People gathered at St. Mary, Star of the Sea Catholic Church on a drizzly Saturday afternoon in October to commemorate the church’s 150th anniversary.

The church’s steeple, adorned with blue trim, has long been a fixture overlooking Grand Avenue. Stained-glass windows filter sunlight onto dozens of wooden pews, each equipped with a paperback prayer book.

One of the city’s oldest church parishes, St. Mary was christened in October 1874 after several soldiers stationed at Fort Stevens made contributions toward the construction of a Catholic church.

In 1896, an adjoining school was built, initially dubbed the Holy Names Academy. After decades of financial difficulties, Star of the Sea, the oldest and last Catholic school on the Oregon Coast, closed in 2011.

Next fall, the white stone school building is set to reopen as Harbor Christian Academy, a kindergarten-through-second grade private school that has pledged to add one new grade level per year through eighth grade.

“People are excited about that,” said Rev. William Oruko, the church’s pastor. “From the community around here, to Knappa and Seaside, all those who would like to bring their kids to a Christian academy.

“They want to instill faith as the source of their wisdom and knowledge and also life. To some parents, that really means a lot.”

‘Truly a rock’

Oruko, originally from Kenya, arrived in Astoria in 2017 after serving parishes in Tennessee for over a decade. He found the history of St. Mary, Star of the Sea inspiring, and said many things have kept it alive throughout the years.

“One time we had a water storm in the school building … When they came to do some assessment, to repair the damage, they said that the building was solid, truly a rock,” Oruko said. “And it was not only just the school building, it was also the church.

“The priests who came here, missionaries, the nuns, all those over the years, they left something solid. What makes this church stand in spite of disasters, or weather? There is faith.”

The congregation, Oruko said, is made up of around 200 people. The church has maintained a strong collection of parishioners despite the challenges posed by the closure of the school, the COVID-19 pandemic and the decadeslong decline in church attendance across the United States.

“I came here right after a big storm,” said Rev. Ken Sampson, who was the church’s pastor when the school closed. “This whole church was compromised, all the walls, everything was cracked. So for three years, every day at 3 o’clock I went home and put on painting clothes, and we repaired walls.

“I learned a whole lot about God’s providence. And though we had no money, the people just gave generously of their labor and their time, and donated materials and everything. We didn’t have any money in the bank, so we made it work. I guess that’s just the long story of Astoria. We’ve withstood a lot of challenges over the decades.”

Due to its location on a hill, the church building survived the Great Astoria Fire of 1922, which destroyed much of central Astoria. St. Mary’s Hospital, built in 1905, was one of the only buildings near downtown to survive the blaze.

The hospital was largely demolished in 1975, though its west wing addition is now the Owens-Adair Apartments for low-income seniors at 15th and Exchange streets.

The parish also survived the fraught politics of the 1920s, a time when the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted Catholics and many others, had a stronghold.

In the 1940s, during World War II, when Astoria saw a boom in population from a naval base at Tongue Point and the use of Fort Stevens as a military base, St. Mary’s masses were crowded to capacity every week.

As more people became interested in the parish over the decades, St. Mary’s reached out to the west, opening a mission chapel in Hammond in 1960 known as the St. Francis de Sales Mission. Services are still held there every Saturday.

‘That carries through’

Sister Adele Marie Altenhofen, who was the principal of St. Mary, Star of the Sea School from 1997 until 2003, serves as the president of the Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon.

She believes prayer, resilience and steadfast faith have been cornerstones of the church’s past and continuing legacy, and that several local families had rich histories dating back to the initial formation of the parish.

“They were very proud of what they had accomplished,” Altenhofen said. “Not only as people who were rooted in whatever the economy was, but people rooted in their sense of belonging to this faith community.

“And I think that kind of resilience, that kind of being rooted in their faith and the sense of the community that they had, I think that carries through, whether they’re here in person now or whether they’re showering it down upon us as they look from heaven.”