The Old Adobe Mission gets the visitors, and it deserves them. But the white adobe on Brown Avenue was a parish church for only about twenty years. The congregation that built it by hand moved east in 1956, and what it built there (a school, a bigger church, a pageant, a ministry to the Yaqui village) is the part of the story almost nobody tells. Our Lady of Perpetual Help, OLPH to everyone who belongs to it, is still at 7655 E. Main St., on the corner of Miller Road. It is the living institution of the families who made the bricks.
This note draws mainly on the parish’s own published history, the city’s 2001 historic register report on the mission, the Salt River Stories project, and the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill’s archive. Those sources don’t always agree, and we say where.
Before the parish: lots, bricks and a naming condition
The ground came first. The city’s historic register report says the Rev. Antimo Nebreda signed a warranty deed on March 22, 1926, buying three lots from Henry George of Scottsdale for $600 on behalf of Bishop Daniel P. Gercke of the Diocese of Tucson. The report adds, as “general knowledge,” that the $600 came from donations by the Phoenix banker Frank Brophy and the merchant A. F. Mahoney. The parish history says Father Manuel Almuedo of Immaculate Heart Church in Phoenix urged the Mexican families to build there.
The families built it themselves through the early Depression. The Catholic Extension Society gave $1,000, with a condition: according to the Sisters of Charity archive, the church had to be called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. That is how a Mexican congregation devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe ended up with a name chosen by its donor. Construction began in earnest in 1932 under Father James P. Davis. Every family made and brought its own pew. The finished church seated 150.
The first Mass is the first disagreement. The parish history says October 14, 1933. The Old Adobe Mission’s own timeline says October 15, celebrated by Father Davis, and this site’s mission page follows it. The city’s report says only “October 1933.” We have not seen a primary document, such as a diocesan record or a newspaper notice, that settles it.
The details of building the mission belong to the mission page and the Corral family. One belongs here, because it shows how the parish got things done. Father Davis obtained stained glass from Bishop Gercke, who was renovating a church in Tucson, and the tinsmith and catechist Bernabé Herrera turned it into the windows.
1949: a parish of its own
For sixteen years the adobe was a mission church served by visiting priests. In the 1940s the wooden box altar they had used was replaced with an altar from All Saints Church in Tucson. OLPH became a full parish in 1949. The parish gives that year for its canonical erection, and the mission’s timeline gives November 25, 1949, with Father James Mulvihill as the first pastor.
Mulvihill replaced the rough blue slate floor with a cement slab and added a communion rail, new altars and statues. More important, he invited the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill, then teaching at St. Mary’s School in Chandler, to come once a week to teach catechism to the children of the Yaqui village on 64th Street. The St. Vincent de Paul Society followed in 1951. The parish history gives its first president as John E. Kelly in one paragraph and as Joe Connors in the next; we can’t tell you which is right.
Father Maguire and the move east
In 1952 Father Eugene Maguire arrived from Queen of Peace parish in Mesa. He was a native of Ireland, remembered in the parish history for “his thick brogue and clipped speech.” He found about 194 families, most of them, the parish says, “the Mexican families who had come north 30 years earlier to work the land.” He said Mass at the Yaqui community’s own small church on 64th Street. In 1953 he installed Catherine Van Horn as prefect of the new Sodality of Our Lady, and that same year he gave the Mexican families permission to stage a pageant for Our Lady of Guadalupe. That became the Miracle of the Roses, a December procession and play at Scottsdale High that drew a mixed crowd, governors included.
The men of the parish raised money for land, and by 1956 the congregation had moved to its new property on Miller Road. The adobe on Brown Avenue went quiet as a parish church. It became a meeting hall for the Knights of Columbus Father Novatus Council 4426, organized in 1957 with 40 charter members, and for Boy Scouts and catechism classes. In 1977 the parish leased it to the Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra.
The school and the Sisters
The parish school opened in 1956 with 87 students. It almost didn’t. In January 1956 Mother Claudia, who had opened four western missions for her order in under seven years, wrote to Father Maguire: “Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a hope we will have to give up – and we would love to have a school under that title.” Maguire and several parishioners went to Sister Ann Augusta Schroth, principal of St. Catherine of Siena’s school, who interceded. Sister Margaret Anne Hanley was sent to Scottsdale, and Sisters Anna Mary O’Brien and Mary Elizabeth Dunnegan taught with her the first year. The parish history credits Sister Emily Miller with leading the first community.
The Sisters taught the Yaqui children too. Their order’s history records sixteen Yaqui parishioners receiving First Communion at the close of the parish’s 1959 vacation school, brought in by a bus that went out to their village. It also records Father Maguire’s surprise that the village could sing a Mass in Gregorian chant, which he did not know the Sisters had taught them years before.
The town boomed and the school boomed with it. By the 1960s, the parish says, 800 children came to class each morning and the Sisters taught Sunday catechism to 600 public-school children. About 90 Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill served at the school over the years. A Sister was principal from the first day until 2010, when Sister Marian Grace Brandt retired after 19 years.
The 1978 church
The congregation outgrew Miller Road too. The first Parish Council met in 1968, and in the same era OLPH passed into the new Diocese of Phoenix. On April 2, 1978, Father Maguire saw the present church at Miller Road and Main Street blessed and dedicated, and the 1956 church became the parish hall. The 1980s added the Men’s Club (1982), which drew 140 men to its first meeting, and in 1987 perpetual adoration in Our Lady’s chapel, which, by the parish’s account, has continued around the clock ever since.
Later pastors were Father William Healy and, from 2000, Father Thomas F. Hever, another Irishman. When the city asked about putting the old adobe on its historic register, Hever decided to save it, and the restoration that followed returned Mass to the mission in 2003. Father Maguire, later a monsignor, is remembered in the mission sacristy, where an Eagle Scout built a cabinet in 2011 for his vestments.
The statue question
Accounts of the parish’s statues don’t line up, and they shouldn’t be blended.
- Salt River Stories says that in 1945, at the end of World War II, Guadalupe Dominguez gave the parish a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as a mother’s prayer for her son-in-law’s safe return and her thanks when he came home. It moved with the parish and now stands in the small chapel at the northwest corner of the Miller Road property.
- The parish history says Guadalupe Dominguez donated a carved wooden statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in a passage about the early mission years.
- The Old Adobe Mission says Guadalupe and Miguel Dominguez gave a hand-carved statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, made in Guadalajara, in the early 1950s.
These may be two statues from one generous family, or one statue remembered three ways. The parish office could settle it in a minute. A fourth statue complicates the picture further. In 2006 the Hispanic community of the Paiute neighborhood raised money for a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in 2019 it was placed in the Old Adobe Mission, where visitors see it today.
Going there
The parish church is at 7655 E. Main St., about two miles east of the mission. The pastoral office is at 480-947-4331, and Mass times are posted at olphaz.org. The building is a working parish church, not a museum, so go to a Mass or stop in quietly between them. On a December visit, the feast-day Mass for Our Lady of Guadalupe is here and the Miracle of the Roses play is at the mission. Keep the two addresses straight.
The parish is also where the barrio’s memory lives. A 2019 newspaper account described a group of descendants of the original Mexican families meeting Tuesday mornings at OLPH to piece the old neighborhood back together. We have not confirmed that the group still meets. Our note on the barrio under the Civic Center explains why their memories matter.
Where the rest of the record lives
- The parish office, for its anniversary books and photographs. Salt River Stories reproduced the pageant photos from them.
- The Diocese of Phoenix archives, for the 1949 decree of erection, which would fix the date. The sacramental registers name the barrio’s families, but access is restricted.
- The Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill archive, whose online exhibit includes the list of Sisters sent to OLPH and the school newspaper, the Perpetual Press.
- The Scottsdale Progress for October 1933 and October 1983, the 50th anniversary, on microfilm at the Civic Center Library, for the first-Mass date.