St. Mary's Church is a Roman Catholic house of worship on Lodge Street in downtown Albany, New York, United States.

Clarence A. Walworth, a convert from Episcopalianism, who was the first advocate for the sainthood of Kateri Tekakwitha, among other contributions to the Church, was pastor of St. Mary's for most of the late 19th century and was responsible for much of the look of the current building, inside and out.

[3] The church is a two-and-a-half-story, three-by-six-bay brick structure with marble trim on a cut bluestone foundation,[9] gradually exposed towards the rear by the slope of the underlying land.

At the top, brick corbels on stone bases support the broad overhanging eave of the pyramidal roof, clad in green tile.

[1]: 2 In the church vestibule is a baptismal font, made of white Carrara marble with a pewter upper covering and silver basin.

[11] Inside, a gallery runs around the sides and back on the upper story, supported by clustered columns in a French Gothic style.

Atop one altar are carved wooden statues of four saints—Isaac Jogues, Elizabeth Ann Seton, John Neumann and Kateri Tekakwitha—all of whom had at least a tangential connection to the church during their lives.

Anticipating that Jogues would likely be killed by his captors, Arent van Curler helped the priest to escape, hiding him in his barn until a deal could be reached and the Frenchman put on a ship to take him downriver to New Amsterdam.

[15] Church lore holds that Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the Revolutionary War, attended Mass on one or both of his visits to Albany during his 1824–25 American tour, but no contemporary newspaper records that he did.

Later that year, the congregation asked Bishop John Dubois for assistance in recruiting nuns to run the school and take care of the parish's orphans.

[15] Among the many contributors to the $12,000 ($343,000 in 2023 dollars[16]) construction cost were Stephen Van Rensselaer III, a former lieutenant governor descended from the Dutch family that had owned and governed most of the Albany area as patroons during the colonial era, and another former lieutenant governor of Dutch extraction, Martin Van Buren, later elected President of the United States.

In June, a newly ordained priest, John Neumann, celebrated a Mass at St. Mary's on the way to his first assignment in Western New York; he would later serve as the first Bishop of Philadelphia and was canonized in 1977.

[15] The new bishop, John Hughes, came into conflict with the trustees of St. Mary's and some of the other new churches upstate over their poor financial management and large debts.

In 1848, construction began one mile (1.6 km) to the south on the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, designed by Irish immigrant Patrick Keely.

An assistant priest at St. Mary's founded the local chapter of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul after the fire to help the victims.

Several members of the congregation who had become prominent in the community spoke out against the Know Nothings, and in 1859 the exiled Irish nationalist leader William Smith O'Brien, a Protestant, broke a self-imposed pledge of neutrality to condemn them while speaking at St.

During the Civil War in the early 1860s, structural defects in the church, possibly a result of its speedy construction three decades earlier, became apparent.

Before that, he invited a friend and fellow Episcopalian convert, Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, to the church to give a lecture.

[15] New York had amended its laws on the organization of nonprofit institutions during the Civil War, and Walworth took advantage of this to reincorporate the church in a way more amenable to Catholic governance.

[11] The Stations of the Cross had been purchased from a church in Germany five years earlier; bronze plaques with their English names cover the original German.

A year later, his Vicar General, Edgar Wadhams, another longtime friend of Walworth's, presided over the consecration of a new marble altar, donated by state historian Edmund O'Callaghan, a parishioner.

Three years later the church joined others in Albany and New York in celebrating McCloskey's elevation to cardinal, the first American-born priest to attain that rank.

[1] Ten years later, the church celebrated again when Daniel Manning, once one of its former altar boys, was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Grover Cleveland.

At a special Mass attended by Catholic Mohawks, Walworth traced the history of the Church in Albany from Isaac Jogues' escape on the site of St. Mary's to the present.

In 1892, Walworth told Bishop Francis McNeirny that his failing health and increasing blindness made it impossible for him to carry on his pastoral duties alone.

Electricity and lighting were also installed, making St. Mary's the first church in Albany with that amenity, and the new bishop, Thomas Burke, presided over the reopening service.

He was joined by Archbishop Sebastiano Martinelli, Apostolic Delegate, or ambassador, of the Holy See to the United States, in celebrating a Pontifical Mass.

He was buried in his family plot in Saratoga Springs, but the next year a well-attended secular memorial to him was held at the local Odd Fellows' hall.

Two years later, he opened a school in a building nearby, operated by members of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate, dedicated to the education of the African American community.

Four years later, the first annual Red Mass for lawyers and judges was held at St. Mary's due to its proximity to the state, county, and city government buildings of downtown Albany.