Touring The Cathedrals of Downtown Minneapolis

Part 1: The Cathedrals of Downtown Minneapolis

Jul 18, 2022

This is part 1 of a multi-part series.

A couple months back, I was wandering a bit around downtown Minneapolis before my daughter’s orchestra recital, and I couldn’t help but be struck by a number of incredibly beautiful churches - cathedrals even! - that I saw there. There is one by the highway that I’ve often admired and wanted to visit, but I abruptly found that there were many more. I thought it would be nice to visit them, but I knew nobody in my family would be interested, so I would have to go alone, which meant that it would have to be on my time - a very precious commodity! So, nice idea, I thought, but it probably would never happen.

Every year my wife puzzles a summer together out of all different kinds of summer camps for both the kids. It’s an amazing bit of work she does, especially considering that a lot of these camps fill up quick, and you basically need to book them the first day they open. Each week of summer is a new adventure with a new schedule, and it’s fun to try to fit it all together. This summer, one of the camps was a week-long orchestra camp for my daughter - 3 hours each day in downtown Minneapolis. It’s a half hour away, so it doesn’t really make sense to drive back home for two hours in the middle. It occurred to me that this would be a great time to do my cathedral tour!

I started today, visiting one basilica and one cathedral downtown. There are maybe six or so more that I want to visit, so I think I can get to all of them this week. I’m tentatively planning to write up one of them a day - with lots of pictures! - until I cover them all. It’s a chance to learn a bit of history of Minneapolis downtown that we might otherwise overlook, to immerse ourselves in beauty, and to hopefully touch the spirit a little bit as well.

We just got back from 10 days in San Francisco, which was a lot of fun, but came with some costs. I practiced maybe 10 minutes of qigong the whole trip, and I didn’t get to meditate a single time. No yoga. I ate way too much carbs and drank way too much coffee. Plus an unfamiliar bed and a less than comfortable sleeping arrangement, airplane seating and one too many taxi rides. I was definitely ready for some qigong after I dropped my daughter at camp, so my first stop was Loring Park, just across the highway from the Walker Art Center, to loosen up a bit and release some tension.

There are some pictures I took at the park below, including a couple shots of a statue of Ole Bull, who apparently was a virtuoso violinist on par with Paganini.