History of Blessed Sacrament Parish

Blessed Sacrament Parish was formed in 1901 from the rapidly expanding population of southeast Rochester. As the city’s new industries grew and attracted increased numbers of workers, people were spreading out from their downtown neighborhoods into the surrounding countryside. Bishop McQuaid founded Blessed Sacrament parish primarily to relieve the overcrowding of worshippers at St. Mary’s Church, but parishioners were drawn here from St. Boniface Church and Corpus Christi Church as well. As the population continued to spread out Monroe, East, and University Avenues, Blessed Sacrament parish was in turn split up to form the parishes of St. John the Evangelist in 1914 and Our Lady of Lourdes in 1926.

Blessed Sacrament Church was the nineteenth Catholic church to be erected in Rochester. At that time, to implement Bishop McQuaid’s vision of the integration of Catholic schools with parish life, the first structure built for the new parish was a two-story building, with one story for the church and the other for the school. The cornerstone of our original red brick church-school building was laid on November 3, 1901, in a grand ceremony attended by 5,000 people. The completed building, dedicated on April 13, 1902, stood on the site of the present parking lot. Then on September 19, 1911, the cornerstone was laid for our current church building. The original building served as a school until 1930, when it was demolished to make room for a parking lot, as more and more parishioners were coming to church by the increasingly popular automobile. The new school building was immediately constructed, and served as our parish school until it was closed in 1990 as part of a diocesan re-structuring of Catholic schools. Since the 1990s, the building has been used by Corpus Christi School.

“The best part of this gift called Blessed Sacrament Church is our diversity: we are young and old rich, and poor, robust and fragile, highly educated and beautifully simple, gay and straight, rich in the experiences of many cultures and peoples, sometimes peaceful and full of joy, sometimes troubled and upset.”

_{~ Fr. Kennedy, Christmas bulletin 2000}

From its founding, our parish school was staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph, for whom the present convent was built in 1939, by combining two Rutgers Street houses.

Our parish has been led since its founding by seven dedicated people:

Rev. Msgr. Thomas F. Connors, Pastor 1901-63

Rev. Msgr. Edward J. McAniff, Pastor 1963-68

Rev. John P. Norris, Pastor 1968-80

Rev. Anthony J. Valente, Pastor 1980-83

Rev. Bruce F. Ammering, Pastor 1983-January, 2000

Sr. Chris Treichel, OSF, Pastoral Administrator February-June, 2000

Rev. Robert J. Kennedy, Pastor 2000-present

Our parish population has naturally changed since 1901, with changes in neighborhood demographics. In the early twentieth century, neighborhoods were ethnically concentrated: ours was mainly German and Irish. During the 1960s, large one family homes, like those on Oxford Street, were broken up into apartments. Since the late 1970s, these apartments have become desirable for young adults, attracted by the renewed commercial life of Park and Monroe Avenues. For over two decades, young adults have made up one-third of our parish population. And with the softening of the sense of a parish as a geographically bounded entity, Blessed Sacrament has attracted parishioners from all parts of the Rochester area. Today, half of us live outside the neighborhood.

Parishioners celebrate the passages of their lives at Blessed Sacrament. In our first century alone, Blessed Sacrament Church had 11,629 baptisms, 5048 weddings, and 4724 funerals.