Behind the Scenes: August 2021 Update
A first glimpse of the statue of the Immaculata which will be placed atop the cupola and more...
Watch an explanation of what took place onsite behind the scenes in order to install the cupola last month at The Immaculata Project site.
Here we are on site almost exactly a year after equipment showed up on site, and today we just lifted the cupola up which is a significant moment because the cupola of the Immaculata forms the pedestal for the statue of Our Lady.
Welcome back to the Immaculata Church Project here in St. Mary's, Kansas. Today behind me you can see a 550-ton crane that we brought in special to pick up our cupola top and place that tomorrow. Let's go check out the crane. That's a 550-ton GMK 7550; this thing with the jib on it reaches 197 feet high and it weighs about 250,000 pounds. We brought this crane in for one purpose: it is to pick the cupola roof and set it on [the Immaculata]. It takes about a day to set a machine like this up. It took seven semi [trucks] worth of parts, another crane to put it together, and a crew of about seven men. On the back side here, all the counterweight to balance this pick for this 33,000 pound roof. Early tomorrow morning they will pick it up with the crane, the crane will turn and hover over the cupola, he'll set it down and basically pin it together.
Well, it's Tuesday morning. As you can see the crane is set up and ready to go. The steel crews are staging their equipment right now. There are going be four lifts, one on each corner of the side transept and one man basket in the middle.
[Construction crew preparation – talking in background.]
Really to understand the significance of lifting the cap of the cupola today, you really need to understand a little bit of the history of this town and the work the Jesuits did with the Potawatomi Indians. Father Verreydt, the priest who founded Saint Mary's in 1848 was afraid that the work of the Jesuits amongst the Indians would eventually fail as so many of the other missions had, and so he asked his Superior General for advice, Father Roothaan, who told him: ‘Father, name the town, name that location you moved to with the Indians after Our Lady and established devotion to her Immaculate Heart there, and the work would last.’ So Father Verreydt named this town, this very place after Our Lady; it is named Saint Mary's.
Because of that the work of the Catholic Church here has remained even continuing on with the Society of Saint Pius X now, and that's why we decided to build this cupola on the church. We wanted some aspect of the church, of the Immaculata that would be very iconic. And so we'll place a statue of Our Lady there at the height of over a hundred feet above the ground with the statue of Our Lady facing her town, this town that she has protected for over 150 years.
[Construction crew preparation - talking in background.]
So as we now have the cupola finally capped, we've been doing a lot of work to determine which statue will actually go up there. We have talked to a number of statue-making companies and we feel we're getting close to a decision as to what the statue will look like. The statue will be 12 feet tall and already from so many directions you can see the cupola from miles away, sometimes as far as even 16 miles away, so we really wanted this cupola and the statue of Our Lady to be one of the most iconic aspects of the Immaculata. The same company who has done the artistic work for the interior has advised us on a fitting statute that would go on the outside as well. And so the statute of Our Lady will probably look something like this: very maternal. But we didn't want her just to be - she can't be made just out of marble and we also wanted her to be something more special than just a light color because you can see her from all around, especially at night when there will be up lights shining on her, we would like to guild the statue of Our Lady and she'll probably look something like this.
Not only did Archbishop Lefebvre want to rebuild the Immaculata because of the priestly significance but he also saw this church as something very important for devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. He refers to her in his letter from the 1980’s asking for this church to be rebuilt, he refers to Our Lady as the ‘Stella Matutina’ or as ‘The Morning Star’ that is a sign of hope. We hope that it'll really be a beacon on the plains here; the star of the morning that will guide souls and be a comfort to souls who can see her from miles all around and know that they have a mother in heaven who watches over them.
