Qualla: Basilica of St. Peter (Columbia, South Carolina)

Basilica of St. Peter (Columbia, South Carolina): Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KudzuVine, Public domain. On June 24, 2018, a decree from the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship arrived in Columbia and quietly changed the standing of a single building. St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church at 1529 Assembly Street, founded by the first Catholic priest to set up shop in the South Carolina capital nearly two centuries earlier, became the Basilica of St. Peter - the eighty-fifth minor basilica in the United States and the first in South Carolina. The designation does not change what the building looks like. It does not change the brick or the spire. What it does is recognize, in the formal language of Rome, that the people who have worshiped in this nave since 1908 belong to something old, and that their building belongs in the company of the basilicas of Christendom.

Image: KudzuVine | Public domain

Basilica of St. Peter (Columbia, South Carolina): A Catholic Parish in a Protestant Capital

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dfscgt21, CC BY-SA 3.0. Columbia was barely a generation old when its first resident Catholic priest arrived in 1820. South Carolina was overwhelmingly Protestant - Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran - and Catholics in the capital were few enough to count individually. Yet within four years they...

Image: Dfscgt21 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Basilica of St. Peter (Columbia, South Carolina): The 1908 Building

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pwsuddes, CC BY-SA 4.0. The current church was designed by Frank Pierce Milburn, a prolific Southern architect responsible for courthouses, train stations, and university buildings across the post-Reconstruction South. Father Thomas J. Hegarty led the fundraising. Construction began in 1906, finished in...

Image: Pwsuddes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Basilica of St. Peter (Columbia, South Carolina): The Bell and the Irish

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Akhenaton06, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bell was cast in 1911 in Baltimore by the McShane Bell Foundry, weighs 3,500 pounds, and measures 55 inches across. McShane had been making church bells since 1856; their bronze rings out from Catholic parishes across the Eastern Seaboard, and St. Peter's is one of dozens of ...

Image: Akhenaton06 | CC BY-SA 3.0