St. Andrew's Cathedral is the mother church of the Diocese of Grand Rapids and the oldest Catholic parish in the city. The diocese was established in 1882, but the parish predates it, founded in 1837 to serve the early Catholic settlers in a city that was then overwhelmingly Protestant and deeply skeptical of Rome. The current Gothic Revival building was completed in 1876, its rose window and pointed arches rising above downtown in a deliberate architectural argument that Catholicism had a permanent place in this community.
Grand Rapids was shaped overwhelmingly by Dutch Reformed Protestantism — the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America both have deep roots here, and institutions like Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary give the city a distinctive Calvinist intellectual character. Against that backdrop, St. Andrew's and the network of Catholic parishes that followed it — Polish, Lithuanian, German, Irish — represented a significant and sometimes contested alternative social world. The diocese today serves a Catholic community that has grown substantially with the arrival of Latino families, and the cathedral celebrates Mass in multiple languages.