When Fr. James O’Brien arrived as St. Peter’s new pastor in April 1888, we have to hope he was ready to hit the ground running. Fund raising for a new church building was already underway, and demolition of the existing church began just a year later. In the three decades to follow, he would oversee significant changes to the physical plant as well as two major anniversaries of the parish.

The church Fr. O’Brien inherited was by then 67 years old and no longer adequate for a growing parish. The advent of a new church was evidently cause for great celebration, and not just in the parish: At a ceremony on September 15, 1889, a parade marched from McPherson Square to St. Peter’s where Cardinal James Gibbons presided over the laying of the cornerstone, to music by the Marine Band conducted by John Philip Sousa. 

St. Peter’s second church, which in its basic outlines looks much like the one we worship in today, was dedicated in September 1890. Five years later Fr. O’Brien proposed the construction of a new altar for the church, to be in place for the parish’s 75th anniversary in 1896. The Jubilee Altar, as it is known, still stands as the high altar in the current St. Peter’s. Its dedication, too, was accompanied by great ceremony -- a solemn pontifical Mass with choir and a full orchestra.

Apparently not one to rest for long, Fr. O’Brien a few years after that initiated the construction of a new rectory to replace a smaller one that had been built in 1834. The imposing grey-stone residence, which still houses St. Peter’s priests, was a far cry from the four-room cottage on the C Street side of the church that served as the first rectory!

In 1920, St. Peter’s commemorated its Centennial with a four-day celebration, and marked the occasion with the installation of electricity in the church and rectory. Now-Msgr. O’Brien (he received that honor in 1914) celebrated the 50th anniversary of his priesthood at the same time.

Fr. James O’Brien was our longest-serving pastor – by a matter of weeks. He and Fr. Michael O’Sullivan (1970-2005) are virtually tied for that honor, each of them having been at St. Peter’s just shy of 35 years. No other pastor comes close. By December 1922, when his health began to fail and he retired, Fr. O’Brien had been a priest for 52 years, well over half of them at St. Peter’s. In that time, he oversaw the physical transformation of St. Peter’s into the parish we celebrate today.