NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
When Father Joseph Alemany, O.P., immigrated to the United States from Spain in 1840, fewer than 400 people lived in the village of Yerba Buena, California. By 1851, when Alemany arrived as bishop, the village had been renamed San Francisco and was home to almost 40,000 residents.
Both events—Alemany’s appointment to the newly created Diocese of Monterey and the city’s mushrooming population—stemmed from the 1848 discovery of gold nearby. In the wake of that find, men and women from around the world came pouring into the city. Along with them came saloons, gambling halls, and brothels. To that mission field, Rome sent Alemany.
While the bishop established schools and hospitals, he also made plans for a cathedral—a beautiful, centrally located building that bore silent witness to God in a city filled with debauchery and dissipation.
To put those plans into action, he hired two architects who modeled the new cathedral’s design on a church in Alemany’s hometown. They then contracted with granite suppliers in China and brick makers in New England to ship the necessary materials across the Pacific and around Cape Horn.
On July 17, 1853, Bishop Alemany laid the cornerstone for the future St. Mary’s Cathedral. Seventeen months later, on Christmas Eve, the church opened its doors for Mass. Above those doors was a message, carved in stone for those who walked the city’s streets: “Son, Observe the Time and Fly from Evil.”
Unfortunately, few listened, and by 1884, when Alemany retired as archbishop of San Francisco, brothels and saloons flanked the cathedral on all sides. For that reason, his successor, Archbishop Patrick Riordan, built San Francisco a new cathedral in a better neighborhood.
Old St. Mary’s, however, still stands. Fire gutted her in 1906, but the Paulist Fathers quickly rebuilt and carried on the work begun by Archbishop Alemany: proclaiming Christ to the wounded and weak.
