Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Members of a small Catholic parish in Milford will leave Sunday's Mass inside a converted car dealership with a vision of the shrine where they will worship in the future.
Members of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church will learn the winner of an international competition to choose an architect for their new home, which also will become a shrine to their namesake, considered a patron of the Americas.
Much work remains before it takes its final shape, and the project already has evolved from a struggle to build a modest new church into a program that has inspired diocesan leaders and leading architects.
'This was especially sweet for me. It appealed to my Catholic heart in the end,' Boston-based architect Rodolfo Machado, one of the five jurors who picked the winning design, said in a telephone interview Friday.
And sweet it will be for the approximately 250 members of the mostly Hispanic parish, founded 27 years ago to serve migrant workers in this area about 25 miles southeast of South Bend.
Six years ago they obtained a wooded, 6-acre lot to build a new church, but have raised only about $150,000 to build it.
The Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend adopted the project to commemorate the church's 2000 jubilee year, designating the new church a diocesan shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Most Roman Catholics believe the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared to a man in 1531 on a hill in what is now Mexico City
Rev. Paul Bueter, the church's pastor, said parishioners are looking forward to finally getting a new church. 'We're waiting for the day when the project will be up. That's not going to happen tomorrow,' Bueter said.
Bueter and others connected with the architecture competition would not disclose the winners before Sunday's announcement. However, Bueter said the designer, from the United States, had submitted an entry with a Hispanic colonial style. He said the parish hopes to break ground on the new church next summer.
According to Rev. Ed Erpelding, pastor of St. Martin De Porres parish in Syracuse, said the project is part of the churches effort to bring a eightened sense of spirituality to the church members.
"It's a way for the parishoners to reach out to one another," he said.
Parishioners cast their own votes in the competition. They reviewed the entries Friday night at a church in Warsaw and wrote their comments on cards. The jurors reviewed those comments and consulted with Bueter and his parish council before selecting the three finalists. Bishop John D'Arcy of the diocese made the final decision last Sunday.
Linda Furge, who is coordinating the diocese's role in the project, said the winning design still must be adapted to the particular needs of the parish and the shrine.
The winner will receive a percentage of the total cost of the project, which if built conventionally could cost $3 million, she said. The second- and third-place awards in the competition were worth $3,000 and $1,000.
Diocesan leaders hopes to offset much of the cost of the building by building it with volunteer labor, Furge said. They want groups throughout the diocese, such as school classes, to adopt parts of the building and raise funds to pay for them.
'The vision is to help this Hispanic community to move into the next millennium with a worship space,' Furge said.
The competition drew 268 submissions from 20 counties - an overwhelming response, said Robert Amico, an architecture professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend and a consultant to the diocese on the project. With the booming U.S. economy, architects have plenty of work, he said.
'The whole idea was to try to bring attention to a small community, a very modest community, and it succeeded. We took a chance,' Amico said.
Juror Carol Krinsky said the competition drew a great deal of interest from young architects, including university students, and people interested in Latin American heritage, as well as architects from the region.
Entries were judged on their practicality, form, message, and liturgical potential, Krinsky said.
She said the project will remain modest in scope.
'People should not expect to see St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City rising in an agricultural region,' said Krinsky, an architectural historian and a professor of fine arts at New York University.
The other jurors were two prominent architects who studied at Notre Dame, John Burgee of San Francisco and Bill Brown of Colorado Springs, Colo., and Monsignor M. Francis Mannion, rector of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City and president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy.
