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O U R S T O R Y
welcome to the neighborhood
Oratorio's story begins in St. Louis' second-smallest neighborhood, home to its second- largest church: St. Francis de Sales Oratory, "The Cathedral of South City," towering over the 15-acre neighborhood of Fox Park, an urban hub with a density of 5,000 residents per square mile.
"Cathedral of South City"
Canons Secular of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest
Fall 2024
"Cathedral of South City"
From Latin mass to critical mass
A study by Partners for Sacred Places found that since 2005 St. Francis de Sales Oratory (an apostolate of the Institute of Christ the King, offering Catholic sacraments according to the Roman Missal of 1962) has been a catalyst for economic impact on the neighborhood, including direct spending, education, open space, magnet effect, individual impact, and invisible safety net. The study proved that the oratory's liturgical life had begun to enrich its surroundings, countering trends of urban decay and attracting investors to Fox Park.
bohemian meets businessman
Inspired by the study's findings, the oratory's music director James Marck organized a multidisciplinary team of professionals cross-pollinating music with entrepreneurship. The team's goal was to identify ways to buttress the otherwise purely urban revival with cultural revival, incorporating the performing and visual arts into the civic, economic, and architectural renaissance happening in the oratory's surrounding neighborhood of Fox Park. By August 2024, the team had incorporated with the State of Missouri as a 501c3 nonprofit supported by a host of individual, corporate, and monthly donors, taking the name "Oratorio."
oratorio: opera's conservative dad
While most of us think of J.S. Bach's Christmas and Easter Oratorios, Handel's "Messiah," or Mendelssohn's "Elijah" and "St. Paul," the term "oratorio" originally referred to a spiritual movement started by St. Philip Neri (1515-1595). In ancient Rome, an "oratory" was a gathering space for public speaking or "oration." During the Italian renaissance, Neri founded a religious congregation at Oratorio di San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, whose rich spiritual life included the musical performance of bible stories for the general public. The concept of beatifying the urban core with musical performance caught on in other cities, and the "oratorio" became one of Europe's most popular genres until it was outrun by its secular and commercially-successful daughter-genre, opera.
oratory-based, neighborhood-faced
The mission of Oratorio is to enrich with performing arts the collaborative effort to keep Fox Park a beautiful place to live. Working together with neighborhood-facing organizations like the Fox Park Neighborhood Association, De Sales Community Development, Rung for Women, and the Koken Apartments, Oratorio has contributed to drawing new families to Fox Park, adding value for residents as the only inner-city provider of its product, while growing grass-roots appreciation of the performing arts.