Parish Histories

St. Edward Parish was founded in 1919 in what was then a brand-new neighborhood on Racine’s west side. The streets were still unpaved. The houses were going up quickly. And for the first time in Racine’s Catholic history, a parish was being built not for a specific ethnic group, but for an entire neighborhood.

This made St. Edward’s something new: Racine’s first territorial parish. The name was chosen deliberately. St. Edward the Confessor was an English saint with no association with any of the European ethnic groups that had defined Racine’s earlier parishes. The message was clear — everyone was welcome.

The parish built its school in 1926, which served as both church and convent until the present church was dedicated in 1953. By the 1960s, St. Edward had grown to 7,000 members. A fundraising campaign in 1958 raised the equivalent of $3.6 million in today’s dollars to build a proper convent and expand the school.

St. Edward’s growth in those years reflected a broader story: Catholics were moving into new neighborhoods, building new institutions, and establishing roots across Racine in ways that went beyond the old ethnic boundaries.

St. Joseph Parish was established as Racine’s German parish on the north side, founded by immigrants who had come from the German-speaking regions of central Europe in the mid-1800s. In a pattern typical of these early parishes, St. Joseph built its school first in 1870, with the church following in 1876.

In the early years, simply getting to Mass required real effort. During months when Racine’s Root River was open water, parishioners paid a penny per person to ferry across. In winter they walked across the frozen river, trading the ferry fare for the risk of thin ice. The parish history notes, with some dry humor, that a number of those saved pennies found their way into the collection basket.

St. Joseph’s interior was furnished with support from Catholic mission societies in Bavaria and Austria, which contributed to churches throughout the Midwest. The precise source of St. Joseph’s benefaction is still being researched, but the quality of the church’s furnishings reflects the generosity of those transatlantic connections.

In 2026 St. Joseph parishioners celebrated the 150th anniversary of the dedication of the church, making it one of the oldest continuously active parishes in St. Leo the Great.

St. John Nepomuk Parish, founded in 1896, is one of the most distinctive parishes in Racine’s Catholic story. Its founders were Moravian immigrants — Czech-speaking people from the village of Vlcnov in the region of Uherskybrod Brod — who had come to Racine following word of available work.

Like many immigrant communities, the Moravians at first attended another parish. But they longed for something more. As the parish’s written history puts it: “Like other immigrants, they desired to hear the word of God in their own language.” That desire, which the historian who researched these parishes called an echo of the promise of Pentecost, is what led them to establish their own church.

St. John Nepomuk became a parish marked by remarkable stability. Its religious and cultural life reinforced each other. Parish festivals featuring Moravian foods and crafts began almost from the founding and continued for generations, eventually coming to be known as Bohemian Fest in 1987. Sermons were preached in both English and Czech right up to 1928. Parish minutes were published in Czech alongside English until 1947, and the 50th anniversary book in 1946 was printed in both languages.

The parish had only two pastors across 68 years, Msgr. Anthony Weiler and Fr. Joseph Macek, a level of continuity that reflected both the community’s deep roots and its strong sense of identity.

St. Lucy has one of the most unusual founding stories of any parish in Racine. It began not as a parish at all, but as a Catholic Instruction League Chapel in 1917. The Catholic Instruction League was a movement that started in Chicago and spread to Milwaukee, aimed at providing religious education to Catholic children who attended public school. In the Archdiocese of Milwaukee at that time, 75 percent of Catholic children were in public school. Racine was the movement’s most successful outpost in the entire archdiocese.

The target communities were Italian and Hungarian families concentrated along Racine’s lakefront. The chapel was established in a converted Italian Mutual Aid Society building. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the community built a new church on South Street. Each family contributed either $30 or 60 hours of labor. Given that $30 represented nearly a full month’s wages at the time, many families gave far more than their share.

St. Lucy did not officially become a parish until 1958. Its first pastor, Fr. Francis Vajda, was born in Hungary in 1919, ordained in Rome during World War II while ministering to Hungarian refugees, and arrived at St. Lucy in 1952. He would remain there until his death in 1987, shaping the parish’s identity through more than three decades of service.

St. Lucy is both an Italian and Hungarian parish, and both communities deserve credit for building it. The present church building was completed in 1997.

St. Patrick Parish was established in 1856 to serve Racine’s Irish Catholic community, which had grown too large for St. Ignatius, the city’s original Catholic church. The new parish was built north of the Root River, in those days a meaningful geographic boundary in a city without bridges. The church building itself is a national landmark, recognized for its architectural and historical significance.

St. Patrick’s story spans nearly 170 years and reflects Racine’s changing immigrant population as clearly as any parish in the city. Founded by Irish Catholics fleeing famine in the 1840s and 50s, it is today a predominantly Latino parish — roughly 80 percent of its congregation — where three of four Sunday Masses are celebrated in Spanish.

The Latino presence in the St. Patrick community goes back nearly a century, with Hispanic families initially settling on Racine’s south side before a Spanish center established near St. Patrick in the 1960s drew more of the community northward. The transition was not without tension. In the 1970s, a portion of the Latino congregation moved to the former St. Mary’s building across the river, establishing what became Cristo Rey Parish. In 2014, in a deliberate reversal of that earlier separation, the Cristo Rey community celebrated a final Mass, locked their doors, and marched back across the bridge to reunite with St. Patrick.

Today St. Patrick is, as one local historian described it, a full-circle immigrant story. Large families, ethnic festivals including Our Lady of Guadalupe and Quinceañera celebrations, and the desire to hear the word of God in one’s own language — the same impulses that built Racine’s earliest ethnic parishes are alive in St. Patrick today. In 2024, 93 St. Patrick children made their First Communion at St. Edward, the group too large for their own building.

St. Richard of Chichester Parish is the youngest of the eight churches in St. Leo the Great, established in 1998, but it carries the legacy of five older parishes within it.

As Racine’s population shifted and the city’s ethnic neighborhoods changed through the latter half of the 20th century, five parishes found themselves with dwindling congregations in neighborhoods that had transformed around them. Holy Name, St. Rose, St. Stanislaus, St. Casimir, and Holy Trinity — parishes that had been built by German, Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Slovak Catholics in the late 1800s and early 1900s — merged to form one new community on the south side.

The name St. Richard of Chichester was chosen for a 13th-century English bishop known for his integrity, his simplicity, and his famous prayer asking to know Christ more clearly, love Him more dearly, and follow Him more nearly. Those words became the parish’s motto and are displayed in the church to this day.

St. Richard was shaped in its early years by three pastors, Father Jack Kern, Fr. Russ Roetzer and Fr. Ron Gramza, who are remembered by longtime parishioners as the people who forged a genuine community out of five separate congregations. The work they did then is not unlike the work St. Leo the Great is doing now.

St. Sebastian Parish was founded in 1905, not as an urban parish but as a rural one. The German farming families who established it lived in what was then the village of Corliss, south of Racine, in an area that would not become part of the city until much later. The present church building, constructed in 1974, gives the parish a modern appearance, but its roots run deep into the agricultural history of the region.

The founding story begins with Fr. Philip Dries, pastor of St. Louis Parish in Caledonia, who was asked by local German farmers to come south and celebrate Mass. He came by train. The first Mass was held in Ligsweiller Hall, with, as the parish history notes with characteristic Midwestern candor, the smell of stale beer and cigar smoke still in the air from the night before.

In those early years, the parish’s chief logistical challenge was not parking but stabling. Parishioners arrived by horse and buggy, and the parish needed to build sufficient stalls and hitching posts to accommodate them. From the beginning, all maintenance at the church and later the school was done entirely by volunteer labor.

From 1920 to 2006 — 86 years — St. Sebastian was staffed by Franciscan friars from St. Bonaventure Minor Seminary and High School, a connection that shaped the parish’s spiritual character for generations. The school, established in 1921, served the community until its closure in 1983.