The McDonald Windows Project

WORLD WAR II SHARDS FIND NEW LIGHT

Twenty-five stained glass windows are being created around shards of stained glass collected from the rubble of World War II by U.S. Army Chaplain Frederick Alexander McDonald in 1944-45. Father McDonald had a life-long relationship with stained glass. So when he visited war-torn sanctuaries during World War II as a U.S. Army chaplain, he was drawn to fragments in the rubble – ancient glass created to mediate light in sacred space, blown apart in the ravages of war, now rescued somehow, pieces of glass in hand. In hand, for what?

Today the shards are featured in 25 new windows, a peace memorial to those who died opposing tyranny and defending freedom, family, and nation. For six years Armelle LeRoux and a team of stained-glass artists have been designing and building the windows around the broken pieces of colored glass and the brief stories that Father McDonald remembered about picking them up.

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