HOVEN | The year was 1917, and an ambitious Bavarian priest by the name of Anthony Helmbrecht asked the citizens of Hoven to band together.
The third and most recent church in the area had just fallen after a prairie windstorm, and Helmbrecht was not about to build another flimsy, white-picket church.
The harshness of the prairie called for something grand, a structure that would last. And he had a vision – a Romanesque revival of the cathedrals he knew as a child in Germany.
Of the 200 parish families Helmbrecht reached out to, about 70 stepped forward to help and to raise funds. It was with their efforts, and the work of the Bavarian artisans and architects he would later enlist, that a spiritual structure beyond that of an ordinary prairie church was completed in 1921.
It didn’t take long for the moniker “Cathedral of the Prairie” to adorn St. Anthony of Padua Church, whose twin spires rise 140 feet over the small town, the Capital Journal newspaper reported (http://bit.ly/117eta7 ).
The beautifully crafted house of worship can still be seen from miles away; but its Bavarian artistry can best be appreciated up close.
INSPIRED ON THE PLAINS
Helmbrecht hired architect and Bavarian immigrant Anton Dohmen of Milwaukee and contractor Anton Zwach of Dubuque, Iowa, to design the church. It’s actually a miniature replica of a 1,000-year-old cathedral in Ruhmannsfelden, Bavaria.
Father Kevin Doyle, current pastor at St. Anthony of Padua Church, said Helmbrecht likely knew of Dohmen from the churches he had previously designed, such as Ss. Peter and Paul Catholic Church of Strasburg, N.D., and St. Mary’s at Assumption Abbey in Richardton, N.D.
While St. Anthony’s displays many European designs, sprinkled throughout are references to the prairie – sunflowers at the tops of pillars and painted rabbits that can now scarcely be seen.
By 1922, about $500,000 had been spent on the project. It was a bizarre sum at the time, but the cathedral is now worth millions, as long as you exclude the Bavarian stained glass windows – those are priceless.
AN ACT OF LOVE
Father Doyle vividly remembers his first time entering the church and seeing the stained glass along the walls.
“You open that door, and it’s like moving from black and white into Technicolor,” he said.
Doyle said stained glass can often be overly blue in color and cold-feeling, but St. Anthony’s painted glass glows with warmth.
“When you walk into the church, it’s just all this vibrancy of colors – blue, red, gold, opalescence. When the sun goes through it and comes into the church, all of those colors are dancing.”
The 31 intricately detailed stained glass windows were crafted by Bavarian artisans and originally cost about $8,300 in total. The windows, which have since been polished, resealed and protected with Plexiglas, have been deemed priceless and irreplaceable by several scholars and experts.
German influence can be seen in many of the windows – quirks such as Joseph wearing a Bavarian hat in one scene or Joseph working rather than sleeping when he’s told by an angel to stay with Mary.
Doyle isn’t surprised that the artisans took creative liberties to portray “good German work ethic.”
“This culture is just oozing out of the windows,” he said. “This tradition has been passed on from one generation to the next. After World War II, that formula, that way of doing things, ended. They were the last generation to make this kind of stained glass window, this kind of art.”
The Bavarian artists found inspiration in the community as well. They modeled several stained glass portraits after Hoven residents. One even features a young Helmbrecht.
“Here you have the priest who built the church immortalized in the window itself,” Doyle said. “You can tell just by the quality of the windows that the Bavarians gave (Helmbrecht) that much more. This was more of an act of love for the sake of their craft versus just putting some stained glass windows in some church.”
BUILT BY THE PEOPLE
As it stands, the “Cathedral of the Prairie” has survived the test of time as Helmbrecht hoped. But that’s not due to superior design.
The church underwent major restorations beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, and without the 20,000 hours of local volunteer work, the interior would no longer be adorned with hundreds of ornately stenciled designs and gold leafing.
It would be peeling and covered in soot. And if the community had taken the advice of contractors, it would have been painted completely white – every spec of history wiped clean.
Hardworking residents of Hoven like Jan Seurer weren’t about to let that happen. So Seurer and many others took on jobs like scrubbing away soot, constructing scaffolding, stenciling and plastering.
“It’s always cracking and shifting,” Seurer said. “It’s such a massive building that through our cold winters and the warm of the summer, it shifts and moves.”
Most of the “marble” seen in the building is actually plastered, and Seurer has become an expert in the art. She’s even experimented with plaster and oils to achieve the illusive “boiling marble” look the Bavarian artisans created.
“I’ve got a dozen different boards downstairs just to keep experimenting until I get as close as I possibly can. That’s about all I can do,” she said.
Seurer has spent countless hours restoring the pillars, fixing the Stations of the Cross and working on statues. She hopes to begin adding more varnish to the plastered pillars soon.
Her work is never really done, because St. Anthony’s relies on its presentation to attract tourists, who come from all over the globe to see Hoven’s Cathedral of the Prairie.