Wedding DJ at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church in Greensboro, NC

The Space

Our Lady of Grace was built as a memorial: Julian Price, a Baptist insurance executive, pledged $400,000 to build a Catholic church in honor of his late wife Ethel Clay Price, who had converted to Catholicism years earlier while a student at Notre Dame Academy in Maryland. Price died in an automobile accident before construction began, and his children, Kathleen Bryan and Ralph Price, added $300,000 more to see it finished.

Architect Henry V. Murphy, who had designed Our Lady of Refuge in Brooklyn, scaled that design down for this site in the Sunset Hills neighborhood of Greensboro. Construction began in Spring 1950 under the George W. Kane Construction Company, the first Mass was celebrated July 13, 1952, and Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani formally dedicated the church that September 14. Artisans from New York, Indiana, Illinois, and Canada all worked on the building, a detail that shows how much outside craftsmanship went into a church built in Greensboro.

Capacity & Layout

The sanctuary seats 500, a scale that suits a mid-size Catholic wedding Mass comfortably without feeling cavernous, and the French Gothic layout follows the traditional nave and side-aisle arrangement with the altar and marble Sanctuary at the front. An organ loft sits in the tower rather than over the narthex, an unusual placement worth knowing if music is being planned around it.

Parking runs to 240 spaces spread across seven lots on five different levels, with 28 handicapped-designated spaces among them, generous capacity for a wedding Mass drawing extended family and guests unfamiliar with the neighborhood. The adjoining Our Lady of Grace Catholic School, serving pre-K through 8th grade since 1953, shares the campus but operates separately from the church itself.

Amenities

The building’s materials are part of its character: pink granite from Salisbury, NC with Indiana limestone trim on the exterior, and inside, more than 30,000 individual pieces of stained glass imported from Belgium and Italian marble on the Sanctuary and side altars. None of that was added for weddings specifically, but it means the sanctuary needs little additional decor.

The Kleuker pipe organ, 2,226 pipes across 47 ranks with three manuals and pedal, was dedicated in October 1977 for the church’s 25th anniversary and remains available for ceremony music. With more than 1,600 registered parish families as of 2012, the parish is an active, well-staffed one used to hosting sacramental weddings on a regular basis, with clergy and support staff who plan Nuptial Masses here routinely rather than occasionally.

Location & Getting There

The church sits in the Sunset Hills neighborhood of Greensboro, an established residential area that gives the grounds a settled, mature setting rather than a newer development. Guests unfamiliar with Greensboro will find it easy to locate given the neighborhood’s long standing and the church’s scale.

Inside, the sanctuary’s stone and brick vaulting, hard floors, and soaring French Gothic ceiling were built for a pipe organ and unamplified voice, so they carry sound with a natural reverb typical of a large stone church, meaning a DJ or musician working a ceremony here plans for that acoustic rather than adding heavy amplification into an already resonant room.