Church Projects Carry Special Memories
Tara McAndrew
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Church Projects Carry Special Memories

The O’Shea family has been building churches longer than it’s had a construction business. According to family lore, Timothy O’Brien, the uncle of O’Shea Builders founder John O’Shea, built Springfield’s first St. Agnes Church and taught John carpentry.

John was a devout Catholic and churchgoer, so it’s no surprise that he helped a church in Cantrall, a few miles north of Springfield, when a storm damaged its roof. This was the early 1940s and parishioners were still recovering from the Depression. The priest took a special collection to raise funds for the repair, but the offering was so sparse he was able to count it while walking to the rectory. John told him it was plenty. John’s grandson, Jim O’Shea, learned this story decades later when he was an assistant priest and the Cantrall priest was his parish priest.

Later that decade, the company got a project that changed its direction. In 1948, the 80-year-old St. Denis Catholic church in Shipman, Illinois burned. Church leaders asked Harold, John’s son and the new head of O’Shea’s, to rebuild it. “It was a great compliment to get this job. It was 65 miles or so to Shipman, and dad would make that trip once or twice a week to oversee the project,” says Bud O’Shea, O’Shea Builders' chief executive officer and Harold’s son. St. Denis “was kind of the beginning of Dad branching out into commercial construction,” Bud says.

Mike O’Shea, president of O’Shea Builders, thinks one of the company’s “coolest projects” was a job that came many decades later, after several other church jobs. In 2002, the company worked on the St. Francis Convent, also known as “the motherhouse,” in Riverton. It was a multi-phase, multi-year project that involved demolishing about 250,000 square feet of buildings and replacing some. “After we got done, we did a very significant renovation of the church there, which was so cool,” Mike says.

While O’Shea was still working on the Convent, it was called to renovate a special place to Bud – Blessed Sacrament Church. This was the Church his grandfather and father had worked on and which they all had attended as parishioners. It was this Church’s school that Bud had run away from as a kindergartener to spend time on construction jobs with his grandpa, and later attended through primary school. “It was always a beautiful church and the renovations made it even better,” Bud says. “I still enjoy the occasions that I attend mass there. I was so proud and spiritually satisfied to be part of this project.”

An even bigger project came along six years later – a renovation of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Springfield’s largest Catholic church and the seat of the Springfield, Illinois diocese. It included demolishing a vacant structure, constructing a beautiful, new atrium between the Church and its School, and upgrading the Church’s breathtaking interior. According to the Cathedral’s website, “the Cathedral Church closed for fifteen months” for the effort, which was “its only major structural project since being built in 1928.” In a November 23, 2009 State Journal-Register article about the Cathedral’s reopening, Rev. Peter Harman said, “People walk in and they’re either speechless or say that it’s better than they imaged. I’ve had people weep…I see the Cathedral as (something) God would be proud to have as his house.”

Bud says: “I tell people when I die, and I’m serious, etch into my tombstone: ‘He was part of the team that renovated Blessed Sacrament Church and the Cathedral.’ It takes a lot more than that to reach Heaven; however, at least now I have a running start.”

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