Our Austin Story

This Saturday morning, December 9, I will be leading a tour of Saint Mary Cathedral from 1-3 PM. There is no charge, and the tour is open to the public. We will meet on the front steps of the cathedral. Saint Mary Cathedral is located at the corner of 10th and Brazos, a short walk from the state capitol.

Yesterday, with 10th Street closed in front of Saint Mary, children let out of school to watch history being made, and bystanders stopping by to check out the activity, Saint Michael slowly (very, very slowly) made his way to his home on the Saint Mary Cathedral bell tower. The installation process itself took several hours, and I found every minute to be fascinating.

Thanks to Deacon Guadalupe Rodriguez and Larry Scheckler for being the alpha and omega for this project. Deacon Guadalupe began this process by noticing that the original Nicholas Clayton 1907 design drawings of the bell tower showed a Saint Michael on this octagonal platform, and to the sculptor Larry Scheckler, who released Saint Michael from a 4-ton block of limestone (the finished sculpture weighs around one ton).

Saint Mary Cathedral is now complete, 116 years after Nicholas Clayton returned to design the bell tower and anticipated that we might need the intervention of Saint Michael long after his passing.

Familia Sagrada in Barcelona is a familiar story. The church has been under contruction for over a century. Let me let you in on a secret about the Catholic Church. To work on a church for centuries is hardly the exception.

Construction began on Familia Sagrada in 1882, a year when Saint Mary's Cathedral in Austin was nearing completion. On Easter Sunday, 1884, Austin celebrated the dedication of one of its first great buildings (and one of the few that remain).

However, the church in 1884 was not finished. Saint Mary's neo-Gothic revival towers and spires were completed in 1907, thirty years after the original dedication of the church.

Flash forward to today. A number of year's ago, Deacon Guadalupe Rodriguez (who remains my favorite deacon), looking over Architect Nicholas Clayton's original 1907 design drawings for the church, noticed a detail that had been overlooked for a century. Well up the bell tower there is a small octagonal platform, where Clayton had planned for a statue of Saint Michael the Archangel.

The platform had remain empty for a century.

Soon after that original discovery, Deacon Gaudalupe contacted a number of us about the need to finish the church with a statue of Saint Michael. That task has taken years to complete, and this morning Father Daniel Liu blessed the statue that is going to be lifted up to that platform tomorrow morning.

We now have two statues of Saint Michael at the Cathedral. One is a contemplative statue placed in the garden behind the church. Found to be too large to fit the platform, we moved onto Plan B while still loving the result of Plan A.

Tomorrow morning the result of Plan B, a Saint Michael, carved from limestone from the same quarry as the Cathedral, will be lifted into place. This morning, Father Daniel blessed the new statue. I will be there tomorrow to photograph that lifting of the statue and the completion of the Austin version of Sagrada Familia.

Thanks to Deacon Guadalupe, Father Daniel Liu, and all of the volunteers and donors that have made this possible. I will post additional information tomorrow at the installation about the sculptor. My fellow Catholics will notice that this is not the waifish St. Michael often seen in paintings. Pray that the platform is still as substantial as the statue.

God bless.

Ted

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