Print edition: 
For 100 years, people have come to St. Patrick Catholic Church to pray and learn, to celebrate weddings, baptize children and mourn deaths.
On Sunday, the call to worship finally was heralded by the clang of a church bell.
To mark St. Patrick's 100th anniversary and "to make a statement that we intend to endure," the church recently installed a bell in its tower, said the Rev. Jerome Spexarth, pastor of the parish near 21st and Arkansas.
It rang out Sunday morning, the day current and former church members gathered to celebrate its centennial.
St. Patrick Catholic Church and School was established 100 years ago in a building on North Wellington Place, near 18th and Broadway. It moved in 1945 to its current location near 21st and Arkansas.
A new church was dedicated in 1949, and though the building has always had a tower, no one knows for certain why it never had a bell.
"I remember going up into that tower as a young associate pastor and thinking, 'If I'm ever pastor of this church, I'll see to it that we get a bell,' " said Bishop James Conley, who served at St. Patrick in the late 1980s. He now is an auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver.
"Of course, that never happened. Other things came up," Conley said Saturday. "But the bell is finally here, and I think that's wonderful."
Throughout history, church bells served as a call-to-prayer to townspeople, particularly in farming areas where people didn't own watches and could lose track of time. The range of a church's bell signified the boundaries of its parish, Conley explained: If you could hear a church's bell from your house or farm, that's the church you attended.
These days, church bells are more symbolic than necessary. The Angelus prayer tradition, which began hundreds of years ago in Europe, dictates that church bells ring three times a day — at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. —to represent the Holy Trinity.
At St. Patrick, the new centennial bell will ring at noon and 6 p.m., as well as for funeral tolls and to call people to worship on weekdays and weekends.
"Whenever we hear the ringing of this bell, we will remember that we are one family coming together to show our unity in Christ," said Bishop Michael Jackels during Sunday's blessing of the bell.
"May its voice direct our hearts" toward God, he said, "and prompt us to come gladly to this church."
Sunday's celebration drew hundreds of people to the church, which boasts one of the most ethnically diverse congregations in Wichita. During a standing-room-only Spanish Mass, church members prepared a potluck lunch that included burgers and hot dogs along with crab rangoon and tamales.
"It's a great place," said Lee Valdez, a longtime member of St. Patrick's. He and his wife, Sara, married at the church in 1958, and two of their three children also had weddings there.
"It makes me feel real old," Sara Valdez said of the centennial celebration. "I look at the list of pastors through the years, and there's only two that I don't recognize."
Conley, the bishop, said the church has changed somewhat over the years, but it remains a friendly, steadfast, family congregation.
"Even when I was here 25 years ago, this parish was a real neighborhood parish, a lunch-bucket parish," he said, referring to its predominantly working-class congregation.
"They're just real salt-of-the-earth type people — hard-working, family people," he said. The church "always adapted to the changing demographics... and served its parish well."
