About St. Anthony the Great Parish

The St. Louis Byzantine Catholic Mission traces its history to St. Mary’s Assumption Ruthenian Catholic Church, founded around 1905. The parish contained a mixture of Ruthenians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, but, due to its Ukrainian pastor, it came under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. It was Bishop Soter Ortynsky, the first Ukrainian Catholic bishop of North America, who consecrated the parish’s first building, a former Protestant church located at 1120 Dolman St. As more and more Ukrainian refugees moved to the area, the parish’s Ukrainian identity was solidified; when the parish moved to a new building in the 1970s, its name was now “St. Mary Assumption Ukrainian Catholic Church.” The parish is currently located at 11363 Oak Branch Drive in South County.

With the original parish now distinctly Ukrainian, the Ruthenians in St. Louis wanted a parish of their own. In 1977, a group of Ruthenian families, led by the late Mel and Jackie Makara, asked Bishop Emil Mihalik of the Eparchy of Parma, OH, to establish a new parish as a Ruthenian continuation of the original St. Mary’s Assumption. The new parish’s first Divine Liturgy was celebrated by Fr. Patrick Hoffmann in the Makaras’ own basement on June 11, 1977.

At first, the community was designated as a mission of St. Luke Byzantine Catholic Church in Sugar Creek, MO, outside Kansas City, and the mission’s administrator, Fr. Frank McGlynn, would drive 250 miles to celebrate Liturgy. To ease his burden, and to allow a weekly celebration of Divine Liturgy, the mission began to enlist the service of bi-ritual priests, starting with Fr. Brian Van Hove, S.J.

On December 15, 1985, Bishop Andrew Pataki, at that time of the Eparchy of Parma, designated the mission an independent parish, with the late Fr. Eugene Selzer, a bi-ritual priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, as parish administrator. Fr. Selzer was administrator of the parish until his retirement in February 2013; Fr. Joseph Weber was appointed as the new administrator.

The parish has borrowed or rented space in many churches and other buildings over the course of its history: the Confraternity Home Study Service Hall of the Vincentian Fathers (1977-1986), St. Wenceslaus Parish (1986-1994), the Marian Chapel of the Cathedral Basilica (1994-2002), the Blessed John XXIII Center (2002-2017), the former college of the School Sisters of Notre Dame (2017-2020), St. Mary Assumption Ukrainian Catholic Church (2020-2021). In 2020, the parish bought the current building at 7100 Virginia Avenue; the first Divine Liturgy there was celebrated by Fr. Joseph Weber on March 25, 2021. The parish is currently served by a number of bi-ritual priests, some from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, some from the Jesuits.