On your right, look for the dark stone church with a steep gabled front, pointed Gothic windows, and a great round rose window above the entrance.
St. James began in eighteen sixty-eight as South Bend’s first Episcopal congregation. The church before you took shape in eighteen ninety-four, when Ennis Austin and Wilson Parker designed it in the Gothic Revival style, a nineteenth-century return to medieval forms with pointed arches and a strong upward pull. Both architects had worked for the Tiffany Glass Company, and that gave this place a rare distinction: St. James became one of only two buildings in South Bend with original Tiffany stained-glass windows.
The most famous is the rose window on the east facade, a great circular burst of colour that reportedly appeared first at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in eighteen ninety-three. Peter Studebaker, treasurer of the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company, gave that window to the church. Two matching Tiffany windows on the north wall, in deep purple and gold, honour Bernadine and Margaret Meyer. In the app, you can see the cathedral and its adjoining parish hall, completed in nineteen twenty, which together entered the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-five.
St. James became the cathedral, the main church of the diocese, in nineteen fifty-seven. More recently, it stood at the centre of a fierce local debate over L-G-B-T-Q rights. Bishop Edward Little had forbidden same-sex marriages in the diocese, but Bishop Douglas Sparks reversed that policy in twenty sixteen. St. James held its first same-sex wedding the next year. Then, on the sixteenth of July, twenty eighteen, former mayor Pete Buttigieg married Chasten Glezman here. Dean Brian Grantz later admitted he felt terror before the ceremony; reporters stayed outside, security tightened, and more than twenty thousand people watched the livestream. Protesters followed, yet in twenty twenty this lawn also held a major interfaith Black Lives Matter vigil for racial justice.
If you want to come back inside, the cathedral is generally open Tuesday through Friday from nine to one-thirty, and Sunday from eight to noon. St. James stands as proof that even an old cathedral is never merely about the past. When you’re ready, continue on to the I and M Building.
