Welcome to Saint Vincent Archabbey

From The Sportsman's Hall Parish Later Named Saint Vincent 1790-1846, By Omer U. Kline, O.S.B., Published by Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, 15650-1690, U.S.A. © 1990, 1998 by Omer U. Kline. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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Father McGirr's friend,
Father Gallitzin
Father McGirr arrived on the scene and took charge of the Sportsman's Hall congregation in the beginning of March 1821, when he was thirty-nine years of age. Father McGirr was a native of Ireland who had been educated for the priesthood at Saint Patrick's College, Maynooth where he received the Doctor of Divinity. It is not certain when he arrived in America, but we do know from church registers in Philadelphia that he ministered in that city off and on from 1813 until 1820. It is also known that Father McGirr was in Pittsburgh in 1824, where he bought a lot adjoining Old Saint Patrick's Church and built a house. Father Vincent Huber, O.S.B., writing in 1892, described the new pastor of the Sportsman's Hall Parish as follows: "Father McGirr was a singular character; he was good at heart, faithful to his duties, ready for every hardship, humble, obliging and kind to the poor; but his outer deportment was not in keeping with the dignity of his priestly character. In conversation he was rough, uncivil, unreserved, harsh and often extremely overbearing and imperious."

Father McGirr, at the time of his death, was sixty-nine years of age. He was buried in the little cemetery in Ebensburg next to the Catholic Church - then called Saint Patrick's; now under the patronage of the Holy Name of Jesus.