Sacred Heart of Jesus (1875)

The sixth church and second Catholic church to be built in Boulder, Sacred Heart of Jesus, was the largest Catholic church in town by 1890 with over 1,300 registered households. The school, church, and parish complex began with the creation of the parish on July 19, 1875. Bishop Machebeuf, in an 1876 letter, expressed pleasure at its growth:

Last year I organized another parish at Boulder with an excellent young German priest, ordained at Baltimore. He is poor but satisfied with his place. . . . I was surprised last week to find a neat church and residence at Boulder, due partly to the generosity of a pious lady convert, who also directs the choir and plays the organ.

Vincent Reitmayr was the young German priest who served from 1875 to 1877 and built the first church on two lots at the northwest corner of 14th and Mapleton, which had been purchased by Bishop Machebeuf in 1875, for $600. The first Mass was celebrated on Christmas Day, 1877, in the new $1,600 brick church with its distinctive square bell tower.

Anthony J. Abel succeeded Father Reitmayr as pastor in 1877, followed by numerous brief pastorates until the Boulder County parishes were placed under the Benedictine fathers of St. Vincent's Abbey in Westmorland, Pennsylvania, in 1887. Father Chrystosom Lochschmidt, OSB, pastor from 1889 to 1902, launched the parish school that thrives to this day.

Sacred Heart was not the first Catholic school in Boulder County. That distinction belongs to Mount St. Gertrude Academy, which opened in 1892 in the meadow beneath Chatauqua in what was known as the University Place Addition. Mount St. Gertrude was operated by four Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary from Dubuque, Iowa, who located in Boulder in 1890 at the invitation of Bishop Matz. Initially, Sisters Mary Theodore, Thecla, Faustina, and Luminia rented the Mallon residence at 14th and Walnut as their convent, then moved to Martha Decker's home at 13th and Mapleton to be next to Sacred Heart Church.

The sisters opened their academy, a grand $30,000 Victorian two-story schoolhouse, at what is today 970 Aurora Street. At first, St. Gertrude's accepted both boys and girls, Catholics and non-Catholics. Within a few years, the enrollment was so large that the sisters began accepting girls only. Sister Mary Luminia, the principal, advertised the academy for "girls who desire health as well as primary education," hoping to attract to this dry, sunny foothills boarding school girls suffering from or exposed to tuberculosis.

Mount St. Gertrude offered elementary, secondary, and music education. In 1919, the original 1892 school was expanded with the addition of two large wings costing $90,000, as well as two more stories for the main building, and a chapel. Much of the funding was donated by Boulder residents, Catholic and non-Catholic. Townsfolk remembered that after the 1893 silver crash, the sisters at St. Gertrude's had staged a carnival to benefit the whole community. Mount St. Gertrude continued to be Boulder's leading private school until 1969, when it closed. The building was sold to the University of Colorado, whose Continuing Education Department used it until the fire of October 26, 1980. The charred shell still sits on the hillside where Mount St. Gertrude first opened its doors--a dormant, brick and stone landmark awaiting restoration.

The Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary also volunteered to open a parochial school for Sacred Heart of Jesus parish. Sisters Mary Marcelliana, Anthony, Augustina, Hilarita, and Cypriana opened Sacred Heart of Jesus School on September 4, 1900, in the two-story frame rectory that the Benedictines had built at 14th and Mapleton in 1891. The parish purchased this building for $3,500 and remodeled it as a coeducational elementary school. The sisters lived upstairs until, in 1909, the parish bought the J. H. Decker home, 1321 Mapleton, as a parish convent. In 1917-1918, the old convent was torn down and replaced by a large, three-story school and convent at 13th and Mapleton.

Livingston Ferrand, president of the University of Colorado, was a guest speaker at the dedication of the sleek new Lyons sandstone and manganese white brick school. William O'Ryan, the orator priest from Denver, added that Sacred Heart School graduates should go to the University of Colorado, which "would become the greatest institution of public education in the nation."

Agatho Strittmatter, OSB, pastor from 1902 until his death in 1938, began planning a larger parish in 1903. Architect Frederick W. Paroth of Denver was commissioned to build the second church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the original site. Paroth designed a two-story Romanesque church of rusticated Lyons sandstone with a roof of Pennsylvania slate. This church, with its 108-foot-high bell tower capped by a gold-leafed copper cross, with its Romanesque arch windows and doors and huge rose window, was, according to the Boulder Camera of May 4, 1908, "considered by many the finest in the city."

Bishop Matz dedicated the new $30,000 church, illuminated by 500 candles as well as electric globe lights shedding light on a magnificent $2,000 marble altar. Walter P. Chrysler, the automobile tycoon, donated the twenty-tube chime tower, in honor of his friend, Father Agatho, in 1927. Throughout his later life, Father Agatho drove Chrysler automobiles, reportedly gifts from his friend in Detroit.

This magnificent church and the large school served the parish well until the postwar boom, when Boulder's population soared from 19,999 in 1950 to 76,685 in 1980. By the 1950s, the school overflowed, with more than 300 children in grades one through eight. Plans to expand began with Paul Fife, OSB, pastor from 1943 to 1957, and were carried out by Edward J. Vollmer, OSB, pastor from 1957 to 1966. For the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who had served the parish since the 1890s, a new $175,000 convent was constructed on the northeast corner of 14th and Mapleton. A dozen Sisters of Charity and nuns from several other orders moved into the modern convent in 1966. The school was demolished and replaced in 1959 by a $300,000 classroom building designed by architects Langhart and McGuire of Boulder. During the 1960s, over 700 students broke attendance records year after year, quickly filling the new school, a four-classroom annex, and a new gymnasium. Consequently, Sacred Heart invested $320,000 in a junior high school, a contemporary design by Rogers-Nagel-Langhart, which opened in September 1967.

During the 1970s, Sacred Heart School and its twenty-two teachers worked closely with the Boulder Valley public schools to give Sacred Heart students the best possible education, which entailed dual enrollment with Casey Junior High School across the street.

Sacred Heart's tuition is no longer $1.50 a month as it was in 1900, and a decline in the number of nuns led the parish to convert the convent to a parish center in 1983. Yet, Sacred Heart School, especially since the closing of the Mount St. Gertrude Academy, remains a major parish commitment.

Hoping to match the new schools with a new church, Father Vollmer began a tithing campaign in 1960 that raised the entire cost of a new $500,000 church. Houses on the northwest corner of 14th and Mapleton as well as the old church were demolished for a new design by Langhart, McGuire, and Hastings. The cornerstone was laid in subfreezing weather on December 23, 1962, and afterwards the chocolate-colored Norman brick walls began to rise in a cruciform shape, with all four wings facing a central altar beneath a soaring copper and bronze spire. Limestone trim, a light blue terra cotta tile roof, and six cast bronze doors distinguished the exterior of the new church. It was dedicated by Archbishop Vehr on November 21, 1963, when Father Vollmer sang the Solemn High Mass, celebrating both completion of the church and his silver jubilee as a priest.

Inside, Sacred Heart of Jesus is strikingly contemporary. Large exposed wood ribs lift the ceiling to a central skylight over the altar while fifty-three windows of imported mouth-blown antique stained glass help illuminate the 792 seats.

This dramatically modern church contains reassuringly traditional symbols. Next to the bronzed doors depicting Old Testament scenes stand seven-foot-high bronze statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and St. Benedict. Inside, the Communion symbols--wheat and grapes--appear on the ceiling, corona, and chandeliers. Such liturgical symbols, as well as the communion of saints itself, link today's Sacred Heart of Jesus parishioners to the handful of Catholics who met in 1875 to create this parish.

Father Tom Woerth, pastor since 1985, declared in 1987, "My hope is to make this a twenty-first-century parish, to meet the needs of all our parishioners from the womb to the tomb."