St. Patrick’s Catholic Church

History of Old St. Patricks Church

Standing as a National Historic Landmark in the heart of the business district, Old St. Patrick’s is a Catholic Church in New Orleans, Louisiana. Established in 1833, it became the city’s second parish church after the St. Louis Cathedral. The foundation of St. Patrick’s was driven by the desire of an Irish immigrant community for an English-speaking parish. Creating a community parallel to the French Catholics of St. Louis Cathedral, St. Patrick’s was built seven blocks off of Canal Street, mirroring the Cathedral’s distance but in the opposite direction.

Because it was under French and then Spanish and then French control, one might not think of New Orleans as having strong Irish cultural contributions. But Irish immigrants arrived early, attracted by its Catholic traditions and historically anti-British sentiments. An early wave of Irish immigrants, fleeing British persecution at the end of the 1700s, landed in New Orleans and became well integrated into the economy and social life of the city. Immigrants driven out of their homeland by the potato famine started arriving in significant numbers between the 1820s and 1840s.

In the first few decades following the founding of the parish in 1833, St. Patrick’s initially served as a neighborhood church. By around 1920, the surrounding neighborhood began to shift from residential to commercial. Efforts to revive and sustain the life of the parish through sacred music and liturgical beauty faltered with the suburban sprawl of the 1950s and 1960s. Compounding the challenge of a dwindling congregation, in 1965, Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans, leaving the church in a very bad state. At this time, Archbishop Richard Hannon appointed Father (later, Monsignor) Paul Reynolds to St. Patrick’s with the intention of closing the church. However, Monsignor Reynolds had other dreams in mind. He became pastor and led the church from 1965 until 2000, overseeing its architectural restoration and the revitalization of its community and congregation.

In addition to the art and architecture, Father Reynolds helped restore the congregation as well.

By this point, the Irish identity of the church had waned. Since most people in the area now spoke English (after over 100 years of being an American city) an English language parish was no longer unique. The liturgical changes brought by the Second Vatican Council allowed Catholic masses to be said in vernacular language, which meant the mass was no said in English as well.

Emphasizing liturgical tradition and sacred music, Father Reynolds requested permission from the archdiocese to continue offering the traditional Latin mass. Maintaining a Latin has drawn in parishioners who were not on board with the new liturgical allowances and social changes of the 1960s.

Now, in the 2020s, whole new groups of people are drawn to the Latin mass. Since the traditional Latin mass is not the common (or Ordinary Form) of mass offered by most Catholic churches, a Latin mass can make some feel like a righteous cowboy sticking to the true way, while others search for what they see as “tradition” in a rapidly changing world. Others still see Latin mass aligned with a type of political and social conservativism, one they’d like to enact and reinforce with some Catholic rituals.

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Since their inception, ideas of America and American identities have been constituted through ever-evolving religious, ethnic, and racial imaginaries. The story of Old St. Patrick’s Church shows how language, memory, and ethnicity cannot be separated from Catholic identity.

Old St. Patricks tells an interesting story about the changing social function of a space over time. St. Patricks weathered many storms throughout its almost 200 year history (both literally and figuratively). Throughout a lot of change– demographic, social, political, and even climate change– the original art and architecture of St. Patricks has remained pretty well preserved. But how it functioned in the community– and who even constitutes the community– has been drastically different at various points in time. From a haven for poor Irish immigrants who wanted a homily in English, to a Traditionailst Catholic parish offering the pre-Vatican II Latin mass to parishioners who feel the world is changing too quickly, St. Patricks shows us that “meanings” do not exist apart from the social actors that produce them.