St Mary Star of the Sea is a Roman Catholic parish church in West Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

On 28 July 1862, the Rev Simon Riordan chaired a public meeting which resolved to erect an entirely new church to serve North and West Melbourne.

In 1875, Archbishop James Alipius Goold visited the parish and informed the priest and parishioners that the building was not adequate for divine worship.

Archbishop Goold laid the foundation stone on 9 December 1883, but the death of Dean England, and a shortage of funds, halted construction.

A young and as yet unknown architect, Edgar J. Henderson, tendered plans for a grandiose sandstone cruciform in the French Gothic style.

Remarkably, in the face of devastating poverty, parishioners managed to fund ongoing construction, and church was built in eight years.

Henderson's rose windows, battered plinths, cylindrical turrets, and soaring groined timber ceiling exemplify the French Gothic Revival.

Local Catholic newspaper The Advocate remarked that "The congregation has literally emerged from the worst ecclesiastical building in the colony to enter one of the finest.

On 12 February, Archbishop Bartolomeo Cattaneo, the apostolic delegate, dedicated the new marble high altar and consecrated the completed church.

The graves of many of St Mary's early parishioners still lie beneath the Queen Victoria Market a few hundred metres eastward.

Daniel Mannix, as coadjutor bishop to Archbishop Carr, resided at St Mary's and served as parish priest of West Melbourne from 1913 until 1917.

While serving as parish priest he effectively led the campaign against Australians being conscripted to fight in the World War then raging overseas.

In 2001, Archbishop George Pell entrusted the parish to the priests of Opus Dei, a personal prelature of the Catholic Church.

For the same financial reasons, St Mary's did not undergo the renovations which occurred in so many Catholic churches in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.

Thomas Hazell AO, an experienced public servant and committed restorationist, acting as Deputy Chairman, headed the restoration project.

Dennis Payne, the chief architect, led a specialist team widely recognised for expertise in heritage buildings and places of worship.

Some of the stencils relate directly to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's restorations at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, whilst others derive from Augustus Pugin's designs for the Houses of Parliament at Westminster.

To enable Mass to be offered by the priest facing the congregation, construction of a permanent marble altar coram populum accompanied the restoration project.

The church is traditional in form, consisting of a tall gable-roofed nave, a crossing and intersecting transepts, with a hipped polygonal apse at the western end.

The flêche is further embellished with a row of projecting decorative elements at the base of the spire, and a Latin cross, once gilded, at the apex.

The total interior length, from east to west, is 53 metres (175 ft) long, or, as described in a contemporary source: 'nearly three chains, or three times the width of Bourke Street'.

The bulk of the east–west portion of the church is 21 metres (68 ft) wide, and comprises a nave, flanked by two aisles and three pairs of projecting alcoves, three of which are used as confessionals.

The sanctuary is flanked by a pair of chapels, dedicated to the Sacred Heart (south) and the Blessed Virgin Mary (north).

The sanctuary and chapels are separated from the nave and transept by a white marble altar rail, installed in 1927, which is pierced by repetitive quatrefoils.

Scagliola columns are traditionally made by forming a substrate of thin strips of metal or wood which are lathed and covered with a coating of lime and hair.

The dense and highly polished finish is achieved by rubbing with pumice, charcoal, linen cloth and, finally, felt impregnated with oil.

[3] While building St Mary's organ, in September 1899, Fincham suffered a paralytic stroke, from which he fully recovered.