On March 26^th, 1987, Gravelbourg Town Council empowered by the Heritage Property Act of 1981 passed a bylaw designating Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral Municipal Heritage Property. Council was thereby giving recognition and protection to a structure of significant historical, cultural and architectural importance to the local community.

In July of 1995, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada recommended that the cluster of buildings known as the “Gravelbourg Religious Complex” – comprising Our Lady of the Assumption Roman Catholic Cathedral, the Convent of Jesus and Mary (Thévenet College) and the Bishop’s Residence – be designated as a NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE.

The Board advised that the Gravelbourg Ecclesiastical Buildings are of national historic and architectural signifacance and should be commemorated by means of a plaque, the text of which should emphasize the colonization efforts of the Catholic Church, rather than their architecture per se… because they symbolize the French colonization efforts of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Canada in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, and because of their close association with the work of Father Louis-Joseph-Pierre Gravel.

Further, the complex of buildings, the work of Saskatchewan-based architect Joseph-Ernest Fortin, was deemed to be of superior architectural quality, both in style and stylistic sophistication, to those erected in other Franco-Catholic colonies dotting the prairies.