St. Stanislaus Kostka Church is an independent Catholic church located in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Formerly a parish belonging to the Catholic Church, it was established in 1880 to serve the Polish community in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. It is considered to be the best example of the opulent Polish Cathedral style of architecture west of the Mississippi River. The church is notable for a highly publicized dispute over control of the parish and its assets between the church's lay board of directors and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis. In December 2005, Archbishop Raymond Leo Burke declared the parish's board members and its priest, Marek Bozek, excommunicated and announced his intention to disband the parish with the likelihood that the premises would be sold. The parish responded by holding a Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve attended by 1,500 to 2,000 people. The church and the archdiocese settled their legal dispute in 2013. The parish continues to be maintained and managed by its parishioners as a not-for-profit corporation, calling itself "Catholic", but unaffiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Church history In 1878, the Archdiocese of St. Louis authorized the construction of a parish to serve the city's growing Polish Catholic community, which up until then attended St. Patrick's at Sixth and Biddle Streets. In 1880, construction began on St. Stanislaus Kostka. The church was built just north of Downtown St. Louis, in a neighborhood that was home to a large number of Polish immigrants. The original church building was built in Romanesque Revival style. It was originally administered by the Franciscans and was the mother church for three other Polish parishes-St. Casimir (1889), St. Hedwig (1904) and Our Lady of Czestochowa (1907). Under a land deed signed by Archbishop Peter Kenrick in 1891, the parish property was assigned to a corporation under a pastor and lay board members to be continually appointed by the archbishop. The founding documents are known collectively as the Deed and Charter & Bylaws of 1891. A new larger edifice, designed by Wessbecher and Hummel, was dedicated in September 1892. In 1928, the church was damaged by a fire that destroyed the center dome of the structure, and almost all of the original interior decoration. The dome was not rebuilt. In 1969, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków (later Pope John Paul II), visited the church. The building was listed