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St. rita’S cHurcH
The members of St. Rita’s Church in Webster never have been fazed by tasks that might seem daunting to others.
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It’s tting, then, that the parish’s patron saint is St. Rita of Cascia, patron saint of the impossible. According to parish lore, one of the priests involved in the parish’s founding suggested St. Rita as the parish’s patron because just 10 months had elapsed between the Diocese of Rochester’s purchase of 23 acres of farmland in western Webster in February 1950 and the rst parish Mass celebrated there in
September 1950.
Founding pastor Father Francis Kleehammer celebrated that Mass in the former St. Margaret Mary Church in Irondequoit. The Irondequoit parish had built a new church, and with permission from St. Margaret Mary’s pastor, men from West Webster and St. Michael Parish in Rochester
painstakingly took the church building apart and rebuilt it on the newly purchased farmland at 1008 Maple Drive in West Webster. Renamed as St. Rita’s Church, the building housed Masses for the parish’s 200 founding families, and also housed Father Kleehammer until a rectory was built the next year.
The parish also built St. Rita School which opened in 1955. Bishop Matthew H. Clark broke ground for a new church in June 1982, and in 1984 Father John Reif, who was St. Rita’s pastor for 20 years, celebrated the rst Mass in the new church. A parish center built in the mid-1990s connects the back of the church to the back of the school, which remains in operation.