Basilica of Saint Francis Xavier, Dyersville

Dyersville, Iowa, sits at a quiet crossroads of the upper Midwest, a small city of about four thousand people surrounded by some of the most productive farmland on earth. Two things make travelers stop here: a baseball diamond carved from a cornfield, and a Gothic church whose twin spires rise two hundred twelve feet above the street.

The Basilica of Saint Francis Xavier has dominated the Dyersville skyline since eighteen eighty-nine. The congregation traces back to eighteen sixty-two, when the first Catholic church was built to serve the German and Irish immigrant families farming Dubuque County. By the late eighteen eighties the congregation had outgrown two successive buildings, and the bishop commissioned a church ambitious enough to serve the next century.

Dubuque architects Fridolin Heer Senior and his son Fridolin Heer Junior designed the current structure in the German Gothic style. The cornerstone was laid on June third, eighteen eighty-eight, and Bishop John Hennessy dedicated the completed church on December third, eighteen eighty-nine. It cost approximately one hundred thousand dollars, a staggering sum for a rural Iowa parish at the time.

In nineteen fifty-six, Pope Pius the Twelfth elevated Saint Francis Xavier to the status of a minor basilica, one of only eighty or so in the United States and one of the very few in a rural setting. The designation recognizes both the church's architectural significance and its role as a center of pilgrimage.

Most visitors today know Dyersville from the Field of Dreams movie site a few miles away. But the basilica was drawing visitors long before Kevin Costner planted a diamond in a cornfield. It stands as a monument to the fierce religiosity of the immigrant farming families who built the Midwest.