Behind the Scenes: September 2021 Update
Introducing “The Immaculata Spiritual Pilgrimage” to stir up within our souls a disposition making us worthier of entering this church being built for the Immaculata.
Watch a new behind the scenes video showing the onsite progress: nearing the goal of having the exterior completed by December; an in-floor heating system is starting to be laid to keep the building dry and warm this winter and start on the interior projects.
Welcome back to the Immaculata project here in Saint Mary's Kansas. I'm Fr. Patrick Rutledge, the rector here of Saint Mary’s Academy and College.
Having just passed two great feasts of Our Lady – of the Assumption and the Immaculate Heart – I’d like to share with you a few words of our venerable founder Archbishop Lefebvre, who spoke these words on the feast of the Assumption 42 years ago about the Immaculata.
“When I came to Saint Mary's College for the first time two years ago I was amazed and stupefied by the magnificence of the chapel, of the chapel dedicated to the Immaculata. And when those who were showing me around this magnificent chapel told me that it was a shrine venerated throughout America and particularly in this area I thought at once that if God permitted us to have this property, especially this chapel, we would make of it a center of pilgrimage, a center of devotion to the most Blessed Virgin Mary for all America. People would come from the north, south, east and west to this center which lies in the geographical center of America. So as to manifest their devotion to the most Blessed Virgin Mary and to discover at her feet the line of conduct to follow in this terrible period that the church is passing through today.”
And that's why I’d like to introduce you to a spiritual pilgrimage and invite you all to participate in this pilgrimage over the span of a year. As we wait for this home to be completed for Our Lady, we need to become worthy to enter into this shrine - and participate in a spiritual pilgrimage. From December the 8th of 2021, to December the 8th of 2022, I would like all who are part of this project or who would like to become a part of this project to participate in a Marian year, wherein we all try our best to grow in devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to grow in holiness.
We will give you a lot more practical information about all of this in coming weeks.
“I would like to invite you all to participate in this spiritual pilgrimage wherein we try to build an Immaculata in our souls.”
[Bill Drew] All right so in August we showed you the raising of the cupola on our last video and since then you can see a lot has changed. In the last video the whole transept was all steel we just had some masonry on this back section. Since then as you can see the masonry is complete on the back section, mostly complete on the north transept wall, the cast stone that we talked about in our cast stone stockyard, a lot of that's been installed, and they're pretty much done with that and they'll start working on the lower section next.
So as we walk to the west, as you can see the framing has been done on that north wall. We talked about the two side chapels, those are sheeted and waterproofing is done. You see the masonry work with the cast stone pieces are done on the upper level above the confessionals. The clerestory wall will soon be sheeted and masonry will follow.
So as you can see on the west side a lot of structural steel work has been done. Both towers have been totally erected; those are up 76 feet up to the belfry level. They still need to put together the belfries and set those on. You can see the service staircases are installed in both towers. The last time we looked at this end of the building we had the structural steel in the cry room and the choir loft but the slabs had not been poured yet and up to date those are poured. And we're going to go in and take a look at them.
Coming up to the cry room and choir loft levels you really get a sense for the scale and the size of this project. All the sheeting is on, and the steel studs, and the roof trusses.
Early on in the project planning we called people who take care of other similar sized Catholic churches and asked them what some of the challenges were. The main challenge that we came up with from all the people we called was heating, they said heating a space this large is very expensive if you want to keep the space at a comfortable temperature. With that information we decided to put in a radiant in-floor heating system, [to] keep that heat down by the faithful, and it's also a very efficient way of heating.
All right so this first year of construction our goal was, this is a two-year construction project, our goal was to get the ‘bones’ and the ‘skin’ of this building up. As you can see the ‘bones’ are up, all of our structural steel, all the infill is also part of those. The ‘skin’ is really the sheeting, the waterproofing, and the brick work. Our goal is by December to have this building dried in so we can heat this winter and start on the interiors. We are a little bit behind schedule so we do need to pray for some good weather for this project and that the workers work swiftly and safely.
All right I just wanted to show you one more thing before we head to the basement, this is the baptistry. You can see they've installed the lantern that we talked about that they were putting together in the last video on the floor. You can see the windows.
One space we haven't talked about yet in our video series is our basement, so I’d like to take you down there and show you that. All right this basement has 16-foot walls. If you're familiar with our campus, we have an auditorium, gym, and locker room complex. You could take that complex and put it in this space. This space is 27,750 square feet. It will contain a parish hall, the restrooms for the church, four catechism classrooms, a Sacred Heart League kitchen, Altar Society room for the Sisters to use for the altar linens, a full office suite in the back for the parish offices, meeting rooms, switchboard. This space down here is the entire parish life.
[climbing back upstairs] So here we are in the sanctuary. You can see there the cry room and the choir loft where we were before.
