Father Baker's Basilica: Built on Pennies, Consecrated Debt-Free

Just south of downtown Buffalo in the city of Lackawanna stands one of the most improbable religious monuments in the United States. Our Lady of Victory Basilica, with its twin copper-clad domes and Italian marble interior, was built entirely without debt, funded through a national letter-writing campaign and the small donations of working-class Catholics who had never seen the building and never would.

The man behind it was Father Nelson Henry Baker. Born in Buffalo in eighteen forty-two, Baker became a priest in his mid-thirties and was assigned to oversee the Diocese's failing charitable institutions at Limestone Hill, just outside the city. When he arrived, he found an orphanage drowning in about sixty thousand dollars of debt. He launched what he called the Association of Our Lady of Victory, sending letters across the country asking for twenty-five cents a year from any household willing to help support dependent children. The response was overwhelming.

By the nineteen twenties, the Association had tens of thousands of members. Baker raised about three million two hundred thousand dollars to build the basilica, designing it with architect Emile Ulrich in Italian Renaissance and Baroque style. Construction began in nineteen twenty-one. By Christmas of nineteen twenty-five the shrine was complete and fully paid for, down to the last penny. Pope Pius the Eleventh designated it a Minor Basilica just two months after its consecration in May of nineteen twenty-six.

Father Baker kept working until his death in nineteen thirty-six at age ninety-four, running an orphanage, a home for unwed mothers and infants, and a hospital during the depths of the Great Depression. The Vatican opened his cause for canonization in nineteen eighty-seven. To the people of western New York, he has been a saint for a long time already.