Cathedral Centennial
On cathedral anniversary, archbishop asks faithful to be ‘edifices of faith and witness’
The Cathedral of St. Paul commemorated the 100th anniversary of its first Mass March 29 at a 10 a.m. Palm Sunday liturgy celebrated by Archbishop John Nienstedt.
First cathedral carving, Bishop Cretin’s letter among archivist’s favorite finds
Every morning, Celeste Raspanti walks through the Cathedral of St. Paul’s “secret door.”
The brown slab of metal is not visible from the street or even the sidewalk marking the perimeter of the grand edifice.
Situated near the northeast corner of the church, it leads to the balcony of Msgr. Ambrose Hayden Hall, where decades of cathedral history are stashed in dozens of cardboard boxes that Raspanti works feverishly to sort and organize.
Cathedral Centennial
A century has passed since the cathedral’s first Mass, a road mark toward the monument’s completion and affirmation for Catholics who sacrificed to build it
Masqueray’s masterpiece
According to local historian Alan Lathrop’s 1980 profile of Emmanuel Louis Masqueray for Minnesota History magazine, the architect was “virtually unknown” in 1904, at the time Archbishop John Ireland commissioned the 43-year-old to design the Cathedral of St. Paul.
A look back in time
Barren walls. A silent eucharistic prayer. Hats, lots of them.
This would have been the scene for the first Masses at the Cathedral of St. Paul starting on that Palm Sunday in 1915.
The visual changes within the cathedral — and the people who worship there — mirror the last century’s changes in the liturgy.
Local historian says cathedral from ‘age of heroic architecture’
Local historian Larry Millett isn’t an expert on the Cathedral of St. Paul, but as a longtime researcher of the Twin Cities’ architectural landscape, he can’t help but run into it, he said. As anyone driving West on Interstate 94 into St. Paul knows, that domed building overlooking downtown “is pretty hard to ignore,” Millett said.
First-person memory of the first Mass at the cathedral
“I can still see Archbishop John Ireland at the altar, beaming with joy. . . . On that morning the cathedral was hardly more than a shell. Only the wall and the dome had been erected. The walls were completed, in a sense, but the bare bricks that composed them were exposed on the inside.”
Sound issue mars cathedral’s first days
“The great problem was of course the acoustic of the cathedral. Rather discouraging reports were given out on every hand.”
Ahead of Mass, unfair criticism, but real problems
An anecdote that a Chicago newspaper called the project “Ireland’s Folly” could not be verified, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it were true.
Rector: Preserving, celebrating cathedral honors its legacy
As a child growing up in St. Paul, Father John Ubel recalls confusing the Cathedral of St. Paul with the Minnesota State Capitol. His mother would gently remind him that the cathedral had the green dome, and the Capitol was white. Decades later, he is rector of the cathedral — the dome of which has been restored to dark copper — as it celebrates 100 years since its first Mass in 1915.
‘It is your home’
John McCormack was better suited than most to judge the countenance of Archbishop John Ireland 100 years ago on March 28 when thousands came to attend the first Mass at the informal opening of the fourth and current Cathedral of St. Paul.
As the McCormack of Clark & McCormack, the company that provided the granite for the cathedral, he would have had many opportunities to be with the St. Paul archbishop during the near decade of planning and construction of the “new cathedral” on the brow of what St. Paulites then called St. Anthony Hill.
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