For nearly two centuries, this chapel has endured in Boston
Sometimes called the Westminster Abbey of Boston’s first Catholics, St. Augustine Chapel is rich in tributes to their glories and struggles.
THE PROCESSION trudged down Tremont Street that cold day with the disinterred body of the Rev. Francis Matignon, crossing a bridge out of the old town and climbing up a grassy hillside on what was then called Dorchester Neck.
It was there that Boston’s small but resilient flock of Catholics had paid $680 for a rocky patch of land where, on Dec. 21, 1818, they could finally bury their dead.
The consecration of a Catholic cemetery represented a remarkable step toward tolerance in a land where not long before, priests could be imprisoned or executed. So virulent was the hostility in Colonial Boston that each year on “Pope’s Day,” mobs of predominantly Protestant laborers burned effigies of the pontiff.
In that bucolic cemetery in what is now South Boston, the congregation built a compact, brick chapel. They called it St. Augustine, and it has endured for nearly two centuries. The oldest Catholic church still standing in Massachusetts, it will be the focus of an unfolding bicentennial celebration, starting next year.
That burst of attention may finally remove St. Augustine from the roster of historic landmarks that most Bostonians, even those who think they know the city and its heritage well, know nothing of — and walk right by.
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