Garden, Scourging at the Pillar, Crowning With Thorns, Carrying the Cross and the Crucifixion.

Crucifix at the Center

Walking around the park, Michael and Kenny shared the story of Reflection Park with the Register. “The inspiration came from my grandparents,” Michael explained. “Four miles down the road is a monument they erected where the first Catholic church for this whole area once stood. We grew up on a farm with 13 children. I went into finance and the consulting business and rented out my land to a brother, and now two nephews farm it.”

Michael shared that he likes to watch the movie The Passion of the Christ on Good Friday, noting that it is a powerful testimony of God’s love for us. That love inspired him to erect a crucifix on his land for passersby to see and perhaps reflect before it. 

But he didn’t want a typical cemetery crucifix. 

He and wife Cecelia were driving back after wintering in Arizona, headed to Minneapolis, in 2015 when they saw the 45-foot crucifix that is part of the Holy Family Shrine in Gretna, Nebraska. “My wife pointed to the top of the hill and said, ‘There it is!’ We turned in for a closer look and tracked down the artist, Michael Montag, who lives in Omaha.”

Michael commissioned Montag to do a similar crucifix to put on his farmland. The plan was just for the crucifix, but as it drew people in, Michael liked the idea of portraying the Sorrowful Mysteries. He worked his way backwards from the Crucifixion, with the next one being the Carrying of the Cross. 

The Artist

Michael Montag specializes in life-size and heroic-scale sculptures that are displayed in shrines regionally and around the world, including in Dodoma, Tanzania; Rome; and Calgary, Canada. 

“The embodiment of all meaning and purpose in life is found in our faith,” Montag said. “It’s the great why of my art. It’s like the hidden basement window to the interior spiritual castle, unguarded so as to reach directly into hearts. It reaches the human condition in a way that other evangelical tools cannot.”

The two Michaels agreed on a 7-foot, cast bronze, life-like corpus placed on a hard-edged, abstract stainless-steel cross. 

“He wanted something that would draw people in,” Montag recalled to the Register. “The bronze speaks of tradition and unchanging truth, and the stainless steel represents our modern age.” The height was to be 34 feet, a foot under local height restrictions due to crop dusting.

The entire project took seven years, with each piece taking around a year. Montag already had molds that he modified for the crucifix and put together a team of welders. 

“Something on such a large scale becomes the work of many hands,” he explained. The other pieces were created from scratch. The only instruction that Michael Dolan insisted on was that the face of each sculpture look the same, to be recognized immediately as Jesus in each image. 

“I am humbled and honored to be a part of this gift to the community and to the world,” Montag said. “God brought us together so that we could complement each other in our skills and vision. He put us on this earth to proclaim the Gospel, and this is one of the ways. I like to think that we’ve left behind something that will outlast us.” 

If You Build It, They Will Come

Montag and his wife Joy personally delivered each piece. 

The park is now complete for the Dolans. Mike is 77 and married Cecelia later in life and they have no children. Kenny, 79, a widower, retired from farming and has two children, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He comes out daily in the warmer months from his home in nearby Marshall, acting as both a greeter and caretaker. 

“When the second sculpture arrived of Jesus carrying the cross, I had started putting rocks around it,” Kenny recalled. “A couple originally from Guatemala stopped by on their trip to Minneapolis from Sioux Falls with their two girls, ages 12 and 10. They offered to help and worked with me the whole afternoon. I was amazed at how much they did.”

“Every year I add flowers and pine trees and made a stand for a case with a plastic cover for a guest book to protect it from the weather,” Kenny added, noting guests have filled two books and started on a third. One man wrote in the guest book that he was struggling with being the husband he should be and asked God to help him. A year later, he wrote that he was doing better and going to Reflection Park was helping him to do that. 

Kenny keeps postcard-size cards with images of the sculptures as a memento for people to take home with them.

“We’ve had people from around 35 to 40 states and 17 different countries,” Kenny explained. “Last year, after WCCO, the CBS station, came out to interview me, visitors came every day, all day long.” 

“I love working here,” he said. “Part of my business is talking to people and explaining the park to them. They will thank me for doing all the work — that’s inspiring for me. I will sit down once in a while and pray a Rosary and join with others praying. Groups will come out in individual cars and sometimes in busloads. A couple of times, a Lutheran church had sunrise Sunday services out here. And, once, a pilot of a small plane landed and got out to walk around.”

‘Gazing on the Suffering Jesus’

“When I see people sitting at the table eating lunch, often by themselves, I think, ‘Yeah, that’s what it’s all about,’” Michael Dolan said. “It’s a place to reflect and think about what is important in life and put things in perspective. By gazing on the suffering of Jesus, there’s the message that there’s Someone else in the world who can get me through this, whatever that is.”

Annette Rohlik and her husband Mike, of the nearby town of Lucan, have arranged on several occasions for six Catholic parishes in the area to gather at Reflection Park for the Rosary. “It’s a wonderful place of prayer,” Annette said. “I’ve also stopped on my own to sit there and enjoy the solitude. I’ve taken visitors out there, too.” 

“It’s a place of peace,” Mike added. “It attracts people who don’t know they are going to get attracted. They pull in and stand there and pray. That is God at work.”