NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
In 1912, William Jennings Bryan traveled to Victoria, Kansas. As he approached the remote farming community, the first thing he spied was St. Fidelis Catholic Church. Larger and more impressive than many of America’s grandest cathedrals, the limestone Romanesque church rose up from the Kansas prairie, dwarfing all that surrounded it. Awestruck, Jennings dubbed St. Fidelis “The Cathedral of the Plains.”
The story behind that unlikely “cathedral” began in the 18th century, when Catherine the Great invited European farmers to immigrate to Russia. In exchange for introducing new agricultural methods, she promised cultural and political autonomy. A group of German Catholic peasants accepted her offer and moved to Russia, settling along the Volga River.
A century later, when the Russian czars began reneging on Catherine’s promises, many Volga Germans left for America. One group arrived near Victoria, Kansas, in 1876. Although the -area’s original British settlers struggled to farm the Kansas prairie, the Germans found the conditions similar to what they’d known in Russia. Soon, hundreds more Volga Germans joined them.
When they first arrived, despite limited resources, the Catholic community constructed a small church. Within a few years, they outgrew it and built another. History repeated itself twice more before 1900, when the parish began planning for a grand new church building that could seat up to 1,200 -people—approximately the community’s entire population, then and now.
In 1905, St. Fidelis’ Pittsburgh-based architect completed his designs, and every man in the parish over the age of 12 was assessed $45 per annum, an enormous sum for Kansan farmers at the time. Every man was also required to haul six loads of stone and four loads of sand each year until construction ended. But not one parishioner protested. For them, little mattered more than their church.
On October 4, 1909, the parish laid the cornerstone for St. Fidelis Catholic Church. Only two years later, they celebrated the dedication Mass.
Dubbed “one of the eight wonders of Kansas,” The Cathedral of the Plains became a minor basilica in February 2014.
