Vigils Reading – Louisville Cathedral

THE CATHEDRAL OF THE ASSUMPTION3 ◊◊◊

Catholics were a small and scattered lot in the earliest days after Louisville’s founding in 1778… The roots of the first real Catholic congregation can be traced to about 1805 when the small Catholic community of Louisville was served by regular priestly visits from Father Stephen Badin, the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States. Badin and other clerics came up from “the Kentucky Holy Land” to minister to that primal congregation that was to become the Cathedral of the Assumption. The congregation got its first building in 1811 on Tenth Street, between Main Street and the Ohio River. The name St. Louis was adopted for the parish, commemorating the saintly King Louis IX of France. But presumably the name of Louis was also a reference to Louisville’s own naming in honor of France’s Louis XVI, for the aid he rendered to the American Revolution…

When the seat of the Bardstown diocese was transferred to Louisville in 1841, St. Louis became the new cathedral, and Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget took up his residence next door. Perhaps his last public act was his blessing of the cornerstone for a new structure, today’s Cathedral of the Assumption, on August 15, 1849. Because that was the Feast of the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption, that name was affixed to the Cathedral that had been known under the patronage of Saint Louis… The new American Gothic structure… was dedicated October 3, 1852, with eight bishops and the first American cardinal present.

The Cathedral parish immediately began to function. It established the St. Vincent de Paul Society for relief of the poor in 1853…

At heart, the Cathedral of the Assumption retains its identity as a vital, truly Catholic community of faith <and> has marched into the third millennium with renewed hope and promise