Rev. Edward A. Knight (1851-62)
A new church in a young city, the first St. Peter’s was a modest building, and remained so through its first decades. That changed with the arrival in 1851 of Father Edward Knight, St. Peter’s eighth pastor.
Born in Maryland in 1804, Father Knight was a convert to Catholicism. For much of his priesthood he was a member of the Society of Saint Sulpice and taught at Saint Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. He retired from the Sulpicians and moved to Washington when he was tapped to lead St. Peter’s.
We don’t know a great deal about Father Knight’s background, but he reportedly owned property. Out of his own pocket, he helped finance major improvements to St. Peter’s church building: confessionals, a choir gallery, and a belfry were constructed along the new east aisles of the church. During his pastorate, in about 1855, two parishioners, John Fitzpatrick and Thomas Bayne, purchased from a fire department in Baltimore a bell for the new belfry. That same bell rings from our church today.
Father Knight died in 1862, while still pastor of St. Peter’s. He was buried either in ground on the north side of the church or in the old St. Peter’s cemetery at 4th and H Streets NE, but he was eventually reinterred at Mount Olivet Cemetery, in Northeast Washington. There a visitor will find two headstones marking his grave – the one from his original resting place and a newer one erected for his reinterment, which commemorates him simply as “Priest of St. Peter’s Church.”
* * * *
Rev. Jeremiah O’Sullivan (1878-85)
Many current parishioners well remember Father Michael O’Sullivan, pastor for nearly 35 years, until his retirement in 2005. But he was not the first Irish-born O’Sullivan to lead our parish. That would be Father Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the eleventh pastor of St. Peter’s.
Our first Fr. O’Sullivan was born in Kanturk, County Cork, in 1842. We don’t know when he emigrated, but he was ordained in Baltimore in 1868, having studied at St. Mary’s Seminary (where, coincidentally, Fr. Knight had taught some years earlier). He was assigned to be assistant pastor of St. Peter’s in July 1878, but was quickly named pastor, in November of that same year. Church records reveal nothing of his years as pastor here. But he must have distinguished himself because in 1885 he was named bishop of Mobile, at the time a diocese that encompassed the entire state of Alabama plus the Florida panhandle.
His consecration as bishop took place not in Mobile, however, but at St. Peter’s, presided over by Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore and two fellow bishops. Bishop O’Sullivan died in August 1896, while still in office, and is buried in the cathedral crypt in Mobile.