ABSTRACT
George P. Stauduhar’s early twentieth-century architectural design for the Sacred Heart Chapel at St Benedict’s Convent (now styled St Benedict’s Monastery) in St Joseph, Minnesota, demonstrates how female administrators of this religious order took charge of their own liturgical setting rather than deferring to the authority of a professionally trained male architect. Impressed by the liturgical furnishings of the Egid Hackner Company of La Crosse, Wisconsin, at other regional convents, the Sisters of St Benedict’s asked for his recommendation for an architect, and he suggested Stauduhar. The sisters expressed, through a clerical intermediary, that the chapel should not be designed in a medieval revival style and that the interior rather than the exterior should receive the greatest aesthetic attention. Stauduhar’s resulting design for St Benedict’s Sacred Heart Chapel also reflected the sisters’ embrace of the recent Beaux-Arts architecture style. The ability of the Sisters of St Benedict’s to erect an ambitious and fashionable architectural statement was made possible by their success in offering a progressive and advanced educational program to young women of prosperous Catholic as well as Protestant backgrounds. The Sisters of St Benedict’s ability to provide advanced education also corresponded to a period of advanced Midwestern agricultural expansion.
