St. Joseph School and St. Mary Academy dedicate new St. Mary’s Chapel

On May 18, 2021, ground was broken for a new 235-seat chapel and learning center for Devils Lake’s St. Joseph School and St. Mary Academy. Twenty-eight months later on Sept. 22, the first Mass was held to dedicate the new $2.5 million facility. The Most Reverend John Folda, Bishop of Fargo, was on hand for the Mass and dedication.

For decades, St. Joseph schoolchildren celebrated weekly Mass during the school year in the school gym. While the focus in the gym has always been Mass and the Holy Eucharist, according to principal Michelle Clouse, there is no substitute for having an actual worship space.

“You can just see the respect and the reverence,” said Clouse. “Before in the gym, we were setting up the chairs and bringing out the altar and there was a sense of this is something special, but then it’s still a gym. Now, you can tell when they walk in, they’re even more reverent and respectful.”

The new chapel’s interior reflects some of the history of the Diocese of Fargo. The pews, tabernacle altar, and the St. Mary and St. Joseph altars came from the closed St. Anselm’s Church in Fulda. Workers and volunteers spent weeks sandblasting, sanding, and staining the pews to help them look brand new. The main altar and ambo were donated by St. Therese the Little Flower Church in Rugby, and the baptismal font came from a small church in western North Dakota through the Cathedral of St. Mary in Fargo.

“It’s definitely a great blessing for the school, for the parish,” said Father Matthew Kraemer, pastor of St. Joseph’s in Devils Lake. “Just a spiritual center for the school. It’s big enough to fit the entire student body, all the teachers, everyone. It’s big enough to grow a little bit, too. It shows a vision for the school that we’re moving forward. We want to grow, but we also want to keep in mind what is our foundation.”

Not only does the new, 75-hundred square foot addition house the new chapel, but also a new learning and media center for the school. There are two meeting/study rooms, one of which was donated by the local St. Joseph’s parish Knights of Columbus council, and a main library, complete with donated book shelves from Lake Region State College. The center also features state-of-the-art learning tools for students.

“The media center is top-notch for a small school,” said Draper Lundquist, president of the St. Joseph School St. Mary Academy school board. “We have a 3-D printer, a touchscreen monitor, and everything’s Wi-Fi enabled so when students have their laptops in here they can connect right into our internet and work on their projects in the library.”

The new chapel was named St. Mary’s chapel in remembrance of the former St. Mary’s Academy/St. Mary’s High School in Devils Lake. The high school burned in 1979 and was never reopened.

“It’s a piece of our heart here at the school,” said Clouse. “We wanted to keep it close.”