A History of St. Paul Church

Catholics in Early Cambridge

The denizens of Harvard Square uniformly worshipped in the New England Puritan tradition until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Rev. East Apthorp established a mission for the Church of England. The first gathering of a more diverse nature was the encampment in 1775 in Harvard College and on the Cambridge Commons of the Continental Army, a force including Catholics from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Canada. When George Washington was informed of the plans for the annual Guy Fawkes procession ("for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the Pope"), he halted the event, expressing his surprise at the lack of common sense and propriety in such an activity.

For decades after its completion in 1803, the old Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Franklin Street was the only Catholic church in the Boston area. That building, designed by Bulfinch, was hardly convenient for Cambridge Catholics, but their number was miniscule. A collection of small villages--the Old Village (now Harvard Square), East Cambridge, and Cambridgeport--Cambridge continued to be almost uniformly Protestant and English speaking. The 481 names on the 1822 voter list included only four that sounded "foreign." When the parish of St. Mary's, Charlestown, was created in 1828, it ranged over the large area north of the Charles River.

Then came the Irish immigration of the 1830's and 40's. At first just a few families, with men working in factories, women employed as domestics, and children occupied in an array of tasks, they moved across the bridges into East Cambridge. At this time, the parts of Cambridge were so separated, both physically and psychologically, that no one at Harvard had to pay much attention to the new Catholics in East Cambridge. The attention they did pay was divided. The morning after Protestants burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown in 1834, Royal Morse, an auctioneer, roused the citizenry of the Old Village to guard Harvard against anticipated Catholic retaliation, and about fifty graduates of the college spent the night there, armed with muskets and ball cartridges, prepared to fight the imaginary danger. On the other hand, typical of the intellectuals concerned for civil liberties, Judge Story led a meeting to protest the outrage in Charlestown and to affirm the rights of "our Catholic brethren."

Soon the immigrants overwhelmed the natives, with over a thousand Irish living in East Cambridge in 1840. Through the zealous efforts of the convert Daniel H. Southwick, a Sunday-school was organized there and money was raised for a church. When constituted in 1842, the "St. John's Church," later to become Sacred Heart Parish, comprised the entire towns of Cambridge and Somerville and much to the west. The pastor there, the Rev. John B. Fitzpatrick, was made coadjutor-bishop of the diocese in 1844 and two years later this man, the first priest of the first parish in Cambridge, succeeded Bishop Fenwick as the Bishop of Boston. The Rev. Manasses P. Dougherty was appointed pastor of St. John's.

Fr. Manasses Dougherty

The name of Manasses Dougherty dominates the expansion of Catholicism in this area for the next thirty years. Seeing the necessity for a church in the western part of Cambridge, he built St. Peter's on Concord Avenue in 1848. As one of the frontier churches of Boston, St. Peter's extended over much of the northwest metropolitan area. The original parish limits enclosed Belmont, Lincoln, Lexington, Bedford, Medford, Malden, and Somerville west of Dane Street. Out of St. Peter's, Fr. Dougherty built so many parishes, the last of which was St. Paul, that he received the sobriquet "Founder of Churches."

The continuing arrival and integration of immigrants was not always easy. What was perceived as an Irish flood completely changed the landscape of those who had known the village of Old Cambridge. "Paddy Jokes" appeared in some newspapers and differences between "natives" and "foreign-born" were obvious. Conservatives in the Old Village were petitioning to withdraw from the rest of Cambridge, as were the residents of East Cambridge. But Catholic growth was so rapid that Fr. Dougherty planned to erect a church in Harvard's own neighborhood. John Langdon Sibley, longtime Harvard librarian and historian, noted in his journal in 1846:

The Catholics within a few years have erected a church at East Cambridge and have just purchased five acres to build another church about one mile west from the University buildings. They are very quiet but zealous in all their movements and the time will come when many of the old battles, the theological at least, must be fought over again, and that too in this country. It is incidentally remarked in the paper today that one-quarter of the population of Boston is Catholic.

Zealous, to be sure, but Sibley would hardly have called Catholics quiet once Manasses Dougherty arrived in the Old Village. A classic, energetic pioneer priest, Father Dougherty started his fund drive for St. Peter's in January, 1848, by celebrating Mass in Lyceum Hall (the site of the present Coop) and appealing for subscriptions for the new building on Concord Avenue--the Pilot reported that sixteen thousand dollars were raised. Bishop Fitzpatrick officiated at the laying of St. Peter's cornerstone in July, 1848.

It can hardly be coincidental that in this neighborhood there were two Harvard alumni among the priests present, George F. Haskins, Class of 1826, and Joseph Coolidge Shaw, S.J., Class of 1840, who preached the cornerstone sermon. Fr. Haskins, whose major work was the establishment of the first Catholic reform school in New England, also served as a temporary pastor at St. John's and at St. Peter's during the illnesses of their administrators. One evening in 1859 during Fr. Dougherty's poor health, it was Fr. Haskins who brought him a note from the parishioners with the sum of a thousand dollars for a recuperative vacation in Ireland. No doubt, the mixture of Yankees like Shaw and Haskins into the heavily Irish parish was curious--but the local clergy at this time was mainly foreign Jesuits and local converts. As Catholics were beginning to surround the college, Catholics were also beginning to emerge from within it. So, after years of anti-Popery, Harvard in fact provided some of the clergy who welcomed the first Catholic Church to Harvard Square.

After twenty-five years, the Catholics in the vicinity of Harvard University had grown so much that a "chapel of ease" was needed for their use, and in 1873 the meeting house of the Shepherd Congregational Society (including organ) was purchased at $20,000 for this purpose. The Congregationalists had erected this small wooden structure on the northwest corner of Mt. Auburn and Holyoke Streets (the present site of Holyoke Center) in 1830 and had twice enlarged it. The appropriate alterations were quickly effected, and two days before Christmas the building was opened for the worship of the 1200 Catholics in the area. References to the St. Paul church in its first fifty years regularly name the famed Fr. Manasses Dougherty as the founder, and tablets in the vestibule of both St. Peter's and old St. Paul's marked the memory of the pioneer priest whose funeral in 1877 drew three thousand mourners.

The First Pastor

Fr. Dougherty retained charge of the St. Paul Church until October, 1875, when the district was created a parish and the fiery Rev. William Orr was appointed pastor. The sacramental registers were opened on October 26th with the christening of Alice Callaghan of Flagg Street and the marriage of William Russell of Charles River Street to Catharine Sullivan of Brattle Street. The parish confirmations that year took place at St. Peter's, but two years later Archbishop Williams confirmed 120 young Catholics at St. Paul's, as 100 received their first communion that day.

Fr. Orr was born in the North of Ireland on August 1, 1830. His early education was in the schools there, but he took his classical and theological courses in Maryland. After ordination in 1864, he was appointed assistant at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Lawrence. After two years as pastor in Templeton, where he had eighteen townships to attend, he returned to Lawrence as pastor until 1875. Large-hearted and energetic, Fr. Orr was a popular clergyman devoted to his homeland. His strong North-of-Ireland accent endeared him to a largely Irish flock, many of whom had come to America in the same generation as he. A contemporary account describes him, "Being an Irishman by birth and having such a broad, sympathetic disposition it is only natural that the land of his birth has always had his warmest sympathy and also financial assistance in her struggle for legislative and national independence."

To the Harvard crowd, Fr. Orr's vigorous style was less endearing. It was perhaps natural that he did not share President Eliot's vision of Harvard Square, but he did not even answer correspondence from the coordinator of student religious clubs. One student, John LaFarge of the Class of 1901, was distinctly embarrassed by Orr, as he explains in a later reminiscence of the relationship between Orr and the local character John the Orangeman:

If John the Orangeman meant anarchy on a humble plane, Father Orr spelled anarchy on a lofty scale. It was just conceivable that some being like John might lurk in one of the discreet pews of the Appleton Chapel or even be found loitering momentarily in the corridor of the Fogg Art Museum. But by no stretch of the imagination could anything like Father Orr's sermons be conjectured in Appleton's pulpit nor would its staid walls ever echo to anything like his lurid descriptions of what he saw by night and sometimes by day occurring around his rectory in the rooming houses of Mt. Auburn St., not to speak of his hygienic discussion as to the effect that the taking of a "blue pull" (to rhyme with dull) is apt to have upon a pastor's health. One would have to go back to the early days of the Massachusetts Colony when pulpits were pulpits to find anything resembling the aspersions uttered by Father Orr upon the personal character of John the Orangeman when the latter presented his bewhiskered self for his Easter Duty in a state of general good will but of somewhat uncertain stance and step.

The relationship between church leaders, however, was apparently quite civil--Catholics contributed to the recasting of the bells of Christ Church, and Fr. Orr offered a polite congratulations to the two congregations of the First Church celebrating their 250th anniversary in 1886. Catholic and Protestant clergymen united particularly in the "No-license" movement which banished saloons from Cambridge. By the end of the century, civic leaders took pride in "The Cambridge Idea," a blessing of religious tolerance and public goodwill.

After an initial decade of growth and expansion, the parish undertook its first burst of development in the 1880's, acquiring the cemetery on the Arlington line, building a school and substantially renovating the second-hand church. In accord with the instructions of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, many parishes were then building schools. In early 1889, the Archdiocese paid $17,000 for the estate of the late Gordon McKay, a wealthy sewing-machine manufacturer and Harvard benefactor, on the large sloping lot between Arrow and Mount Auburn. The Cambridge Chronicle reported on April 13 of that year that there was some doubt as to the disposition of the property:

At the time of the sale it was understood that a parochial school was to be erected. Later an idea has gone forth that it would be wiser to erect a new church building. The society has outgrown the present building at the corner of Mount Auburn and Holyoke streets, and at the present date a new church will be imperative shortly. If a new church is built on the McKay estate it is probable that a school will be erected in connection with it.

The school stood for a century, but its twelve classrooms, two large meeting-rooms, and first floor hall for 800 were soon insufficient and had to be augmented by an adjacent brick building, known most recently as the Catholic Student Center. On the McKay estate, Fr. Orr apparently still intended to build a new church and for that reason the school building had been set back in the block leaving open the site where in fact the current church stands.

School enrollment reached its peak in 1914, when the parish celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the school and the new church was being planned. In that year, 990 pupils were registered for the parish school and 412 came for Sunday classes. However, the population of the neighborhood began to decline as residents moved to the suburbs and Harvard purchased land along the Charles River, so that in each subsequent decade the school lost about 150 students. By the 1960's, the school faced not only declining attendance but also a shortage of nuns and was relying increasingly on lay teachers. On June 28, 1968, the remaining few Sisters of Saint Joseph vacated their convent. In 1974 the last class of the St. Paul's parish school graduated, but in a reduced form the enthusiasm and standards of excellence of the Sisters of Saint Joseph continues today in their association with the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School.

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.

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.

Fr. Ryan's New Church

Fr. Orr was succeeded as pastor by his longtime assistant, the prudent Rev. John J. Ryan. A native of Roxbury, Ryan had been editor of the Stylus, head of the student sodality, and prominent in debating, dramatics, and athletics at Boston College. Later in life, he continued to write frequently (for the Pilot and religious magazines) and developed some reputation as a lecturer. He studied for the priesthood in Boston and was ordained by Archbishop Williams at the Cathedral in 1889. The following week he was assigned to St. Paul's, where he spent his entire priestly life, first as Assistant and then as Rector when he succeeded Fr. Orr in March, 1907.

Since the church had established herself in Harvard Square rather late, her choice of suitable property was constrained. Accordingly, Ryan inherited a scattered collection of buildings: a church on Mt. Auburn and Holyoke, two school buildings and a convent several blocks east, a rectory two blocks south (where Lowell House B-C-D entries now stand) in which baptisms and marriages were performed, and within another year there would also be the Newman House at 34 Mt. Auburn Street, given by the Archbishop to the Harvard Catholic Club. Most pressing, however, was the new property further east on Massachusetts Avenue with its heavy mortgage--the site for the proposed church.

After much reflection Ryan returned to Orr's original plan--to build the new church where it stands today, on the former McKay estate. In July, 1915, the convent was torn down and the priests each dug a shovel of earth to break ground for the new church. When the cornerstone of this Italian Romanesque monument to Catholic faith, arts, and education was laid on November 12, 1916, the church was already partly under roof. Before the afternoon Mass and dedication, the Cardinal was met on Putnam Avenue by an escort of the Knights of Columbus, the Holy Name Society, and the Harvard Catholic Club. The pastor's sermon that day spoke of the dangers of the time, and Cardinal O'Connell made the reference explicit, "There is very grave danger, not far distant from this sacred edifice. It is the growing tendency to separate science from faith and spiritual from material forces. Prominent educators are striving to undermine the foundation of all truth, the source of all knowledge, of all life--Christian faith."

The siting and the design of that incredible building reflect Ryan's clear and sophisticated vision of the Catholic Church's role in Harvard Square. The new church was the center of that vision and it should stand tall in the center of the parish, next to the university. He worked well with the Harvard Catholics and the university, and he knew the Catholic Church had an educational opportunity in Harvard Square. He determined to make its presence unmistakably visible and audible. In describing the site to the Cardinal, Ryan wrote, "the church will face Quincy Square, opposite Pres. Lowell's house....This site is the end of the so called 'Gold Coast.'" As Veritas is the motto of Harvard, so the front facade of St. Paul's boldly states the logical priority of "The Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of truth." The tower bell rings out with the inscription from Isaiah, Vox clamantis in deserto--a voice crying out in the wilderness of Harvard Square.

It was Edward T.P. Graham, a parishioner, graduate of Harvard, and winner of the first Travelling Fellowship to Rome and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, who articulated Fr. Ryan's vision in architectural terms. In a career spanning over fifty years he designed dozens of institutional buildings across New England, of which St. Elizabeth's Hospital was the largest. Locally his work ranged from a hall for St. Peter's parish in 1897 to a hundred units in Jefferson Park on Rindge Avenue in 1949. He had recently completed several buildings for St. Mary's in Central Square, when in 1913 he received his first commission from Fr. Ryan, an eight hundred dollar alteration of the Harvard Catholic Clubhouse. Soon afterwards he was asked to design the hundred thousand dollar Church of St. Paul, working with his usual contractor John B. Byrne. The sources for the church and tower were Verona's S. Zeno Maggiore and the Torre del Commune. Throughout experts from European universities were consulted, but parishioners were also involved, such as Martin Feeley for the execution of the decorative colors.

It is impossible at this stage to sort out Graham's ideas from those of Ryan, whose obituary gives him credit for the design, but a complex program of iconography was exploited. The Irish heritage of the parish is prominently displayed by an altar to St. Patrick and a mural of St. Columban, in Ryan's words, "parting with his Irish home and mother, as he and his companions set their faces to the journeys and labors that have immortalized their names." The other characteristic feature of the parish, its aggressive setting beside an expanding secular university, is seen in the choice of the bas-reliefs, St. Paul addressing the philosophers of Athens and inspiring the Ephesians to burn their false books of divination. Moreover, in an appropriate but unusual statement of Catholicism's own scholarly tradition, the stained glass parades the doctors of the church and other intellectual giants: from Athanasius and Ambrose to Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. The last window in the cycle is that of Ignatius of Loyola, whose purpose Fr. Ryan stated was "to combat in the universities of his day the rationalism that culminated in the French Revolution"--a broad view of the Enlightenment but a pointed one for the local audience. The Church's two constituencies are brought together not only in the facing statues of St. Peter (given by the Knights of Columbus) and of St. Paul (in memory of the six Harvard Catholics who died in World War I), but also in the unusual mission mural picturing parishioners and Harvard alumni going off to spread the faith, all under the pastor's benevolent watch and the Cardinal's blessing.

While the church was under construction, fundraising continued apace. The annual field day held in the summer of 1918 drew five hundred parishioners and friends. The Cambridge Chronicle of June 22 recorded several festive activities:

The parish was divided into four districts and each district had a table and booth in the basement of the new church as well as in the parish school where home made candy, fancy articles, ice cream and soft drinks were for sale, presided over by the women of the parish. During the afternoon, sport and field events were held by the children, and dancing in the evening. Special features were held in the afternoon, and there was a road race, over a course of about a mile and a half on the streets around the church for boys under 18, which was won by John Murphy....A potato race was held in the basement of the new church, and a three-legged race for boys furnished much amusement.

After beginning the triduum services in the old building, the parish moved its liturgies to this new church for Easter Sunday, April 1, 1923. Five early Masses that morning were followed by the solemn High Mass at 11 a.m. featuring Mozart's 12th Mass but also including works by Schubert, Tozer, Falkenstein, and Haydn, with orchestral accompaniment. For a year, while the lower church was being finished, three Sunday Masses were held upstairs with the earlier and weekday liturgies still at the old church. At the dedication of the church of a million bricks on October 13, 1924, Cardinal O'Connell devoted half his sermon to praising the priests and people of the parish and half to the juxtaposition of this Catholic church with "a great temple of learning." While giving credit to "the great influential institution" nearby (which he never called by name), O'Connell reminded his audience that centuries ago Oxford and Cambridge also "forgot their duty to their Mother" and have hence missed the way in their campaign for truth. In contrast, "This sacred edifice, this temple of God, possesses the whole truth, the real truth, the fundamental truth."

It is difficult to evaluate O'Connell's involvement with the building of the church. The oral tradition of the parish claims that the Cardinal was opposed to the building of the church, gave not one cent for it, and actively persuaded wealthy Catholic professionals and business people not to support it. Such statements are the natural pride of parishioners in their own work. On the other hand, there is no evidence that O'Connell was anything but helpful. Correspondence shows that he regularly approved the mortgages Fr. Ryan took out on the old church building and appointed Fr. Ryan to important diocesan positions. O'Connell's insistence that the dedication service be a Low Mass, that Fr. Ryan's sermon be short, and that he would not be able to stay for lunch (since he would be tired) were merely par for the course during the busy archbishop's reign. Whatever it actually thought, the excited parish treated the impatient prince of the church to an escort parade, starting on Putnam Avenue. Great credit clearly goes to these parishioners, many of whom had limited resources, and to Fr. Ryan, who organized weekly dime collections as well as field days when the contributions slowed. Although St. Paul's was no longer a very poor parish (the pew rent then totaled twenty-three thousand dollars annually) the ambitious and expensive church tested its limits.

The pastor had not otherwise been idle; he was also developing the property on Massachusetts Avenue. In 1908 one newly acquired house there was rented out to the seven hundred members of the Holy Name Society to give them a headquarters for meetings (and to carry the lot's heavy mortgage). To house the sisters, whose residence on Arrow Street was removed for the church, 1033 Massachusetts Avenue (next to the school annex and the Holy Name Society) was altered for a convent of twenty-five bedrooms, chapel, and reception rooms.

With the church now towering over the river area (there were as yet no Harvard houses), Fr. Ryan's work was almost done. There remained only the matching rectory to be built. In June 1918 Fr. Ryan, alerted by the owner, had obtained permission to purchase at foreclosure a parcel with two houses on Mt. Auburn Street immediately opposite the rear of the new St. Paul's Church and adjacent to the Newman House, commenting to the Cardinal "this property would make an ideal location for a rectory in keeping with the new Church." Later that summer, however, he came down with pneumonia and was forced to take his first vacation in fifteen years. In the summer of 1924, with the new church open, Fr. Ryan despite failing health determined to finish the building program. He bought another house along De Wolfe Street and sold the old church and rectory to Harvard for $85,000 (through a Catholic alumnus as broker). After payment of a $42,000 mortgage, he had over $40,000 on hand towards the cost of his $70,000 rectory--he had built the new church without resulting debt! Graham had already started on the plans for the new rectory, when on April 7, 1925, a stroke of apoplexy ended John J. Ryan's long ministry on Mount Auburn Street.

When Fr. Ryan arrived at St. Paul's as an assistant in 1889, the parish was just undertaking its first major project, building a school. By the time he died as pastor thirty-five years later, St. Paul's was a powerful sign of the Catholic Church in Harvard Square--not only an extraordinary edifice, but also a thriving parish with active societies and over eight hundred school children. In the last five years of his life, he served on the Diocesan Building Commission and as Synodal Examiner and Diocesan Consultor. Before 1914 he had been state chaplain of the Knights of Columbus and at the time of his death he was still council chaplain for Cambridge. His relations with Harvard were vastly superior to his predecessor's. He served as chaplain for the students for several years, and in regard to university expansion, he and the parish committee chaired by the dry-goods merchant J. H. Corcoran felt that Harvard dealt squarely with their concerns. Most conspicuously, he conceived and executed the Church of St. Paul in a way that now seems inevitable. Thinking back to Harvard's petition for a boulevard to absorb much of the open Church property along De Wolfe Street, Fr. Ryan commented in his final days, "The Lord has worked the opposite."

Fr. Hickey and a Changing Parish

Fr. Hickey proved himself as prudent in real estate as his predecessor. Soon after taking the helm at St. Paul's, he sold two unused lots on Ellery Street (using the same realtor with whom Fr. Orr had purchased them almost twenty years before). In particular, although school enrollment was declining, he purchased additional property in order to provide more school playgrounds. In this way the parish acquired the house east of the school on Mt. Auburn as well as several houses on De Wolfe Street, which were later used as a parking lot. He also put permanent windows into the lower church and repaired the convent.

The only building he did not improve was the Newman House. After the Rectory displaced its lodging, the Catholic Club used 8 and 10 De Wolfe as addresses. Slowly the Newman House became less active, and what was called the "Clubhouse" became a parish house. In 1939, 10 De Wolfe was razed for a playground without any mention of Harvard students. The diminished campus ministry, never a particular focus of Hickey's, left a vacuum which the St. Benedict Center filled during the next decade. The student chaplaincy was always assigned to an assistant, but Hickey was willing to intercede at the Chancery for Harvard students who needed Catholic letters of reference for research in Europe or who sought permission to read indexed books (like Gibbon's history and the novels of Fielding, Richardson, and Steme)--although he was not always successful.

As the Harvard Summer School grew, a number of clerics and religious took part in the courses and special programs, both as students and teachers. The parish benefited as visiting priests (including Rev. Fulton Sheen of Catholic University in 1927) filled in as summer replacements. Priests who came to do graduate work during the scholastic year helped with the parish Mass schedule, a resource which has continued to assist St. Paul's even today.

Shortly after he was elevated to domestic prelate in 1937, his own attempt to distribute a small parish bulletin was stymied. The monthly bulletin would just have been four pages the size of a holy card, outlining parish activities and important feast days--alerting the faithful to feasts was always part of Hickey's liturgical mission--but O'Connell's chancery refused him permission, telling him emphatically to "concentrate all efforts on the Pilot which contains all news and sufficient instruction.

Harvard University's expansion did not cease with the building of the Harvard House system in the 1920's and 1930's. Further Houses were added and, as important for the parish, the university acquired apartment houses and other residential property on a large scale. The university cannot be blamed for the demographic shift, since most areas of Boston witnessed a population movement of younger and more affluent families to the suburbs during the post-war period. Harvard Square's distinctive history is that the suburban emigration was accompanied by institutional expansion rather than urban decline or the immigration of new groups.

The parish census numbers show that the community was still growing at the time of World War II, but it was already aging. In fact school enrollments, both parochial and public, had been declining from 1914, just as the new church was being planned. Though baptisms surged during the post-war "baby boom," the number of parishioners peaked in 1947 with 6637 Catholics in the parish boundaries. After 1955, the flight to the suburbs (in many cases no farther than Belmont) accelerated, and by 1970 the Church served only half as many parishioners as it had for the first half of the century. Although it is not clear when and whether students were counted in the rolls, the parish certainly regained strength under Fr. Boles in the late seventies, and since then the number of "souls" has stayed somewhat over 3000.

During Fr. Hickey's forty-year tenure, he was assisted by a number of fine priests, of whom Rev. William G. Gunn (1918-1937) was one of the longest in residence. A noticeable change came after World War II, when the rectory was filled by a completely new set of assistants: Rev. John E. Kenney (1946-61), Rev. Charles B. Murphy (1947-60), Rev. John J. Sullivan (1946-54), and the eventual successor as pastor, Rev. Joseph I. Collins (1946-71).

Msgr. Hickey retired at age 81 on Jan. 18, 1965, and became the first occupant of Regina Cleri, the archdiocese's home for priests in the West End. A small, devout, and proper man, Fr. Hickey was seen as rather intellectual by some parishioners and aloof by some students. He preferred to work quietly, rarely making appeals for funds. However, his formal and introspective nature did not stop him from generously helping those in material need or putting energy into his great love--the liturgy. Although in general his long administration of the parish reflected the nominal stability of the pre-conciliar period, he was an early and active advocate of participation by the laity in liturgy. His greatest legacy to the parish is the work he accomplished with Theodore Marier in building congregational singing and eventually in founding the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. A founder and original board member of the Cambridge Community Federation, he also served as a member of the Cambridge Housing Authority and a director of the Cambridge Red Cross.

It was under the pastorate of Msgr. Hickey that, in 1934, Theodore Marier began fifty years of musical service at St. Paul's, first as organist and then from 1947 as choir director. A graduate of Boston College, he was director of band and music there from 1934 to 1942. In 1940 he received a master's degree from Harvard, and over the course of the years he was also choir director or lecturer at Emmanuel College, Newton College of the Sacred Heart, and Boston University.

As Marier was taking over the choir, Mgsr. Hickey was inspired by the papal encyclical Mediator Dei to encourage congregational participation--quite unusual in a time when the choir or altar boys gave all the responses. It was Marier's experience that the Gregorian Chant was ideally suited both to congregational singing and for musical nourishment. Gradually, the parish developed the habit of singing the Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). In 1958, the Vatican's Instruction on Sacred Music and Sacred Liturgy continued the directive that every parish should have a boys choir but especially encouraged that "every effort must be made that the faithful of the entire world know how to give the responses in chant."

The St. Paul's Choir School began in 1963 with twenty-five students chosen from throughout the archdiocese. Under the direction of Theodore Marier, the young musicians sang in the parish choir with members of the Harvard Catholic Club. Harvard students also helped out with the recreation program. The school was designed as a four-year course for students of academic ability and musical talent, assigning two periods of each school day to music, plus an hour after school. The music program included sight reading, tone placement, appreciation, theory and history, and instrumental studies.

The first years of what was relabeled the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School were extraordinary. The choir made guest appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood, with the Boston Philharmonia, and with the Handel & Haydn Society. Annually they performed with the Boston Ballet in the Nutcracker Ballet, with Arthur Fiedler conducting.

Since the Council

Fr. Collins was spiritual director to the Radcliffe students from his arrival, and, with the merger of the Harvard and Radcliffe chaplaincies in 1960, he became a full-time chaplain, assuming responsibility for the men of the university as well. In the academic year 1963-4 the popular priest served as chairman of the United Ministry at Harvard. Three years after he became pastor, he arranged for the first full-time campus ministry staff for Catholics at the university. Exploiting the energy he first displayed as a Holy Cross cheerleader, Fr. Collins was also active in Cambridge civic groups, including the Unity Commission, the Economic Opportunity Commission, the Boy Scouts, and the American Legion. As a member of the Riverside Neighborhood Association, he helped plan the elderly housing complex at 2 Mt. Auburn Street.

In the seventies, migration to the suburbs had changed the parish environs dramatically, university life had been radically altered, and St. Paul's too underwent a number of shifts. In 1971, Fr. Collins was succeeded as pastor by Msgr. Edward G. Murray, former rector of St. John's Seminary. Three years later, Rev. John P. Boles, D.D., another priest with wide administrative skills and student experience, was appointed to the combined position of Pastor-Chaplain.

Fr. Boles had been Headmaster of St. Sebastian 's Country Day School and Director of Education for the Archdiocese. His goal in 1974 was to bring together the various elements of the Catholic community. Fr. Boles tried to be sensitive to what he called "the reality of the town-gown relationship, staying visible on the campus ministry side and among the community which built the church." Rev. Joseph Fratic, Rev. Paul Hurley, and Rev. Gerald Osterman worked with him to sustain and expand the complex parish ministry. The popular student chaplains of this period were Fr. Thomas Powers, Sr. Evelyn Ronan, S.N.D., and later Fr. John MacInnis and Sr. Mary Karen Powers, R.S.M. In 1986 the guard also changed at the choir school, when Principal John Dunn succeeded Dr. Marier as Music Director. Mr. Dunn first came to St. Paul's as a Harvard freshman in 1960. While still a student, he played organ for the weekly college Mass and taught part-time in the young choir school. He joined the faculty full-time upon graduation and was named principal a decade later. In 1991 he oversaw the move of the choir school into its newly renovated quarters on the location of the former school building.

In May, 1992, after the completion of a new parish center, Fr. Boles was named titular Bishop of Novasparsa and Auxiliary Bishop of Boston. The new pastor turned out to be Harvard graduate Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, an old friend of the parish and frequent guest speaker in the past. While a counselor for social policy at the United States Catholic Conference, Fr. Hehir assisted the bishops in the development of several pastoral letters on that topic. Reassigned from Georgetown University, where he had been a professor of ethics and associate vice president, Fr. Hehir continued his teaching at Harvard--a visible sign of the degree to which the parish's mission has shifted from the days of Fr. Orr. Fr. Hehir left his position as pastor of St. Paul's in 1996 to accept a new position as Counselor at Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore, working on policy issues for that agency, but in 1999 he returned full time to Cambridge, assuming the position of head of the Harvard Divinity School. He still presides at Mass at St. Paul's as time permits.

In 1996 Rev. Monsignor Dennis Sheehan was appointed pastor of St. Paul's and senior chaplain, and in 1999 he launched a capital campaign to refurbish St. Paul's.

In demographic terms, St. Paul's is a young and diverse parish. A well-organized 1983 pew census of 1500 parishioners found that 50% were under 25 years of age, mostly students. Another 35% were between 25 and 45, a certain number of whom lived outside the parish boundaries but are drawn by the quality of liturgies, university association, and parish activities. In a university neighborhood, the parish is naturally quite literate and even literary--when Sally Fitzgerald edited Flannery O'Connor's letters, she took an office in St. Paul's Rectory itself. The increasing diversity of the worshipers at St. Paul's reflects the parish's international and ecumenical awareness.

In 1989 the deteriorating schoolhouse and student center were removed for the construction of a large complex including parish offices, choir school, student center, and rectory. The new building (designed by the firm of Koetter, Kim and Associates and dedicated by Cardinal Law on November 1, 1991) shapes itself physically to the parish's great hall of worship. On top of the new chapel rises the bronze cross which has stood for over a century above the Catholics of Harvard Square.

The consolidation of the parish's scattered properties which Fr. Ryan began at the turn of the century is now achieved--with the brick-patterned church supported by her matching attendants. No one could have foreseen the changes of Harvard Square in the past fifty years, but Fr. Ryan's vision of an enduring landmark has been proved right. "It is a monumental structure," he wrote of the church in 1924, "suited for any demand in the way of religious service and adapted by style of architecture to whatever developments or change of surroundings may arise in this vicinity."