Knight makes pilgrimage to Big Mountain statue
<p>John Moore leaves St. Matthew’s Church on Wednesday morning for his trek to Big Mountain.</p>
A member of the Knights of Columbus from Gallup, N.M., was in the Flathead Valley Wednesday making a pilgrimage hike from Kalispell to the Big Mountain Jesus statue.
John Moore left St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Kalispell at 6:10 a.m. carrying a hand-crafted cross with the expectation of arriving at his destination at around 4 p.m.
It is Moore’s seventh pilgrimage this year and his second in the last two weeks. He walked to the Lady of the Rockies above Butte last week.
Wednesday’s pilgrimage is in honor of veterans, particularly 10th Mountain Division veterans “who were the driving force behind the statue being put up on the Big Mountain back in 1953,” according to a press release from the Kalispell Council of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization.
The statue is the focus of a lawsuit filed by a Wisconsin-based group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims the statue violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause because it is located on a small leased parcel of Flathead National Forest land.
The Forest Service is defending the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Missoula, with the Knights of Columbus, Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., and the American Center for Law and Justice also involved in the case.
A trial is scheduled to begin in March 2013 before U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen.