The Paulists in San Francisco
by Patrick J. McNamara and Clayton E. Jewett
November 20, 2011

December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, has always been a significant day for the community of Old St. Mary’s in San Francisco. This was the first church in the world dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, in December 1854, not soon after Pope Pius IX’s promulgation of this doctrine. The day held additional significance in 1994, when the parish celebrated 100 years of Paulist service. This date marked a long, rich and varied history for the Paulists in San Francisco, beginning with Archbishop Patrick Riordan, who had assigned the old cathedral to the order’s care a century earlier.

One hundred years of Paulist ministry can be characterized in two different ways. The Paulists served the ever-changing nature of this parish as the area that comprised the parish changed dramatically over the last hundred years from sailor’s bars and opium dens to elegant high rise buildings. Like its model, St. Paul the Apostle in New York City, this second Paulist parish always sought to move beyond the parish boundaries to respond and care for the needs of many different constituancies within the city. This short article attempts to draw forth some of the highlights of that experience.

Paulist Fathers Edward Brady and Henry Wyman came to San Francisco in 1894. The area that surrounded the parish, known as the Barbary Coast and Chinatown, was a district filled with sailor’s bars, gambling establishments, and houses of prostitution. What had once been one of the more fashionable neighborhoods in the city was now characterized by rowdy night life and street gang violence. As one observer described the neighborhood: “the streets are lined with houses of prostitution, and a stone’s throw beyond is the Barbary Coast reeking in infamous filth.” There were a series of brothels within the immediate vicinity of the church, and Father Wyman and Father Michael Otis began a campaign to close them down. Despite their attempt to bring some moral reform to the neighborhood, they received very little help from the city government. It was the 1906 earthquake that led the city to purchase “objectionable properties” across from the church, making them into St. Mary’s Park.

The Paulists had come to San Francisco to establish a base for missions on the west coast of the United States. Old St. Mary’s was their second parish after the Paulist mother-church, St. Paul the Apostle in New York City. The Paulists sought to model their ministry at Old St. Mary’s on the experience of the New York parish. It would not only serve as a residence fore Paulist missionaries, but become a “mission church,” a parish whose outreach would extend across the entire city. Like their church in New York, the Paulists offered a city-wide mission each year at Old St. Mary’s. Father Elias Younan, one of the community’s most distinguished preachers, arrived in San Francisco in Marcn 1898 at the invitation of Henry Wyman. Father Younan preached a city-wide mission the next week. While the first night of the mission was poorly attended due to bad weather, the crowd became so large on succeeding nights that the overflow crowd was forced to sit in the sanctuary of the church. Father Younan preached in the mornings and evenings, and Father Wyman assisted by leading daily discussion drawn from a large wooden question box to answer questions about the Catholic faith. Following the mission, some 90 people enrolled in Father Younan’s first inquiry class, of which 57 became Catholics. Such classes have continued as a fundamental work of the Paulists at Old St. Mary’s down to the present day.

Beginning in 1894, the Paulists took responsibility for the city jail, located within the boundaries of the parish. The first chaplain was Father Oliver Welsh, who ministered to the needs of Catholic prisoners for almost 25 years. He is most remembered for his acquisition of an elaborately decorated Chinese altar which had been on display at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. When the altar went up for auction, no one bid on the piece in deference to Welsh. The word had gone out that the chaplain wanted the ornate altar for use a the city jail.

Another immediate need involved the large number of sailors who frequented the bars and bawdy houses in streets surrounding the parish. To create a wholesome alternative, the Paulists established the Seamen’s Catholic Institute in 1898. The institute provided sailors with an atmosphere free from temptation, where they were protected from robbery, shanghai or assault while they remained in port. The original quarters of the institute were located in the church basement, but when the church was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, the Paulists ended the work in the aftermath of the great disaster.

The most tumultuous say in the early years of the Paulists at Old St. Mary’s occurred on April 18, 1906. Early that morning an earthquake shook the city. As water and gas mains broke, fires started and spread throughout the city. The earthquake resulted in the destruction of five square miles of buildings and property damage amounting to half a billion dollars. Old St. Mary’s was located in the area of the city hit hardest by the earthquake. Firemen struggled for hours to extinguish the fire which encompassed the church, but to no avail, as the fire devastated the interior of the structure. Fortunately for the parish, neither the foundation nor the walls of the church collapsed. As one witness described the ravaged church:

“The church, with the exception of the rear building, was marvelously intact. Everything flammable had, of course, been consumed. The sweethoned bell lay on the dome of the vestibule in scattered, shapeless lumps of melted metal. The marble side-altars, imported from Italy and recently consecrated, had melted like wax. The main altar, perhaps the most perfect specimen of Carrara marble and of Italian sculpture on the coast, was reduced entirely to dist and lost in the ashes.”

Father Wyman set to work to restore Old St. Mary’s to her former beauty, and the cost of rebuilding was made easier when the old cathedral received a higher proportion of insurance money than any other parish in the area. A vaudeville matinee held at the American Theatre in October 1908 helped raise the additional funds. The Paulists built a wooden chapel in the site of the old parish house, which served as a temporary church until the building program was completed. Old St. Mary’s reopened its doors on June 20, 1909.

A pioneering ministry of the Paulists began with their outreach to the people of Chinatown in 1903. Protestant missionaries had been engaged for some time among San Francisco’s Chinese, but no attempt had been made by Catholics anywhere in the United States. At the Paulist General Chapter held in New York in 1902, Father Wyman called for the Paulists to begin some type of ministry to the Chinese community in San Francisco. In 1903, the newly ordained Father Henry Ignatius Stark returned home to his native city of San Francisco to devote his energies to the people of Chinatown. Reaction in both the Chinese and Anglo communities was one of suspicion and opposition. The Catholic Irish of the city formed some of the most bitter opposition to the Chinese. As the backbone of the city’s working class, the Irish filled the construction trades and manned the docks. They had long been opposed to the importation of Chinese workers, fearing a threat to their livelihood. Anti-Chinese sentiment in northern California had led to the Exclusion Act of 1882, and workers often rallied around labor agitators who attacked the Chinese and the growing boundaries of Chinatown. Father Stark’s efforts were hardly welcome. At the same time, Father Stark experienced distrust and suspicion from the Chinese, who were accustomed only to hostility, manipulation or exclusion. Through patient work, Father Stark began to break down some of these barriers to create the first Catholic ministry to the Chinese in America. He began his Chinese mission as a small school in the church basement with four students and himself as teacher. By 1904, with the help of Archbishop Hanna, he was able to secure the services of the Helpers of the Holy Souls, an order of women religious who came to San Francisco from Shanghai, China.

In 1904, two remarkable gifts arrived on Father Stark’s door. A local Catholic named Gleason donated a house on Clay Street to use as a mission. More importantly was the arrival of Mother Ida, a Eurasian member of the Holy Helpers who spoke fluent Chinese. Mother Ida began a kindergarten class in the new Clay Street mission. As the number of Chinese mothers who brought their children to the kindergarten increased, Mother Ida began to invite the women to stay and learn English. At this time, California required segregated schools for the Chinese. This terrible act of discrimination compounded the many restrictions the Chinese faced. The schools run by Father Stark and Mother Ida both served an important community need and provided an opportunity for the Chinese to learn about the Catholic faith. The great earthquake of 1906 brought additional problems, having destroyed both the Clay Street Mission and the Convent of the Sisters of the Holy Souls on Howard Street. By 1909, the mission was back, but not in full operation. This was the year that Father Stark and Father Welsh began a night school for Chinese adults in the basement of Old St. Mary’s. In 1910, Father Stark was succeeded by Father Charles Bradley, who served as director of the Chinese mission for the next 17 years. His untiring efforts to build the adult language school led to the conversion of hundreds of Chinese and earned him the affectionate title “apostle to the Chinese.”

One element that hampered Bradley was his absolute insistence that all Chinese converts resign from the tongs and all secret societies. This led a significant number of catechumens to not take the final step in becoming Catholic. Resignation from the tongs meant potential social ostracism and serious financial loss for the catechumen’s entire family, if not in some cases physical danger. Father Bradley understood enough Chinese to hear confessions, but speaking the language lay beyond his grasp. Here the arrival of Anthony Chan in 1920, a native Chinese catechist from Canton, proved invaluable. Chan could not only offer instruction in Chinese but could translate Father Bradley’s sermons for the Sunday community.

In 1914, Mother Ida was joined by a second Chinese-speaking sister, Mother St. Rose. Their efforts led to such an increase in students at the mission school that in 1919 Father Bradley requested from Superior General Thomas Burke a completely new school, a project San Francisco’s Archbishop Edward Hanna strongly supported. The Chinese public school, which the city provided was overcrowded and inadequate to the needs of the children in Chinatown. In June 1920, the Paulist General Council approved Father Bradley’s request and property was purchased on the corner of Stockton and Clay streets at a cost of $15,000. Father Bradley designed his new school to have large, multi-purpose classrooms, a playground and chapel. On August 1, 1921, Archbishop Hanna dedicated the new Holy Family Catholic Chinese School and Social Center. In Chinatown, it was popularly known as “Sing Ma-Li” or “St. Mary’s.” The first day of school opened to a student body of 175, and a new faculty composed of six Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, had come to supplement the work of the Sisters of the Holy Souls. In addition to the school, Father Bradley opened a Chinese language school with a separate curriculum of two grades that served to “preserve the cultural heritage of the Chinese.” Expanding in size over its 50 years of operation, the school grew from 100 students in 1921 to almost 600 students in 1971.

Another ministry that evolved into a separate work was the chaplaincy to Catholic students enrolled at the University of California. The Newman Club had begun at Berkeley in 1899, as a club pamphlet noted “to supplement the works of the state” in providing religious formation for Catholic students. In the summer of 1906, Archbishop Riordan asked for Paulists to take responsibility for this ministry. Paulist Superior General Father George Searle sent the young Paulist scholar, Father Thomas Verner Moore, to San Francisco. Moore was to become the first of a long line of Paulist campus ministers at Berkeley. As the chaplain’s responsibilities increased with the expansion of Moore’s program, Father Thomas Lantry O’Neill arrived the following year. Newman ministry had begun at the turn of the century, and was still in an early stage of development when Father Moore and Father O’Neill served on the Berkeley campus. They provided religious services to students and faculty, but some of their original duties included corresponding with parents, securing decent and safe housing for students and offering adjunct classes in Catholic theology. In 1907, Archbishop Riordan purchased a house near the north gate of the university, which was later dedicated as Newman Hall. The ministry at Berkeley would eventually develop into a much larger operation, presently known as Holy Spirit parish.

Old St. Mary’s not only survived the earthquake and fire, but continued to expand in both size and beauty. In April 1925, the church’s seating capacity was increased from 700 to 1,300 by extending the rear end of the church and rebuilding the sanctuary. Four years later, seating was increased to accommodate 2,000 souls, making the church the largest Catholic structure in the city. To enhance the exterior of Old St. Mary’s, the Paulists imported from Germany a statue of the Blessed Mother with her arms outstretched. For a Marian church committed to citywide ministry, the statue gave visual representation to the work of the Paulists. As the Blessed Virgin extended her arms across the rooftops of the city, so the Paulists sought to extend their ministry beyond the parish to meet the various needs of the city. The parish apostolate extended in a variety of different directions. Paulists responded to hospital calls, celebrated Mass at the city jail every Sunday, and conducted parish missions throughout the archdiocese. The Paulists noted with pride, during the 1928 visit of the superior general, that the children of most parishioners at Old St. Mary’s attended parochial rather than the public schools.

During the visitation, the local Paulists expressed the desire to build a reading room for the literary consumption of parishioners and others in the area. The first parish circulating library was introduced by Father Isaac Hecker at St. Paul the Apostle in New York in the 1870s. Since then, the Paulists have been committed to adult education, not only to strengthen the faith of their own parishioners but to provide a central location where non-Catholic adults might inquire about Catholicism. Specifically, the San Francisco Paulists hoped to build”

“a Catholic Truth Society which should provide conveniences in the way of literature, apologetic and otherwise, for the Catholic Church; and a lounge for young ladies and young men who are downtown in the noon hour.”

In 1930, Father Thomas Burke, the pastor of Old St. Mary’s, purchased a storefront near the church. On October 8, 1930, the Paulist Circulating Library opened with some 500 volumes. The library lent books and served as a center for inquiry classes. These classes were to “provide an opportunity for non-Catholics who are interested to hear the accurate expressions of the truths of the faith.”

The circulating library was eventually moved to the Grant Street side of the church. It was an early version of a new form of urban evangelization that the Paulists would spearhead in the 1940s and ’50s. Catholic Information Centers formally began in the mid-1940s as downtown urban centers for inquirers. While the Toronto Information Center, begun in the church basement in 1938, is generally credited with being the first of these new centers, the San Francisco Library preceded the Toronto center by almost a decade. The San Francisco storefront had an informal ambience to make inquirers feel comfortable. As one Paulist noted, many non-Catholics:

“have a vague fear of priests. But when one of these alarming individuals meets them with a pleasant smile, a cheery greeting, and an outstretched hand, their reserve melts and their unease vanishes … Bashfulness, timidity as a discomfort in the presence of a priest are gone from them forever. The outer walls of separation are tumbled.”

The number of inquiry classes grew in San Francisco, reaching a high point in the years immediately after the Second World War.

In December 1940, Father Paul Ward established the Wyman Club, named after the second Paulist pastor of Old St. Mary’s. The club offered young adults the opportunity to participate in a variety of programs under the auspices of Catholic Action, a growing movement in the American church mandated by Pope Pius XI. The club also served as a positive social outlet for young Catholics. Having a center for young adults already in operation when the Second World War occurred, it was an obvious development to extend this program to reach out to the large number of soldiers and sailors coming through San Francisco on route to the Pacific theater. Father Thomas Burke, the pastor, wasnted to provide “a home-like spot where servicemen and women may enjoy those cherished hours of liberty.” The Old St. Mary’s Service Center was opened in the basement of Old St. Mary’s in March 1944. By January 1945, the center welcomed some 800 military personnel each day. Tens of thousands of servicemen and women passed through the center before it closed in September 1946.

Following the war, the center reverted back to become the Old St. Mary’s Center for Young Adults, serving many of the young Catholic men and women who came to San Francisco in the post war years looking for work. While most parish clubs were geared toward adolescents or married couples, the Old St. Mary’s Center attempted to meet the spiritual and social needs of young Catholic singles. By January 1948, Father Edward Lawlor was running a thriving downtown center. One event was a lecture series featuring prominent Catholics such as Claire Booth Luce. The center offered a variety of classes on both academic and practical subjects. In particular, regular members attended a religious discussion group that occurred every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. Father Lawlor’s goal was to influence young Catholics who worked in the financial and commercial district and who might “bring the advantages of Catholic culture to the business and social world of 1948.” Throughout the 1950s, the club grew in size and reputation, and became the largest association of its kind in the nation.”

Paulist outreach to the Chinese continued in the 1940s under the direction of Father Charles Donovan. As director, he was privileged to witness President Roosevelt’s 1943 signing of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and remarked that it was a happy day for all the people of Chinatown. The Chinese could now become citizens of the United States with the right to vote, own property, and live where they chose. As a result, many Chinese sought better housing in other parts of the city. Father Donovan described his ministry as one to “bring the Catholic faith to the Chinese, to bring education, social programs, to be a Christian presence.” Sunday Mass was celebrated in Chinese. From Father Donovan’s perspective, the children were the most wonderful part of Sunday. They were “like sponges, the way they listen and learn. They love to hear Bible stories.” Outreach, however, included more than just Sunday worship. Under Paulist direction, the Chinese school daily taught over three hundred boys and girls in grades 1-8. In the evenings, Chinese professors were employed to teach English to primary and secondary school children. In 1947, Father Donovan left Holy Family to conduct missions in Northern California and Nevada. It would be 17 years before he returned to work in Chinatown.

The period following World War II was a highly active time for the parish, and most especially the downtown inquiry center. In the first two decades of operation, the inquiry classes begun in Father Burke’s library were to receive some 1,200 converts into the Roman Catholic Church. The success of the library led the San Francisco Paulists to formally establish a Catholic Information Center in 1952 with a fixed schedule of inquiry classes for non-Catholics. It was later renamed the Paulist Religious Education Center in 1957.

While their city-based ministries grew through the 1960s, the Paulists noted a decline in the number of active parishioners. It appeared that the growth of surburbia had an effect on the life of the parish as Catholic families were moving both out of the city and the parish proper. At the Chinese Mission, the same move to the suburbs occurred. Father Arthur Maguire, the director, stated that “the ghetto has been broken,” as young families left the old neighborhoods of Chinatown for the suburbs. Old St. Mary’s was in the process of transition.

On January 11, 1966, some six decades after the infamous earthquake and fire that had destroyed much of the original church, another fire broke out at Old St. Mary’s. It began in the attic and would have engulfed the church, but was contained by the heavy doors of the complex. Firemen entered the building through the Paulist Center Library, which contained some 9,000 books. In order to save the library, many of the books were taken from the building by relays of young Chinese boys in the neighborhood, and the volumes were stored by local merchants. Damages to the building only amounted to $300,000, of which the parish’s insurance covered two thirds of the costs. An example of ecumenical support for the Paulists came from the Very Rev. Julian Bartlett, the dean of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, just north of Old St. Mary’s. Rev. Bartlett offered the Paulists the use of Grace Cathedral during the renovations. Despite the offer, the Paulists celebrated Mass in the basement of the old church, while the repairs were under way. On Easter Sunday, 1967, the parish community returned to the upper church, and the liturgy was once again celebrated in the main sanctuary of Old St. Mary’s.

Despite the restoration of the church, parish membership continued to decline. Where the once had been a balance between outreach to the various constituencies in the city and ministry to parishioners, the continual erosion of the parish base required a new vision for the downtown parish. In 1967, Father Anthony Wilhelm and Father Michael Ryan wrote to Superior General John Fitzgerald, describing the state of the parish. Old St. Mary’s was located in the business district of the city with a “largely transient” population of young office workers and executives. The older parishioners, who had been the bulwark of the parish’s financial support, were becoming increasingly fewer. On the basis of these developments, Father Wilhelm and Father Ryan proposed the establishment of something like a “Wall Street apostolate” to the banking community, whose high-rise business centers surrounded the old 19th century church. The specifics of the program were to include discussion groups, seminars, film programs, leadership training, and organized worship for the city’s financial center employees. Father Wilhelm and Father Ryan soon to moved on to other assignments, but their successor, Father Walter Anthony sought to implement their ideas. He expanded the mission of the library and bookstore, to increase outreach to the business community and renamed the complex the “Old St. Mary’s Paulist Center.” In the years that followed, the center has provided many lecture series and other programs to business people on their lunch hours.

Father Donovan returned as director of the Chinese Mission and School in 1964, at a time when the Chinese community, fueled by the Civil Rights Movement, was making greater demands on the city for equal rights. Father Donovan was named a member of Chinatown’s Anti-Poverty Program, and later served on the board of the same citywide agency. Having refurbished the mission chapel, he confronted a new crisis which threatened the life of the school. In 1969, Old St. Mary’s, which had undergone profound changes in membership and finances, announced that it could no longer afford its annual subsidy, the critical funding that often kept the school alive. Father Donovan rallied the Holy Family parish community to create an educational fund. Some two years later, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange announced that they could no longer staff the school, creating the need to find new teachers. Father Donovan’s second tour at Holy Family was characterized by difficulties that required great self-sufficiency in resources. The school continues, and the mission now functions as an independent parish.

Vatican II brought many changes to Old St. Mary’s. In 1968, the first parish council was created to coordinate parish activities and to advise the Paulists on social and pastoral issues. Father John Carvlin, pastor at the time, stated, “One thing is certain in the new complexities of parish administration, the Catholic layman must accept a larger responsibility.” In 1968, Father Leo Conlin, arrived at Old St. Mary’s to serve as chaplain to the city jail. What had once been a separate building on the edges of Chinatown was now the upper floors of the city’s Hall of Justice. Crowded 12 to a cell while awaiting trial for up to three or four months, 95 percent of all inmates were too poor to afford an attorney. As jail chaplain, Father Conlin found that many inmates were more than happy to talk to break the monotony of their daily routine. By the 1970s, he had become so popular among returning inmates, that several repeaters had telephoned Father Conlin and asked him to arrange their surrender to police.

The 1970s provided new opportunities to evangelize in the local community. Under Father Anthony, the enter had become quasi-independent with its own staff, budget, and a volunteer staff of 45. It offered some 600 programs a year, principally during the lunch hour. Following the fire, the parish library had grown to some 4,500 titles, and Father Anthony had added some 4,000 books on audio tape as well as several hundred videotapes. Father Anthony established a highly popular program for people who could not come to the downtown center to allow them to borrow books and tapes by mail. In 1982, he opened a second center and bookstore in the Embarcadaro Center, a series of high-rise office buildings with shops and cafes that extended over several city blocks at the base of California Street. Here many of the center’s poplar programs were repeated, providing liturgy and instruction classes during the lunch hour.

Old St. Mary’s had established, over the decades of Paulist presence, a solid reputation for preaching, liturgy, and counseling; pastoral skills that attracted non-parishioners. Old St. Mary’s was known for its hospitality, with parish activities that remained open to anyone. This ministry of hospitality added a dimension of warmth and welcome to the many tourists who visited the church from around the world. Since the Second World War, San Francisco has been a popular center for tourism, and in the decades of the 1960s and ’70s, a highly popular setting for national meetings and conventions. Old St. Mary’s unique location, nestled between Union Square and Nob Hill, combined with its historic nature, made the church a magnet for tourists. The actor Cyril Richard noted that it “is one of the three warmest churches in the world.”

Hospitality extended beyond liturgy. Beginning in 1972 during the pastorship of Father Joseph Quinn, a group of parishioners became volunteers at DePorres House to work among the city’s poor, providing food and clothing and preparing meals. As Father Quinn noted, the program helped “to sensitize the parish, to get it more aware of social action.” The original St. Vincent de Paul Society was created in the parish by Father Wyman in 1906. In the 1980s, this program had expanded with a volunteer staff of 20 parishioners to feed and house the city’s homeless.

The parish was increasingly composed of seniors. In the 1970s, the parish created the largest senior citizen program in the archdiocese. The noon Mass was followed with a 25 cent lunch, a sing-along and bingo. During the pastorship of Father Thomas Connellan, from 1976-82, parish members began to organize to lobby against the transformation of apartment buildings into condominiums. The urban change led to the eviction of some of the elderly members of the parish. The care of older parishioners led to a growing concern to assist seniors with the problems of higher rent, personal isolation, and the fear of crime. Old St. Mary’s became enthusiastically involved, lobbying city supervisors and monitoring the physical well-being of its parishioners. “We like to get everyone here involved,” said Father Connellan. Ministry to seniors and other parishioners, to tourists, and the business community would characterize Father Connellan’s successor, Father John Carr, who served as pastor from 1982-86.

In February 1984, Father Daniel McCotter became director of the Old St. Mary’s Chinese Center and pastor of Holy Family. He succeeded Father Patrick Leary, who served briefly as director from 1981-84, and the legendary Father Charles Donovan. Father McCotter established an evangelization program to encourage Chinese Americans to return to Holy Family in Chinatown. The British decision to return the colony of Hong Kong to mainland China brought an influx of Chinese immigrants to San Francisco. Father McCotter helped to coordinate joint efforts with several city parishes that now serve Chinese Catholics to assist these newcomers, much as his predecessors, Father Henry Stark, Father Charles Bradley and Father George Johnson, had done years earlier. He also created the Hecker-Pallotti center to train lay ministers who would work in the church throughout the bay area.

The Paulist General Assembly of 1986 issued a mission direction statement that articulated three main goals: evangelization, ecumenism, and reconciliation. Since the 1986 Paulist Assembly, pastors Father George Fitzgerald and Father John Hurley have attempted to implement these principles at Old St. Mary’s. In 1987, the Paulists began a reconciliation ministry for Catholics alienated from the church. A program for evangelization begun the same year attempted to expand the parish’s many educational programs to reach out ot the unchurched of San Francisco. Advertisements geared to alienated Catholics and the unchurched were placed in local city newspapers, inviting them to Old St. Mary’s, and elicited hundreds of responses.

Citywide ministries continue to operate out of Old St. Mary’s. In the last few years, there has been an increase in the number of 12-step programs meeting at the parish.

A marketplace ministries program has been created for outreach in the financial district, and the parish has a very active ministry to Catholics in San Francisco’s large gay and lesbian community begun by Father John Collins in 1979. Father Terry Ryan, who succeeded Father Walter Anthony at the Paulist Center Bookstore, has developed new programs for the downtown community, and Father Nat Wilburn, now at work in the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s evangelization office, describes the ministry at Old St. Mary’s as one that tries to “deal with people where they are.”

Earthquakes and fires have defined the physical history of Old St. Mary’s, and the earthquake of 1992 created a new challenge to the continued existence of the church and Chinese mission. Following this disaster, San Francisco passed an Earthquake Hazard Reduction Ordinance that required both church buildings to be retrofitted or gradually closed to all public activity. Father John Hurley, the pastor of Old St. Mary’s, has launched a parish campaign to raise the millions of dollars necessary to save the church. Father Daniel McCotter began his campaign to save or relocate the Chinese school. Like the early Paulists, Father Wyman and Father Stark, who faced rebuilding in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, so these 20th century priests face the same challenge to keep Paulist ministry to the many people of San Francisco alive and flourishing. The story of Old St. Mary’s continues, rich with the ministry to the people of downtown San Francisco and to the entire city.