Cincinnati's Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains was designed for the diocese in 1840 by Henry Walters, architect of the Ohio state capitol in Columbus. The cornerstone of the cathedral was laid by Bishop John Baptist Purcell in May, 1841; and it was dedicated in November, 1845 -- a relatively short time for such a monumental structure.

By 1912 the neighborhood around the cathedral had begun to deteriorate so that a plan was devised to incorporate a new cathedral with a new theologate in a planned Catholic community in suburban Norwood. So in 1938 the structure was abandoned as a cathedral; by 1950 it was slated for demolition. In that year, Karl J. Alter, newly appointed Archbishop of Cincinnati, in concert with the diocesan priests, decided to renovate the structure. There were several good reasons for this: a compelling one, for instance, was written by Talbot Hamlin in his classic work, Greek Revival Architecture in America (1944), describing the building as "one of the hansomest and most monumental of Greek Revival churches." The cathedral was rededicated November 3, 1957, the renovation having taken two years longer than the building of the original structure 112 years earlier.

Bishop Purcell's Motives
In 1840 the Catholic population was largely made up of recently arrived immigrants, mostly German but some Irish. There were more than murmurings at the time of American nativists against the increasing influx of poor foreigners into the United States, many of whom persisted in preserving their native language in an Anglophone country. Bishop John Baptist Purcell was an immigrant himself, born in Ireland in 1800, arriving in the United States at the age of eighteen. But why would he, less than ten years after his installation as second bishop of Cincinnati, so strongly lead his mostly German immigrant flock in building the largest, most costly church west of the Allegheny Mountains? In a review (October 25, 1992, The New York Times Book Review) of Tyler Anbinder's The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s Robert Remini, a noted historian and biographer of Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, wrote that "there has not been a general history of the Know-Nothing Party except for Ray Allen Billington's splendid study of antebellum nativism, The Protestant Crusade: A study of the Origins of American Nativism, 1800-1860 (1938)." And Remini begins his review of Anbinder's work by declaring:

An ugly, frightening streak runs through the entire course of this nation's history, and Americans need to remind themselves regularly of its lurking presence lest they forget that organized bigotry is not a foreign contagion. It is as American as violence, capitalism and democracy.

Though we might prefer to forget or cover up bigotry, especially when involving Christian denominations, it is not a simple matter to brush aside a statement like the one of Arthur Schlesinger Sr., that "prejudice against the Catholic Church is the deepest bias in the history of the American people, and the only acceptable bias in the United States today." If that is true in our time, how much more might it have been so in the past. Billington's book, the Protestant Crusade, is indeed a revelation; and perhaps the most riveting personality was Lyman Beecher, a seventh generation Puritan preacher who came to Cincinnati in 1832 as the first president of Lane Theological Seminary at the age of 57.

One year later, John Baptist Purcell, an Irish Catholic immigrant who had lived in the United States some twelve years all told, was installed as second bishop of the Cincinnati diocese at the early age of 33. These two men, Purcell and his adversary, Beecher figure largely in the events leading to the dedication of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral in November, 1845.

Continue:
events leading to the building of the present Cathedral

Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains
325 West Eighth St.
Cincinnati Ohio 45202
(513) 421-5354