Dormition of Mary Cathedral

## Dormition of Mary Cathedral, Diocese of the Red River

* **Official Name:**Dormition of Mary Cathedral, Seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of the Red River
* **Type:**Cathedral
* **Affiliation:**Roman Catholic Diocese of the Red River
* **Location:**619 7th St N, Fargo , RRDMZ58102
* **Style:**Third Gothic Revival
* **Completed:**September 2032
* **Architect:**Parler Buildings Associates
* **Capacity:**1000 congregation, up to 1200 at full capacity.
* **Bishop:**Most Rev. Hector Gonsalves
* **Rector:**Rev. Monsignor Leonard Brennan

### History

When the waters of the Awakening receded to their current boundaries , they left behind a wake of devastation. Generations-old landmarks washed from the face of the earth, whole districts of homes and businesses rendered almost uninhabitable by the flood waters. Among those hit by the natural and supernatural disasters were the Cathedral of St Mary in Fargo and its neighbor across the street, First Lutheran Church. While the first version of the Group began rebuilding the shattered downtown into what would become the Block, the newly-formed Roman Catholic Diocese of the Red River began a massive renovation that turned into a total rebuilding of an entirely new structure on the place where the old Cathedral once stood (in parallel with similar efforts by the newly-formed Northwestern Minnesota Synod that led to the creation of Last Lutheran Church, which had opened earlier the same year). Although only Coadjutor Bishop at the time, the rebuilding of the cathedral had been the pet project of Father Uriel Bankole, who was known as a VITAS  survivor and Theurge  and its completion was one of the factors that led to him succeeding Bishop Folda as head of the Red River Diocese.

The Dormition of Mary Cathedral really came to the fore in the Great Manastorm of '43, when Bishop Bankole arranging for refugees and those displaced by the storm and coordinated with his counterpart across the road, the Lutheran Presiding Bishop Victoria Rorvig to house nearly three thousand between them.

### Interior

The strikingly vertical, basilically arranged three-aisled neo-Gothic church contains a pair of Gothic prismatic towers in the west. In the east, the church is terminated by a short presbytary of one rectangular field, polygonal closed by four sides of the octagon. The side aisles are finished with deep polygonal chapels with five sides of the octagon. The side aisles are vaulted with five cross-ribbed vaults on an almost square floor plan, which is joined by one cross rib vault in the tower.

The nave and the presbytery are then vaulted by six rectangular, wide-ranging fields of compressed baroque arches with triangular sections. The side aisles have retained the original Gothic ribbed vault. The church is illuminated by a number of cantilevered Gothic windows with stone tracery.

The church is accessible by four Gothic portals. The northern portal has a relief in the tympanum depicting three scenes from Christ’s Passion in multi- figured compositions. High- quality sculptural work is one of the most important monuments of Gothic sculpture of the post-Awakening  Third Gothic movement. The pair of towers is topped with richly decorated cantivered Late Gothic octagonal helmets, which are complemented by a gallery, four corner turrets, and even more brilliantly halfway through another four decorative turrets. There is a Gothic gable containg the Baroque relief of the Madonna, that is surrounded by richly decorated rows of phial tops, in between the towers.

### Astral

In the late 2020's-early 2030's the field of astral architecture was still in its infancy, and Bishop Bankole himself did the design work for the manatecture of the Cathedral. While not unusual today, Bankole's use of natural unworked stone in the basement and his arrangement of the sanctuary in the shape of a summoning sigil were on the leading edge for its time and because of that the basement storm shelter provides protection not just from physical but also magical storms (housing several hundred locals for several days during the Great Manastorm of 43). Additional astral security is provided by occasional updates provided by Theurges of the Order of St Sylvester based out of the Twin Cities.

### Matrix

The Cathedral's Matrix architecture needed to be completely replaced in the wake of the Second Crash , rebuilt around a series of Novatech DataShepherd 1.0 servers. As the administrative center of the Diocese, a large amount of money and information passes through their hands, including medical records from parishioner visitations and money not just from congregation giving, but also to and from the various grants, charities and NGO's they support and are supported by. Because of this, they also maintain a Premium-level Matrix security contract with TrixSec, BSI's Matrix security team.

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