Cancel

Open app

Search

Life Center Madison

4.0 (1 review)
Closed • Closed
Updated over 3 months ago

Life Center Madison Photos

Recommended Reviews - Life Center Madison

Your trust is our priority, so businesses can't pay to alter or remove their reviews. Learn more about reviews.
Yelp app icon
Browse more easily on the app
Review Feed Illustration
Photo of Super G.
23
75
41

12 years ago

Helpful 2
Thanks 0
Love this 0
Oh no 0

Ask the Community - Life Center Madison

Verify this business for free

Get access to customer & competitor insights.

Verify this business

Cathedral Parish of St Raphael

Cathedral Parish of St Raphael

4.2(5 reviews)
4.5 mi•Capitol

This is beautiful Holy Redeemer Church, which was built in the 1860s and is the oldest extant…read moreCatholic church in Madison, and is today part of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Parish, which has four church building (the other churches of the parish are Saint Patrick Church on East Main Street, where the parish office currently is, Saint James Church off of Mills Street sort of behind Meriter Hospital where there is also a parish school, and Saint Joseph Church south of the beltline). Holy Redeemer Church has very thick fieldstone walls with rubble fill like a medieval castle, and looks quite picturesque near the intersection of West Johnson and State Street; the interior is also quite beautiful and traditional. A Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration prayer chapel is open daily on the lower level of Holy Redeemer Church, you enter through the parking lot side of the building and turn left. The focus of this chapel is the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, people come here to visit Jesus. Anyone may visit, rules are posted for maintaining the reverence of this place of silent personal prayer. At the time that I'm writing this Holy Redeemer Church is used 24 hours a day as the site of the Adoration Chapel, and there is one scheduled Mass per week, 8 am on Saturdays. That's not a Sunday Mass, all Sunday Masses are currently at St James or St Joseph Churches and complete information about Sunday and weekday daily Masses can be found on the Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish website, https://www.guadalupemadison.org/ . I go to Sunday Mass at St James and weekday Masses at St Patrick's, as well as Saturday morning at Holy Redeemer. There are Spanish as well as English Masses--the Spanish Masses are largely at St Joseph right now. Definitely check the parish website for up to date information. Normally confessions are heard before every Mass, which makes it so much easier to go to Confession. I live in the neighborhood and am a longtime parishioner. If you live on the Isthmus or Fitchburg you probably live in our parish's territory-- please come and worship with us. Saint Raphael's Church was Madison's first Catholic church, and became the Cathedral when the Catholic Diocese (bishopric) of Madison was formed in 1946, but it burnt down by arson in 2005 and a Stations of the Cross garden now stands on its site. Whereas Saint Raphael's had a predominately Irish congregation, Holy Redeemer was built by the German Catholic immigrants. High up in its front facade, amidst chunks of local sandstone-limestone there is a carved white marble plaque reading "Domus Dei et Porta Caeli," meaning House of God and Gate of Heaven in Latin. After the destruction of Saint Raphael's, the nearby downtown parishes of Holy Redeemer and Saint Patrick's merged under the name the Cathedral Parish of Saint Raphael, serving as the temporary seat of the Bishop of Madison. More recently a different Cathedral church was designated, which is Saint Bernard's on Atwood Avenue, and thus the downtown parish was no longer the "Cathedral Parish." Saint Bernard's is now the official "seat" of the bishop's leadership of the Church in southwest Wisconsin. A new diocese-wide parish reorganization clustered four different churches, Holy Redeemer, Saint Patrick's, Saint James, and Saint Joseph into the current Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish. This name, a beloved Mexican title for Jesus' mother Mary, is fitting because today more than half of our parish's attendees are Hispanic. The latest reorganization was not due to any severe priest shortage; the larger cluster of churches is served by a team of several priests, most of them bilingual including our current main pastor Father Drew Olsen. In 2019 major restoration work was done to the exterior walls of the church, including replacing eroded local sandstone-limestone. In May of 2024 Holy Redeemer Church's wooden steeple caught fire after being struck by lightning. The building was saved thanks to the Madison Fire Department, this loss was covered by instance and a new metal-framed steeple, replicating the appearance of the original complete with a large clock, was installed in the fall of 2025. People in the neighborhood should join us for Mass at St James or Saint Joseph Church on Sundays. When or whether Sunday Mass will return to Holy Redeemer Church is unclear right now--I really think Mass needs to be available in the middle of downtown (though there is one at Saint Paul's on the University Campus, primarily intended for students) but the issue is that they wanted to consolidate people at St James for community building purposes. The Adoration Chapel at Holy Redeemer Church remains a real blessing to have in the neighborhood, that you can visit anytime.

This is not a place to go if you care about your physical health. I came there for the 9am Mass…read moreand most of the people around me were not wearing masks including a person who plopped down right beside me. I decided not to stick around to see how unsanitary the distribution of Communion would be. Even the man who appeared to be the head usher was maskless and coughing. Yuck and gross!

Photos
Cathedral Parish of St Raphael - Christmas 2015

Christmas 2015

Cathedral Parish of St Raphael - Advent!

Advent!

Cathedral Parish of St Raphael

See all

Life Center Madison - churches - Updated May 2026

Loading...
Loading...
Loading...