St. Fidelis Church, Victoria, Kansas.
Wichita Eagle:
The rose window is one of the stained-glass windows of St. Fidelis
Catholic Church that has beenundergoing restoration since August. (Travis Heying/Wichita Eagle)
A little history of the church:St. Fidelis Catholic Church in Victoria is one of the most iconic buildings in Kansas, with twin towers soaring 140 feet above the plains and featuring exquisite stained-glass windows.Most people know it as the Cathedral of the Plains, a nickname bestowed by former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan after he visited the town in 1912, shortly after the church was dedicated.
Now the church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, is getting a new look.
The church has undertaken a $155,000 project to protect its 48 historic stained-glass windows. Installed in 1916 by Munich Studios in Chicago at a cost of $3,700, the windows are now valued at more than $1 million.
Members of the rural church, which serves 480 families, are paying for the project through donations and fundraising projects.
Built by Volga Germans who settled the area in the late 19th century, St. Fidelis was actually their fourth church. The parishioners kept quickly outgrowing each previous church.More on the Volga Germans here. As the article points out, it is amazing how much the immigrant communities sunk into their churches, when they were struggling to get by as it was. I've stopped by the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier in Dyersville, Iowa, and have toured many of the churches in West Central Ohio, and went to numerous masses at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, and each of these places is amazing, especially considering when they were constructed. That they were built by immigrants on the margins of their society is all the more impressive.
Fashioned in the Romanesque style, the current church was built to last by the parishioners themselves using local hand-quarried stone. They used block-and-tackle and wood scaffoldings to hoist and place the stone.
“I think when people come here, they are most impressed by those Volga German farmers who could mostly with their own labor and with no machinery of any kind – with just themselves and horses – could construct an edifice of this nature without very much help,” Windholz said.
“When you look at how high those towers go, you have to ask, ‘Who would dare to go up there and lay stone?’ ”
According to the church history, each member of the church who was 12 or older was asked to give $45 a year and six wagonloads of stone to help construct the building. Some families brought as many as 70 to 80 wagonloads of stone.
When it was dedicated in 1911, it was considered the largest church west of the Mississippi River.
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