“This sanctuary must be like a beacon guiding souls toward their eternity. Mary is the Stella Matutina, the star that guides the mariners. May she be the guide of all Americans.”

— words of our venerable founder, Archbishop Lefebvre
September 8, 1989
(the full letter can be read here)

Transcript of the Video

[Bill Drew] Welcome back to the Immaculata Church Project here in St. Marys, Kansas. Today we are going to give you an update on the construction progress.

Over the past month our finishes continue. We have our stone flooring in the sanctuary 100% complete. The crossings in the transepts are being floored now. We have the wall cladding in the side chapels being installed. The painters are here touching up the final touches on all of the finishes on the walls. The trim carpenters are almost done, the guys doing the staining have shown up. We will have some casework in the sacristy being installed later this week. In the auxiliary spaces here, we are now in the cry room, the flooring is in. In another week or so they will be putting down flooring in the choir loft. We are still in finishes. We have probably a few more weeks of those. Now we are going turn it over to Father Rutledge and he is going talk about the exterior progress.

[Fr. Rutledge] So recently we had a very exciting event where we lifted up four of our exterior statues, the four statues that have already arrived here in the United States (from Italy). We are going to give you a little bit of an explanation, or more of an explanation, of why we chose each statue. We made some reference to which saints they were back in a previous video [November 1st 2021] but here I’d like to go into a little bit more detail so that you understand.

We are going to start out on our west façade where a statue of Christ the King was lifted up: it's Christ sitting in power, that is why He is seated, it shows His authority. And we chose Christ the King for that entrance because, well, it's like He is coming from the east, the whole idea of the church facing east, facing the sun, facing the direction where Christ is. So Christ facing west is coming from the east, and we wanted Him at that high pinnacle of this main façade because in a certain way His Kingship is what the Society (of St. Pius X) is all about; it's what the fight in the church is all about. Christ is King: He has rights over all of us and over souls.

You know there is a little summary of this fight, if I were to quote our venerable founder Archbishop Lefebvre when he met with the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1987, he said to him: “Eminence, you are working to dechristianize society and the Church, we are working to Christianized them. For us, Our Lord Jesus Christ is everything, He is our life. The church is our Lord Jesus Christ. The priest is another Christ. The Mass is the triumph of Jesus Christ on the cross. In our seminaries, everything tends towards the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

And so it is clear that for our founder that the whole fight is about this. And again it speaks a little bit too, to what we see on the inside of the church, as you know we have taken these themes from the Apocalypse in our sanctuary and up in the cupola; we chose that Book precisely because the Book of the Apocalypse is about the victory of the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over his enemies.

Now we are going to swing around to the north transept entrance. On both the north and the south transept entrances we have a niche at the high point, and those niche are directly underneath the statue of Our Lady. We chose two saints who kind of speak of Our Lady. So on the north side we put a statue of Saint Cyril of Alexandria, a patriarch of Alexandria from the fifth century, and a lot of people don't realize this but he was the great Father of the Church who defended Our Lady’s greatest title which is Mother of God, Theotokos as we say in Greek. So he defended her at the Council of Ephesus against the great heresiarch Nestorius. We chose the northside for Saint Cyril because there is a symbolism: the north often, liturgically, represents a region of darkness, of ignorance, or paganism, and so because Saint Cyril defended Our Lady’s great title of Mother of God against heretics we decided to have him there facing north as if to say to those who still don't believe in Our Lady’s greatness, here is a great saint who defended her title and who is calling them to understand her greatness and have devotion to her.

Then as we jump over to the south side, on the south entrance we lifted up a saint there who lived 1300 years after Saint Cyril of Alexandria. There we have St. Louis de Montfort and most of us are aware of him because a lot of us are consecrated to the Blessed Virgin Mary using his method and so that is why we have him facing south, facing town - if you will facing the parish, so to speak - and so many of us here in St. Marys and others who are consecrated to Our Lady according to St. Louis’ method feel a little bit more connection to him, because even our glorious patron Saint Pius X who wrote a beautiful encyclical on Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception called Ad diem illum uses the very language of St. Louis de Montfort where he says, “Since it is through Mary that we attain to the knowledge of Christ, through Mary also we most easily obtain that life of which Christ is the source in origin”. So we show St. Louis up in the niche, with this statue we show him with a full rosary in his hands as well as a booklet that says on it “ad Jesum, per Mariam” i.e. “to Jesus, through Mary”, that famous moto of St. Louis de Montfort. And again, it ties very much to the inside of the church, this battle of Our Lady, this final quote from St. Louis who sums everything up when he says, “God has never made and formed but one in enmity, but it is an irreconcilable one, one which will endure and grow even to the end. It is between Mary His heavenly Mother and the devil, between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the children and the tools of Lucifer. The most terrible of all the enemies which God has set up against the devil is His holy Mother Mary”.

And lastly we lifted up this beautiful 12-foot statue of Our Lady who is, you can see, completely wrapped in gold and stands there as a beacon, as a ‘beacon on the plains’, and here I can only make reference to what our venerable founder Archbishop Lefebvre said when the original Immaculata burnt down. You know, the only reason why he bought this campus was because of that church and its significance: its priestly significance, but also its significance as a center of devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary here in the heartland of the country. He says back in 1979 when he was encouraging souls to help rebuild this Immaculata, “I proposed that the Society of Saint Pius X participate universally in this restoration, that a collection be made everywhere for the restoration of the sanctuary which must be like a beacon guiding souls toward their eternity. Mary is the Stella Matutina, the star that guides the mariners. May she be the guide of all Americans”.

You can really see now that she's lifted up how she glistens and shines. It is such a joy of hope to drive up the street or walk in town and see her shining, even at night when we sense evil and darkness to see her lit up and to know that our Mother is there and that we have a responsibility to her too, to practice this devotion to her Immaculate Heart.

So this wraps up what we have for today. We will continue on, please pray continue to pray for the project. We are in our final stretch.

One thing, Father, that popped into my head when you were talking about the quotes from St. Louis de Montfort was I heard in a sermon once a priest mentioned this: God has two pictures of everyone of us - a picture of what we are, and a picture of what we should be. He has but one picture of Mary.