Starting today, I’m going to be going back to the vaults and publishing pictures from some of my travels in the Upper Midwest in 2018. I visited the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for a friend’s wedding, and contributor Jeff Phillips and I visited the Co-Cathedral of St. Paul while we had some time off before the wedding ceremony.

Not surprisingly, St. Paul is the Roman Catholic patron saint of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Since this is the Twin Cities, Minneapolis has a Co-Cathedral of St. Mary, which unfortunately we did not have time to visit. I have actually visited the Cathedral of St. Paul before, way back in 2009. The cathedral has an interesting St. Louis connection; the primary architect, Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, also designed many buildings for the 1904 World’s Fair. The building is heavily based off French and German models. He also designed other buildings around the upper Midwest such as the Winneshiek Courthouse in Decorah, Iowa.

The baldacchino is of course based off Gianlorenzo Bernini’s highly influential original in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The cathedral is graced with the sculpture of John Angel, the British American sculptor who worked throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. As is appropriate for St. Peter, below in his chapel, is the Latin superscript which says, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

St. Peter is depicted as a burly man, befitting of a fisherman having spent his life pulling in nets heavy with a bounty of fish. You can see his two keys in his left hand.