Father Eugene Engels
St. John the Evangelist Church
Plaquemine, La.

I had to decipher all of the windows because Emile Frei is long dead and his studio in St. Louis burned, and with it went all records of what the windows here at St. John are about. We do now have all of the windows deciphered except for one panel that is a coat of arms, and another panel in the first window on the west side of the church. I felt that we should try to decipher the windows because stained glass was originally put in churches as a teaching device. Its the way people were taught bible stories and they could remember them because they had seen them in color.

To do the windows like we have here at St. John the Evangelist and also those at Sacred Heart in Baton Rouge and possibly the windows at St. Joseph in Thibodeaux, Emile Frei must have been profoundly versed in scripture. However I suspect that he had total artistic freedom, because some of the things in the windows are perhaps not so theologically or scripturally accurate. They might even be called a bit far-fetched. For one thing, [although] there's an example of this, there's a window in the west wall, and those windows are generally much more abstract than those in the eastern wall; but one of these western pictures shows St. John the Evangelist sitting in a pot of oil with fire under it. Now this comes from a legend which has no scriptural basis. What we do know historically was that St. John the Evangelist was the only one of the twelve apostles who did not die a martyr's death, he died as an old man, in his own bed, in ephasis. But there is a legend that at one point he was being going to be put to death by being boiled alive in oil and an angel rescued him from the pot of oil. That is portrayed in this window. Although it may not be historically correct it is a very old and venerable legend.