St. Mary's Church in Lancaster, PA

 

I was in Lancaster, PA. last week. Lancaster is a beautiful and very old (by American standards) city located in the Pennsyvania Dutch country. The original settlers weren't Dutch - they were German (deutsch).

The church in the pictures is St. Mary's, which was built on the site of a log chapel first used by German Jesuit priests to celebrate mass around 1742. St. Mary's is the 4th oldest Catholic congregation in what is now America.

Interestingly, by the mid-1850s the immigrant Irish outnumbered the Germans at St. Mary's so a new church was built for the Germans. The name? Why, St. Joseph's, of course!