St. Mary Mother of God: the German Catholic parish

Created 29 November 1848 — the first German-speaking church in the area

The procession: The German Catholics of St. Augustine's wanted the Gospel preached in their own language. In 1848 thirty German families bought lots at the present corner of Lafayette Street and Jefferson Boulevard for 1,700 dollars — five of the chartering families mortgaged their farms for the endeavour — and on 29 November 1848 they marched in formal procession from St. Augustine's to their new Mother of God Church, a frame building 32 by 64 feet, after the missionary F. X. Weninger had preached a week's mission to them. Cholera had interrupted the building that August. Some reference works date the parish's creation to 1849 — the year the little church entered full service; the parish's own jubilee proclamation fixes 29 November 1848, and that date is carried here.

Fire, explosion, fire: No Fort Wayne congregation has rebuilt so often. A larger brick church, built from 1858, was dedicated by Bishop Luers on the second Sunday of November 1859 (the parish proclamation says 2 November 1859), and the old frame church became the school. On 13 January 1886 the church boiler exploded, destroying the building and killing the custodian, Anton Evans, and a young passerby. A third church — a red brick and sandstone Gothic Revival landmark — was dedicated on 11 December 1887, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, and struck by lightning and burned on 2 September 1993; it was delisted that year. The present church, the fourth on the site at 1101 South Lafayette Street, was dedicated on 2 May 1999. Since 22 January 1975 the parish has run its soup kitchen without interruption, and its 175th jubilee ran through 2023. The parish's own historians note the arc plainly: founded as the German church, it survived by turning, under Father Ralph Larson in the 1960s, to the changing neighbourhood around it.

Sources:

1. St. Mary Mother of God parish, "175th Jubilee Proclamation" (1 January 2023) and parish history pages (stmarysfw.org) — the 1848 procession, the 1859 dedication, the 1886 explosion, the 1887 church, the 1999 dedication.
2. Charles Blanchard, ed., History of the Catholic Church in Indiana, vol. I (1898) — the thirty families, the 1,700 dollars, the November 1849 completion and Weninger's mission.
3. Today's Catholic, "30 Years Later: Remembering the Fire at St. Mary" (5 September 2023), quoting the News-Sentinel (2013) — the 1993 fire, the first church's dimensions.
4. "St. Mary's Catholic Church (Fort Wayne, Indiana)," Wikipedia — the 1886–87 church, NRHP listing 1984 and delisting 1993, the 1999 church as the fourth building.