Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help

The Parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was established by Bishop Charles Edward McDonnell in November 1892 to serve the Catholic residents of what was then a rural stretch of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The territory was carved from the parishes of Our Lady of Angels and St. Michael. The Redemptorists purchased an entire city block bounded by 59th and 60th Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues in November 1892 for about $40,000. The first Mass was celebrated on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1893, in the Morse family house on 54th Street and Fourth Avenue, with 350 people attending the first parish Masses in the wooden rectory on December 8, 1893. A wooden frame church on Fifth Avenue between 59th and 60th Streets was dedicated by Bishop McDonnell on January 14, 1894. On May 6, 1894 the Redemptorists began the devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the parish, distributing prayer cards, and in December of that year a copy of the icon, brought from Rome, was installed in the new church, inaugurating what became the famous Perpetual Novena. Within ten years a large elementary school was built (the Sisters of St. Joseph arrived to staff it in 1896). Plans for a much larger church were always in mind, and groundbreaking on the present granite and limestone Romanesque church took place in 1907; the Lower Church was opened for services in 1909, while construction on the Upper Church continued for nearly two decades. The cornerstone for the Upper Church was laid in 1925 and the completed church was opened in 1928. Designed by Boston architect F. Joseph (Franz Joseph) Untersee, the basilica was built as a double-tiered church modeled on the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi in Assisi. At the time of completion the parish was largely Irish in character—so much so that the area was nicknamed "Irish Hill," and memorial windows bear the names of founding families such as Collins, Brennan, Wade, Connors, Burns, McCaffrey, Healy and Coffey. Beginning with the perpetual novena preached here in the 1930s, two Redemptorist chaplains—Father Joseph Manton among them—carried the devotion to Ireland during World War II, and from there the perpetual novena spread to England, Africa, the Philippines, India and Singapore. On Saturday, November 1, 1969, Pope Paul VI raised the church to the status of Minor Basilica via the Pontifical Decree Quamquam Christianus (dated September 15, 1969); Father Joseph Manton, a son of the parish, preached the inaugural homily. Through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the parish demographics shifted to a predominantly Hispanic, Chinese and Vietnamese congregation, and the basilica was renovated repeatedly: in particular, a magnificent mosaic of the icon was installed in the Lower Church's semicircular oak shrine, while the Upper Church's "Golden Shrine" gleams in marble beneath a star-studded blue dome. In 2017 the parish celebrated its 125th Anniversary Jubilee, with a Mass celebrated by Bishop James and attended by Father Michael Brehl, C.SS.R., Superior General of the Redemptorists. Because of its size and central location, the basilica serves as the de facto pro-cathedral of the Diocese of Brooklyn for major diocesan services such as ordinations, and is frequently the venue for large funeral Masses of NYPD officers and FDNY firefighters killed in the line of duty. The parish operates the Juan Neumann Immigration Center, a food pantry, a Chinese senior citizens' group, an OLPH Catholic Academy (the parish school, which closed in 2020 after declining enrollment), and leases space to a pre-kindergarten program and to Lutheran Medical Center outreach clinics.