St. Boniface Church has always been one of the most beautiful houses of worship in the Archdiocese — and city — of Louisville.

Now, after a $425,000 cleaning and restoration project, the church at 531 E. Liberty St. is more beautiful than ever. And in completing the six-month project, the historic church — it’s the oldest extant parish in the city — has added some additional artifacts to its already impressive collection.

William Lincoln, the parish’s director of worship and a walking compendium of St. Boniface history, said the project began last January and “produced two big surprises right at the beginning.”

“When we pulled out the confessionals so that the walls behind them could be painted, we found the original stenciling that went around the entire building,” he explained.

The parish was founded in 1836, and the first St. Boniface Church stood on what is now its parking lot. The current church was erected in 1900.

When the stencil pattern was discovered, Tim Schoenbaechler, the project architect, incorporated a similar stencil pattern into a new deep red color that now graces the church’s walls, including those behind the high altar.

“We also decided, while the confessionals were pulled out, to paint the walls behind them white and let people sign them,” Lincoln explained. “It became something of a time capsule for us.”

The second major surprise discovered during the project was the presence of painted canvases behind the altar and above each of the church’s 20 arches.

The paintings above the arches were of angel heads, and each of the 20 was different. There was a variety of faces and hand positions. All had been painted over in 1969 when a priest in charge of worship and environment for the archdiocese deemed that they were “distracting elements,” Lincoln said.

Age, paint and plaster conspired to forever ruin all but six of the canvas paintings. The same was true for large paintings of angels that once adorned the wall behind the high altar. Six large canvas paintings held those images; one has been rescued and is now on display in an anteroom near the lavatory at the front of the church. A second has been stored for safekeeping; the rest were damaged beyond repair.

Lincoln and Deacon J. Patrick Wright, pastoral administrator at St. Boniface, noted that the workers from BJB Restoration were extremely careful with the cleaning, painting and restorative work they were doing. And Jeremy Bolton of BJB said they were proud to do it.

“Finding those paintings and being able to save some of them is what makes this job fun for us,” he said. “It meant a lot to us, to all the workers on the job, that we were able to preserve something like this for the people of the church and the archdiocese.”

In addition to the remarkable new paint and stenciling on the church walls, BJB Restoration also cleaned the altar and St. Boniface’s stained-glass windows, some of the most historic in the city. Lincoln noted that the windows were made in Munich, Germany, in 1898 and 1899 especially for St. Boniface by the Royal Bavarian Art Institute. BJB also added a wooden chair rail around the church walls.

“The workers were especially careful when cleaning (the windows)” Lincoln said. “And when cleaning the altar, too.”

In fact, the BJB workers used something of a secret weapon when it came to restoring the delicate figures and shapes on the church’s altar. They used gold leaf there — and gold paint on the church — but when it came to cleaning they used an over-the-counter product.

“Scrubbing Bubbles,” Bolton explained. “And it produced amazing results. You don’t want to make things worse by using something abrasive, so we used the Scrubbing Bubbles on the altar and on the Stations of the Cross.”

The original project called for an expenditure of about $385,000, but Deacon Wright and Lincoln said that, thanks to funds raised in the Building a Future of Hope capital campaign, the parish was able to expand its project to include the chapel that sits on the west side of the altar. To honor retiring pastor Father Timothy Hogan, the people of St. Boniface decided to name the chapel after St. Timothy.

One of the discovered angel-head paintings has been placed in a shadow box and displayed at the rear of the church, and the five others are being kept, too, in casefunds are found to restore and display them.

“We’re hoping someone will want to sponsor their restoration,” Lincoln said. “They’re so unique. If you look closely, you can see the pencil lines made by the artist before he started to put paint onto the canvas.”

As it stands now, the people of the parish feel lucky to have discovered the paintings, Deacon Wright and Lincoln noted. “We knew the paintings had been up there at one time,” Lincoln said, “but we didn’t know that any of them had survived.”