St. Andrew Catholic Parish in Sag Harbor To Celebrate 150th Jubilee of Church Building

Parishioners of St. Andrew Catholic Church in Sag Harbor will kick off a half-year of celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the completion of the church with a special Mass at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday, June 17. The opening Mass will be followed by a parish cocktail party.

The festivities will continue on August 12, when the Most Reverend Robert J. Coyle, the auxiliary bishop and vicar of the eastern end of the Rockville Centre Diocese, will preside over the reconsecration of the church at a 5:15 p.m. Mass, which will also be followed by a parish party.

The celebration will conclude on December 2, when the parish gathers to celebrate the feast of St. Andrew at another Mass at 5:15 p.m. As part of the observance, the parish is putting together a commemorative journal that will be distributed celebrating the feast of St. Andrew.

In 1830, the Catholic population of the village numbered about 75 people, including male laborers and servant girls. All were Irish, except for one Portuguese family. The Reverend Patrick Moran of Newark began to visit the village in 1832 to minister to the spiritual needs of the small flock. Two years later, the Reverend Patrick Carraher visited the village on his way to make a sick call on Shelter Island. He said Mass, heard confessions and baptized children.

Although St. Andrew Parish was officially founded in 1836 in the home of Michael Burke, a 28-year-old London mechanic, making it the first Catholic parish outside of Brooklyn on Long Island, the congregation would have to wait until 1840 to be visited by another priest, the Reverend Andrew Byrne, who visited in 1840 and said the first Mass in a temporary church building.

The parish’s first resident priest, the Reverend Joseph Brunnerman, who arrived in 1859, purchased a parsonage and opened the parish school and consecrated the parish cemetery in 1860.

Work began on the new church in 1871, with the cornerstone laid on June 16, 1872. The cornerstone contained coins, a contemporary newspaper, and a memorial in Latin detailing the day and its participants and noting that it was the reign of Pope Pius IX, Ulysses S. Grant was president, and John T. Hoffman was governor of New York.

The Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary came to the village in 1877 and took over teaching in St. Andrew School and opened the Academy of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The academy closed in 1970 and is now the Sag Harbor Elementary School.

In 1894, when the Reverend Lawrence J. Guerin was pastor, he arranged to have a mission church, now Most Holy Trinity parish, built in East Hampton Village as well as Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Catholic Church in Southampton, with another mission church soon established in Bridgehampton.

St. Andrew was enlarged and modernized starting in 1923 under the direction of the Reverend Peter L. Rickard, who installed the current altar and Communion rail.

Following World War II, with the availability of new cars, parishioners began to complain that they could not find parking spaces near the church, so the home of Henry Packer Dering, who had been the first tax collector of the Port of New York was moved to its current location on Garden Street, allowing the parish to have a parking lot.

The church suffered a near calamitous fire on August 7, 1964. The pastor, the Reverend John Ennis, and his associate, the Reverend John Drab, launched a major fundraising drive to help repair the building.

The centennial of the church building was observed in 1973, and today, the Reverend Peter Devaraj serves as the pastor.