Notice the mother church of the Archdiocese of Louisville, right here in Kentucky. This is the Catholic cathedral and the mother church of the Archdiocese of Louisville. As of 2025 it is the seat of Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre, and the Very Reverend Frederick W. Klotter serves as rector.
The story here reaches back to the first Catholics who came to present-day Kentucky in the 1770s from the Province of Maryland. They set up communities around Bardstown and its surrounding counties, visited periodically by Reverend Stephen Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States, as he traveled west of the Alleghany Mountains. In 1808 Pope Pius VII erected the Diocese of Bardstown — at the time the only diocese in the interior of the United States — covering most of Kentucky and the territories that would become Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. The pope named Reverend Benedict Joseph Flaget the first bishop of Bardstown.
Closer to home, in 1811 a small group in Louisville formed Saint Louis Parish at 10th and Main Streets. That parish received its first resident pastor, Reverend Philip Hosten, in 1821; Hosten died one year later during an outbreak... Every one of those early chapters of Catholic life in Kentucky converges here, in the mother church you now face.