While located just across the border in Webster Groves, the Roman Catholic church of Mary, Queen of Peace is often associated with the small suburb of Glendale.

The current church was built in 1955 and features windows by Emil Frei & Associates.

But I am interested in the sculptures in the high altar. I showed the old Kaletta Sculpture Company a while back, and related how they went out of business so rapidly in the mid Twentieth Century. I wonder if in the 1950s they were still providing these works for the church, which sits 800 and boasts that no person sits further than 70 feet from the high altar.

But like I said, there are some great Emil Frei windows, who unlike Kaletta, was able to adapt to the new era in architecture and transition to a Modernist style of stained glass.

This window below depicts the Resurrection.

Behind the choir loft is a scene that is rarely depicted in St. Louis religious art, and that is Maestà, where a massive entourage of saints appear around the figure of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

The nearby school was completed in 1948, which is an almost ubiquitous pattern in the St. Louis archdiocese–get the school open, have the congregation worship inside that building for a while and continue fundraising for the final church nearby. I’ve seen it time and again in St. Louis.

But this is where it gets interesting. There are three Carrara marble roundels above the front entrance of the school. Thanks yet again to an audience member who attended one of my public lectures, I learned that these roundels were intended for Mexico under the reign of Emperor Maximilian. If you know your Mexican history, he was deposed (if you even consider him to have ever been a legitimate ruler) by the forces of Benito Juarez and executed. The roundels ended up in the church of St. Lawrence O’Toole, and then when the parish was demolished, they ended up here. The first roundel represents the Gospel.

The second is Ecce Home, or Christ with the Crown of Thrones.

And the last one represents the Eucharist, with the grapes for the wine and the wheat for the bread clearly visible below the chalice and Host.