A Catholic congregation in the heart of the city is pushing forward with an ambitious plan to restore the German neo-Gothic building that’s been called “the Cathedral of South St. Louis.”
St. Francis de Sales is one of just two oratories in the Archdiocese of St. Louis that celebrates the Latin mass. It worships inside the stunning 1867 edifice, sometimes called “the Cathedral of South St. Louis.” Its spire is 300 feet high—the tallest in the Midwest and sixth tallest in the U.S. It’s located in the up-and-coming Fox Park neighborhood, which suffered years of neglect but is now seeing a wave of young home buyers drawn to the stately old homes and walkable streets.
“This church here, it’s really a landmark, but most people in St. Louis don’t even know about it,” says its rector, the Rev. Canon Benjamin Coggeshall. That’s perhaps because it’s on a singularly unlovely stretch of Gravois, or perhaps because it was empty for a time: The parish that was located on site closed in 2005, and originally the archdiocese sought to reopen it as a ministry focused on Hispanics. Those plans never came to fruition, and the oratory focused on the Latin mass instead opened not long after.
St. Francis de Sales now counts 5,000 members from across the region and now consistently draws 700 to 800 people to mass every Sunday—more than double what it did five years ago…