Basilica of St. Josaphat

By the 1890s the Polish immigrants of Milwaukee’s south side had outgrown their church. Their pastor, Father Wilhelm Grutza, found an unusual source of building material. The old Chicago Post Office and Custom House was being demolished, and he bought it for salvage. Five hundred railway cars carried its stone, columns and ironwork to Milwaukee. Parishioners did much of the building themselves, to a design modelled on Saint Peter’s in Rome, and the church was dedicated in 1901.

Its copper dome, one of the largest in the world when it was built, rises above the neighbourhood. Inside, the dome and walls were painted and decorated in the 1920s, with Polish saints alongside the great saints of the Church.

In 1929 Pope Pius XI made it a minor basilica, the third in the United States. The church is dedicated to Saint Josaphat Kuntsevych, a seventeenth-century archbishop and martyr for Church unity. A careful restoration has returned its interior to its full splendour.

Built

1896–1901

Style

Renaissance Revival

Where

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States

Map

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