I’ve been wanting to see this church since I arrived; Saturday was the first time I was able to slip in between communions and baptismals, yowzah.
It’s a ginormous concrete of a building, and their website offers a lengthy history, but here’s the final gist:
El Purísimo Corazón de María is a parish which is located on Gabriel Mancera Street between Torres Adalid and Luz Saviñon, where Division del Norte, Amores and Colonia Del Valle avenues converge, in the neighborhood of the same name. The total height of the Parish is 65 meters with its 20 meter high polyhedron dome topped by the image of Mary with semi-open arms that together with its base measures 10 meters and can be seen from a great distance; It is a unique church thanks to such a figure that is at its peak. Few know his name and think that the great figure that crowns its dome is a Christ instead of the Virgin Mary.
There are still more people who do not know the name of the temple and lack to know it, they call it “Our Lady of Transit”, because with its open arms it seems to want to contribute to speed up the vehicular traffic that converges on the neighboring avenues of División del Norte, Colonia Del Valle y Amores around what was the Glorieta de Mariscal Sucre.
Both the exterior and interior are striking for their great beauty, full of extraordinary details on all sides. Inside, its stained glass windows stand out, its candelabra next to the benches, its gilt bronze tabernacle with a revolving base, the main image in its dressing room of the Virgin Mary with the Child God (it measures 4 meters high and is the work of Antonio Ballester), the murals that cover an area of 1400 meters created by the painter Pedro Cruz, the two high reliefs alluding to the motherhood of Mary, on the outside its monumental concrete façade, its staircase, the three wide gilt bronze doors, its two concrete towers symmetrical that finish off the façade, its majestic architecture that is described as a mix between art deco and functionalism with a certain gothic air.
Inside the temple you can see fantastic stained glass windows and murals that represent various biblical passages in an extraordinary architecture.
It is likely that for all these reasons, in 1996 Australian director Baz Luhrmann chose this Parish as one of the main locations for his film “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.
http://purisimocorazon.org.mx/contenido/parroquia/79
