St. Peter’s Catholic Church

800 East Grace Street
Architect unknown
1834. 1855, transept

Perhaps unfairly overshadowed by St. Paul’s, the larger and more lavishly articulated church across the street, St. Peter’s Catholic Church is a nonetheless a wonderful presence on the downtown streetscape. Its temple front in the Doric order is a classical structure of solid beauty.

This sanctuary (there is no separate parish hall) was Richmond’s second catholic church and the city’s first catholic cathedral (from 1840 to 1906). Architecturally the building might be viewed as a bridge between the restrained neo-classicism of the 1810s and 1820s and the full-blown Greek revival style of the 1840s (as exemplified by St. Paul’s).

The overall facade was perhaps inspired by the Church of St.-Philippe-du-Roule in Paris. The pediment facing Grace Street is supported by two flanking sets of four paired columns, an arrangement made popular by another Parisian landmark, the Louvre. This pairing of columns is similar to the garden portico of the White House of Confederacy, nearby at 1201 E. Clay Street.

The church interior, with its cruciform shape and apse, is intimate and warm.
With the shift of Richmond’s Catholic diocese center to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on Monroe Park in 1906, this church reverted to parish status. In the 1970s the bishop closed another Catholic church downtown, with a mostly African-American congregation, and merged it with St. Peter’s seeking to break the long-held tradition that, as the Rev. Martin Luther King once said, “…the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.”

E.S.