PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – Bishop Thomas F. Hendricken never lived to see the grand cathedral he envisioned for this city. But 120 years after his death, Providence’s first Catholic bishop was given a prominent honor in the building he helped create.

In a solemn ceremony Friday filled with song and prayer, six students from the Warwick boys’ high school bearing the bishop’s name carried a casket with his remains past hundreds of worshippers. They gently laid it to the right of the altar at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

The bishop’s new resting place is a massive green sarcophagus, which church officials say offers a far more visible and dignified resting place for the diocese’s founding father. Until recently, he and other bishops had been buried in a crypt downstairs in the cathedral.

“This man is a gift to us,” the Rev. Marcel Taillon, the diocese’s vocation director and the chaplain at Bishop Hendricken High School, said in his homily at the special afternoon Mass.

Current Bishop Thomas Tobin pronounced the day holy and historic, and said relocating the bishop’s body was a “modest little dream of mine.”

An Irish immigrant who arrived in the country as a missionary, Hendricken was ordained the first bishop of Providence in 1872 and served in that position until his death in 1886.

He is credited with opening many parishes and schools and preaching Catholicism at a time and in a region of the country where Catholics were not widely welcomed, Taillon said.

Hendricken was instrumental in building the cathedral, raising money for it as he traveled and commissioning its construction. He died before the building could be completed, but his 1886 funeral Mass was the first Mass ever said there.

Hendricken’s remains will be entombed in a 2,100-pound sarcophagus of Brazilian green granite that bears his name. It is located against the wall of the church and just below a colorful stained-glass window depicting Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

Tobin sprinkled the green velvet-covered casket with holy water, and as the worshippers filed out at the end of Mass, many rubbed the casket and kneeled in front of it.

For years, Hendricken had been one of six bishops separately buried in a crypt downstairs.

One of the men, Bishop William Tyler – who was the first bishop of Hartford, Conn., and received permission from the Vatican to reside in Providence – was returned to the Archdiocese of Hartford earlier this year. The others have been re-interred in the clergy section of a cemetery in Cranston.

“Most people had no idea the bodies were downstairs,” Taillon explained in an interview Thursday.