Sacred Heart: Ninety-Four Windows from Munich

By the eighteen seventies, Augusta's Catholic population had outgrown St. Patrick's parish. Father Theodore Bulter acquired land on Greene Street for a new church in eighteen seventy-four. Construction of the permanent building did not begin until eighteen ninety-seven. The first mass was celebrated on December second, nineteen hundred.

The building that rose on Greene Street was designed in a cruciform Romanesque style, with an Italian marble high altar in the apse, two side altars in the transept, and walls covered in stained glass shipped from Munich, Germany. Ninety-four windows in total. The brickwork used fifteen different types of brick in decorative patterns. For a city that had not been burned in the Civil War, Augusta had accumulated enough merchant wealth and institutional ambition by nineteen hundred to build something extraordinary.

The church served Augusta for seventy years. Then, in nineteen seventy-one, the congregation closed it. The surrounding neighborhood had lost population to the suburbs. Two floods from the Savannah River had accelerated the decline. Maintenance costs had become unsustainable. The building sat, deteriorating, until it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two. Renovations followed, and in nineteen eighty-seven Sacred Heart reopened as a cultural center for concerts, art exhibitions, civic events, and celebrations.

The ninety-four Munich windows still fill the nave with color. The marble altar is still in place. The fifteen kinds of brick are still in the walls. What changed is what the building is for.