History of St. Paul Church

Although Fr. Orr intended to build a new church, parish resources must have been restricted so that he settled on expanding the church at Mt. Auburn and Holyoke Streets at the same time the school was rising. Thus in 1890 the capacity of the lower church was enlarged by 200, and in 1891 a new front and tower were finished as part of a plan that lengthened the church by twenty-five feet, replaced the pews, and improved the heating. After so many changes, the church was even thought worthy of rededication, accomplished that October by Archbishop Williams--an occasion for which Orr's friend Bishop John J. Keane of Catholic University preached the sermon. The plan of the church, converted from a simple New England meeting house, somewhat resembled the basilica design of the old Cathedral. Doric columns, surmounted by Corinthian capitals, divided the nave into aisles. A large cross was the principal design of the vault and the front of the altar displayed a lamb, which survives today. A decade later, in 1903, Fr. Orr initiated a second effort at a new church on the McKay estate and obtained a building permit for a church 75 feet by 125 feet with a pitched roof.



After the Catholic renovation of the Shepherd Church. The altar seen here was later used in the lower church of the new St. Paul on Bow Street.

Meanwhile Harvard had started to invade the neighborhood. As part of the 1890's civic movement for attractive and healthy public spaces, the coal and lumber yards along the river were purchased by the park commissions and developed into the Charles River Parkway (the present Memorial Drive). The subsequent damming of the river completed the beautification project. While several grand plans for new quadrangles and boulevards stretching down from Harvard Yard circulated, a group of Harvard alumni under the leadership of Edward Waldo Forbes saw the opportunities as early as 1902 and began to acquire properties between Mount Auburn Street and the Charles River. The question of a boulevard widening and extending De Wolfe Street to Harvard Yard particularly concerned the parish lands. Prof. J.D.M. Ford, the only Catholic member of the faculty, was an occasional intermediary between President Eliot and Fr. Orr and even between the landscaper Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., and Mayor McNamee, a St. Paul's man.

Those purchases and the resultant Harvard houses have been lauded as successes in city planning, but the rapid changes shook the parish. While recognizing the civic improvements and "positive transformation of the locality," an assistant pastor later noted that "More than a half dozen streets with the dwellings of a Catholic population estimated at 1200-1500 souls were taken over. These people were compelled to seek homes elsewhere outside the parish boundaries. The movement which swept through the center of the parish involved the church and rectory and even threatened the property where stood the schools and convent." One can see why Fr. Orr stalled his building plans on the McKay property and decided instead that the church should follow the parishioners' emigration. Shortly before his death on Dec. 30, 1906, he bought an expensive piece of property at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Ellery Street with the intention of building the new church there.

Pastor for thirty years, Fr. Orr was a shepherd who knew his flock. A lively character, he took St. Paul's from its creation as an offshoot of St. Peter's to its status at the turn of the century as a self-sufficient parish with its own rectory, school, and convent--and still growing population.