San Francisco is one of the world's most secularized cities and vies with New York for the highest cost of living in America. Neither of these qualities favor large families, or even families at all, and San Francisco has the dubious distinction of having more dogs than children. And yet it was not always thus. Large churches, now mostly empty, testify to the immigrant faith of years past that built vibrant Catholic communities from New York to San Francisco. Large churches can once again begin to fill with large families, who are the heart of the Catholic parish.

This book tells the tale of one such church, Star of the Sea parish in San Francisco. Irish immigrants built the first church in the City's "outside lands" near the Golden Gate in 1888, along with two schools in which 32 nuns educated, at their zenith, 1300 children a year. This story tells of its beginnings among the sand dunes, its growth after the 1906 earthquake, its decline in the 1970s, and its rebirth in the 2010s. It tells the story of every parish, and gives hope that every parish, even those at their lowest ebb, can realize a flood of energy and grace through God's Word and Sacraments.

Fr. Joseph Illo was baptized at Star of the Sea Parish in the Bronx and spent his boyhood in rural Pennsylvania. He studied literature at Penn State, philosophy in Rome, and theology in New York. He did his master's degree research in history on the first Archbishop of San Francisco, Joseph Sadoc Alemany. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1991 and is currently pastor of Star of the Sea parish in San Francisco.