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Catholic parish of the southeast side · founded 1947 · 4643 Gaywood Drive · a personal parish for the Traditional Latin Mass since 2011 · active, November 2026
Founding: Sacred Heart was a parish of the postwar building boom. Ralph L. Shirmeyer donated six acres at Gaywood Drive and Capitol Avenue, and Archbishop John Francis Noll assigned Father Fred Westendorf, just returned from Army chaplain service, to build the parish on it. His successor, Father Thomas Durkin, celebrated the first Mass on the site at midnight on Christmas Day 1948. A rectory was bought in 1948, and the school was established in 1949, staffed in turn by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, the Sisters of St. Joseph, and the Sisters of Providence; the sisters left in 1975 and the convent was sold.
Building line: The first church was a building of the war itself: a former hospital ward barracks moved from Baer Field. When the present church — designed by a parishioner, the architect James McCarron Sr., and seating 660 — was ready, the old barracks church was burned in May 1963 to clear the site, and the first Mass in the new church was celebrated on Christmas Day 1963, Father Andrew C. Mathieu being pastor. The parish's Stations of the Cross came from a closed Slovak parish. In the 1990s its school combined with those of St. Henry's and St. Patrick's into the short-lived Benoit Academy at the St. Henry campus.
Present state: Active, and singular in the diocese. From 1990 Bishop D'Arcy permitted the Traditional Latin Mass at Sacred Heart; the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter has staffed the parish since 2008, and in 2011 Bishop Rhoades made it a personal parish — non-territorial, dedicated exclusively to the traditional Mass. Father Mark Wojdelski, FSSP, was its pastor at its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2022.
Sources:
- Today's Catholic, Sacred Heart parish histories, 14 March 2017 and 20 September 2022 (founding, buildings, the Latin Mass, the FSSP).
- Diocese of Fort Wayne parish list (RootsWeb transcription): "Sacred Heart Catholic Church [Est. 1947]."