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Japanese Christian Pure wrote this page. We have no connection with the parish, whose own website is spcolr.org.
Several churches around New York are called Our Lady of Victory, one of them in the Bronx, and the one in the Financial District is the small red-brick Catholic church at 60 William Street, on the corner of Pine, a block north of Wall Street, with the office towers standing over it. Archbishop Francis Spellman founded it in 1944, while the Second World War was still being fought, and it is known to this day as the War Memorial Church. Since May 2023 it has been part of St Peter’s parish on Barclay Street, and Mass is said there every day of the week.
Founded before the war was won
Spellman was Archbishop of New York in those years and military vicar of the American armed forces as well, so the Catholics in uniform were his people too. In 1944 victory was in sight and nobody could promise it yet, and that was the year he started a parish in the Financial District and called it Our Lady of Victory, with the victory still to come. It had no church at first, only temporary quarters down the street at 23 William Street.
The ground at the corner of William and Pine came from Major Edward Bowes, and in those years you would not have needed to ask who that was. Millions of Americans listened to his Amateur Hour on the radio, Frank Sinatra and Beverly Sills went on it when nobody had heard of them, and in 1937 the Treasury Department named him as having the sixth-highest personal income in the country. He gave the site to Spellman and never saw the church dedicated, because he died in June 1946, a year before the ceremony.
Eggers & Higgins designed the church in red brick in the Georgian manner, and it was finished in 1946, small enough for the office towers around it to swallow. Land down there was already so dear in the 1940s that they put the rectory on top of the church, where most parishes would have it alongside. Cardinal Spellman, as he had become by then, dedicated the finished building on 23 June 1947.
A reviewer from the magazine Ship of Fools went to Mass there in 2011 and was surprised, going in, by how much light there was, and by the art deco figures of Christ the King and Our Lady of Victory set against mahogany, and by a chrome streamline tabernacle on a marble plinth before the altar. Outside, one statue of Our Lady of Victory stands over the Pine Street door and another beside the William Street door.
The words over the door
In the vestibule, over the main door into the body of the church, are these words of Cardinal Spellman, and whoever comes in that way comes in under them:
“This Holy Shrine is dedicated to Our Lady of Victory in Thanksgiving for Victory won by our Valiant dead, our soldiers’ blood, our Country’s tears, shed to defend men’s rights and win back men’s hearts to God.”
He is giving thanks, and he has hardly started before he is counting what it cost, the dead first, then the blood, then a country’s tears. Only at the very end does he say what it was all for. Soldiers can defend men’s rights, and these soldiers had, but nobody ever won a heart back to God with a rifle, so the last part of that sentence was still to be done when the fighting stopped. People from the offices of the Financial District have been walking in under it for nearly eighty years.
The parish church of Wall Street
Many of the people walking in are on their way back to a desk, and a marker on the corner of Pine and William, put up some time after September 2001, tells how the days went: confessions heard for three hours every weekday, 21 Masses on a holy day of obligation, thousands coming for their ashes on Ash Wednesday, the Angelus and the Rosary said aloud every day, and the bells ringing on the hour across the Financial District. Ship of Fools says it is often called the parish church of Wall Street, and that there is a running joke about attendance going up when the markets go down. We can only laugh at that if we have never prayed harder in the week the money ran short.
A media consultant walked past the church one day, feeling down, and went in, and there he “found peace,” as he told Catholic New York in 2022, almost thirty years later. While he sat there he learned there was a Mass at lunchtime, so he started coming, since it only took half an hour and he could still go out and get something to eat.
Father Myles Murphy, who was pastor in 2022, told the Broadsheet, the downtown paper, that as Lower Manhattan has filled with residents the church has more and more become a parish where people live as well as worship, though many still work nearby, live elsewhere and think of it as their “spiritual home away from home.” When public Mass was suspended for several months in the pandemic, he said, the church itself never closed and confessions went on. Its bells had been ringing over the markets for a long time by then, and in that same year of 2022 the New York Stock Exchange invited him to come and ring theirs.
The same marker remembers 11 September 2001, which it says touched the members of this community, and it tells us that many people were missing and dead and asks prayers for them and for their families, which we can still give. “Founded in a time of conflict,” it says of the parish, and it closes with a verse from the First Letter of John, “this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith” (1 John 5:4).
Is Our Lady of Victory still open?
Yes, and on a weekday you can still walk in at lunchtime. In November 2026 the parish lists weekday Masses at 8:15 a.m. and 12:15 p.m., Saturday Mass at 9:00 a.m., and Sunday Masses at 11:00 a.m. and at 6:00 p.m., the evening one being for young adults, with confessions from 12:45 to 1:15 on weekdays and adoration on Wednesdays from 12:45 to 1:45. Times change, so look at the parish’s own schedule before you make the trip.
In changes announced in November 2014, under the archdiocese’s Making All Things New plan, Our Lady of Victory was joined to St Andrew’s near City Hall, the old Printers’ Church, where for more than fifty years a Mass was said at 2:30 in the morning for the night workers on the newspapers of Printing House Square. We think those two belonged together, since each had learned to keep the hours of the people working around it.
Then on 10 May 2023 Cardinal Timothy Dolan signed a decree merging that parish with St Peter – Our Lady of the Rosary, and he gave his reasons, among them how near the two were to each other, the shortage of priests and the challenges left by the COVID-19 pandemic. St Peter’s on Barclay Street became the parish church, and of Our Lady of Victory the decree says that it “will maintain a regular schedule of Masses and the celebration of other sacraments.” The parish’s own page says the merger was in 2022, but the decree has its date on it. St Peter’s is the first Catholic parish in New York, established in 1785, so a parish born in the middle of the Second World War is now joined to one older than the Constitution, and together they go by the name St Peter’s Church – Our Lady of Victory.
Why is she called Our Lady of Victory?
The feast of that name goes back, by the account Word on Fire gives, to 7 October 1571, when the fleet of a Christian league beat the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Pope Pius V, who had called on the faithful in Rome to pray the Rosary for it, then added a feast of Our Lady of Victory to the Roman calendar, and his successor Gregory XIII changed its name to the feast of the Holy Rosary. The old Catholic Encyclopedia tells it a little differently, with Pius V ordering a commemoration of the Rosary and no feast of Our Lady of Victory named at all. Catholics call on Mary by titles like this one because they are asking for her prayers, the way any of us might ask a friend. Spellman’s dedication talks only about the war he was living through, and we have found nothing to say whether he had Lepanto in mind when the name was chosen.
When Cardinal Dolan’s decree had to name the merged parish, until the people could propose a new name, it simply strung the old names together, so that “Our Lady of the Rosary” and “Our Lady of Victory” came to stand side by side in one title. We doubt anybody planned that. Four and a half centuries earlier, on Word on Fire’s account, those were two names for one feast.
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