Cathedral of Saint Mary (St. Cloud, Minnesota)
church in Minnesota, United States
The Cathedral of St. Mary, in St. Cloud, Minnesota, United States, is the cathedral and parish church in the Catholic Diocese of St. Cloud. The St. Cloud Diocese serves Central Minnesota and a Catholic population of about 150,000.
History
Saint Mary's Church
Saint Mary's Parish was founded in 1855 by the Reverend Francis Xavier Pierz. He celebrated the first Mass in the parish on May 21 in the home of John and Catherina Schwarz. Property was bought for $500 and plans were made for a wood-frame church and a school. In 1856 a Benedictine monk from Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, became the parish's first pastor, and a combination church and school building was built on Eighth Avenue, across the street from the current parish offices.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cathedral of Saint Mary (St. Cloud, Minnesota)” is church in Minnesota, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cathedral, Saint and Mary, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “church in Minnesota, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5052361. Authority coordinates are 45.559, -94.161. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1855 and 1856.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Cathedral of Saint Mary (St. Cloud, Minnesota)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.