Building a Home Worthy of The Immaculata

The largest SSPX church ever built is unveiled, Archbishop Lefebvre speaks in English about his hopes for St. Mary’s, and rare historical footage of St. Mary’s is shown. Help build the Immaculata by donating at anewimmaculata....
Copyright © 2019 - Immaculata Church Project, SSPX of St. Marys Kansas, SSPX, Angelus Press
-- transcript --
Many people know St. Mary’s. This place, in the center of America, was a good place to continue the Church, Catholic Church. To maintain the true doctrine and the true faith and the sacrifice of the Mass.
My dear brethren, you come from, sometimes, very far to live here in St. Mary’s with the hope that your children receive a good and true Catholic formation.
Anybody who comes to St. Marys was just refreshed at what a spirit of Tradition that is held here.
It’s a place of profound spiritual significance.
The first I heard about the Immaculata burning down was in the late 80’s.
This is going to be the biggest church that the Society of St. Pius X has ever built.
()
In 1978 when the Society of St. Pius X acquired St. Mary's there were no parishioners who lived here. As the years went on, the Society grew more and more; more and more people moved to St. Mary's putting their children in the Academy, and attending the parish. Such that 40 years later we have over 4,000 souls who attend Mass here.
My name is Fr. Patrick Rutledge, I’m the Rector here in St. Marys, KS.
Currently in St. Mary's Sunday's are very chaotic. There's limited seating in our small chapel which was an old refectory for the Jesuits. The faithful come to Mass - they’re in traffic on Mission Street, trying to get in to parking, they finally find a parking spot they walk into Mass, and lo and behold there's only standing room. The priests come out of the sacristy to try and go give Communions. They’re stepping over the faithful to try to get to the sanctuary. Lines of faithful are there just simply trying to have space to pray there Mass.
Just in the last year we've even had to move one of our six Sunday Masses into our Auditorium just simply so that we would have enough space for the faithful to attend their Sunday Mass.
St. Mary's has grown by Providence, by her desire, and now it's time to build her church.
So this current project effort actually began in conjunction with a Master Plan study of the Academic Campus, to look at long term needs of both the parish and the Academy. And it was quickly determined that the size of Church needed to serve the size of the parish community today, would really squeeze the campus and impact it in negative ways.
We decided to build the Immaculata our parish church up near our cemetery.
The site was also selected so that it could allow adequate room for proper layout and planning to provide not only for a very large church structure but all of the approximate parking.
So the new church has been sited on an east-west axis to follow the tradition of siting our churches that the altar faces east into the rising sun.
So the style the overall style that we would say the church is being designed in is the is a Romanesque Revival style - meaning that we're referencing those churches of medieval Europe in the the perhaps 9th to 14th centuries.
The church is laid out in a very traditional Latin-cross plan.
The building itself, its key exterior features would be the twin bell towers that flanked the front façade, as well as the cupola over the crossing of the Latin cross plan which would be crowned by a statue of Our Lady.
The church exterior will be of mostly masonry construction with a couple colors of brick as the main material with an ample amount of stone accent detailing.
In front of that front facade of the church we have a large plaza to help gather the faithful before and after Mass.
Once you would pass from the porch through the front doors will come into the narthex of the church.
You'll be able to see down the central aisle clear to the sanctuary. As you move down the nave to each of your side's there are side aisles that are divided and screened from the central nave by an arcade carried on a row of Corinthian columns.
For the design of the interior of the church we drew inspiration from several of the major station churches of Rome - such as St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Santa Maria Maggiore.
Going to Rome and going to these older and grander churches I found that it does stir the soul, it does inspire you further in a way that you don't get in a simpler church.
The sanctuary is surrounded by a colonnaded ambulatory and flanking each side of the sanctuary then will be two major side chapels - one dedicated to St. Pius X and the other to the Sacred Heart.
The new church as it's designed to date seats 1,550 people. In order to do that comfortably the church is very large - the main floor level of the church alone is 30,000 square feet, which to give one a sense of that if you're familiar with the current...