Dec. 21, 2023

Christmas came a few months early at the Cathedral of St. Joseph this year in the form of reaching a fundraising goal that at one point seemed ambitious, to say the least.

“I didn’t know if the money was out there,” said the Rev. James Morgan, who has served as rector at the Cathedral since 2015.

“After COVID, everything shot up, and we didn’t know if we could do it. We went from $5 million to $6 million to $7 million, and it just kept going up, and we decided to go for the jugular and decided to see if we could do $10 million.”

The fundraising total was reached in September and has continued to grow as the campaign remains active.

“We went to people who have a love for the Cathedral, who helped with the restoration, and there are some who wanted to contribute who had never given to the Cathedral,” Morgan said. “It was very much, I would say, a city- and diocese-wide effort.”

Sacred sounds

Dubbed the InSpires Campaign, the vision for building on the next phase of the Cathedral’s restoration goes back at least four years, though the seeds were sown earlier than that when director of liturgical music Jared Ostermann approached Morgan about six months into his move to Cathedral.

“I knew when I came here in 2015 we had to do something about the historical rectory, but I didn’t know about the organ,” Morgan said. “Jared had put a lot of time and effort into having it inspected on more than one occasion and realized we had a problem.”

The organ, which was built in the late 1980s with the technology of the time, had certain functions that had deteriorated to the point that repair was estimated well into the six figures.

“As he tells you, it could just stop any day,” Morgan said. “He literally uses duct tape to hold things together, and some of the pipes aren’t working at all, and they have socks or napkins stuffed in them.”

An organ committee interviewed builders, and a team from Montreal, Canada, with origins in France was selected.

The Cathedral made a $180,000 down payment in 2019 with funds left in a will to support liturgy and sacred music so a spot could be held on the craftsmen’s calendar.

In interviewing for the job, the team said: “We know this cathedral. We know your church. It’s French, and it needs a French organ,” Morgan said.

A concert organ to complement the primary, or gallery, organ, is already done. A rendering shows how the new one is envisioned to look, completing the Cathedral’s French Renaissance architecture and the lighter aesthetic used in the renovation.

The organ builders started on it in July, and the hope is to begin hearing it in the Cathedral by the summer of 2025.

The concert organ already has been used, and “it’s handmade and made to sound correctly in our Cathedral,” Morgan said. “It’s got a lot of sound. It’s vibrant.”

To complement the new addition and add to the Cathedral’s commitment to music, the InSpires Campaign includes funding for an endowed assistant organist position that also will help direct a new children’s sacred music choir.

A small group of students already is learning sacred music from Ostermann, and “we need somebody to be able to direct that and teach and also play organ, so Jared can be concerted on directing and perfecting the sound of the choirs,” Morgan said.

Rectory renovation underway

The original Cathedral rectory dates back to 1925, and “it fell into disrepair over the years,” Morgan said. “The sisters lived in it for 20-some years, and because they were quasi-cloistered, they really couldn’t do anything on the inside except Band-Aid.”

With the sisters’ move to a new monastery on the Cathedral campus, the rectory now is undergoing a basement-to-roof renovation.

After considering multiple uses for it, Morgan and his team determined it should return to its original use, with some modernization.

“We’ve got to move back,” he concluded. “The priests lived there for 100 years. We should move back and establish it as a rectory.”

The three-story building will include basement storage, a mechanical room and space for exercise and for priests to store gear related to their hobbies, he said.

The first floor will include much the same floor plan for kitchen, dining and living space, with some enlargement and the addition of a chapel that will use some of the marble remaining from the Cathedral restoration.

“We want the first floor to be in a classical style and bring back the history of the Cathedral,” Morgan said. “We need a chapel because a lot of times there’s something going on (in the Cathedral), and we need a private chapel where we can say Mass on our days off and go down and pray.”

The third floor is being converted back to the three bedrooms it had originally, which will be used for visiting priests, and a new roof and garage are being added.

The second floor will include bedrooms for Morgan and the Cathedral’s newest priest, the Rev. Pasquale Francesco, who moved here from Eritrea and “has just fit in really well,” Morgan said. “We love him to death, and the people love him to death, and he has especially reinvigorated our New American community.”

Growing parish

As an urban, Catholic church, the Cathedral is defying attendance trends seen elsewhere.

“We have seen an increase,” Morgan said. “The totals certainly jumped in 2022, and this year we’re averaging … about 1,200 people at Mass at the five Masses we have. That’s a little more than 2022, and it’s holding steady.”

Located at 523 N. Duluth Ave., the Cathedral has always been “a transient place, a mobile parish,” he continued. Out-of-town guests attend weekly. People move in and out of the neighborhood, especially as they marry and head for more suburban churches.

Now, though, “some stability is occurring,” Morgan said. “We’re getting some of these young families with children. Some live in the neighborhood, some live outside, but they want to be here.”

The younger demographics along with the multicultural nature of the church will drive the need to adjust programming, he said.

The Cathedral is among the most successful churches in the city for welcoming new Catholics, he added. In the past three years, nearly 80 people have joined the faith within the parish.

Morgan jokes that it’s not the sort of church for those looking to attend with coffee in hand but adds he thinks that’s also part of the attraction.

“I think … people are looking for a sense of the sacred,” he said. “They say, ‘We’re here for the liturgy, the beauty, and we feel like we’re going to church.'”

They’re also giving back. For the InSpires Campaign, more than $1 million in funding came from within the Cathedral parish.

“We were hoping they could do $1 million, and they actually did more,” Morgan said. “That’s huge for us. We’re not necessarily an affluent parish, at all.”

The plan is for the priests and guests to begin using the renovated rectory in the summer. Both the organ and rectory projects include funding for endowments to support ongoing maintenance needs. To learn more and give to the campaign, click here.