By the early 20th century, Germantown was already on its way to becoming the large and incredibly diverse community that it is today. Back then — as now — there was a great divide between those who had access to good economic and educational opportunities and those who did not. Religious services were one area in which the intersection of racism and poverty excluded many from participation in their wider society.

The issue grew to be so difficult that Black Catholics in Germantown were effectively unable to attend Mass every week for much of the early 20th century. Their local parish at the time was the St. Rose of Lima Church on Clopper Rd. in Gaithersburg, but that was very far from the growing Black communities in Germantown and few people in those days had access to transportation.

Sometime between the early 1930s, a group of Black Catholics who lived in Germantown got together to form their own unofficial congregation with the support of Father Michael Finnerty (pastor at the nearby St. Rose of Lima Church and St. Martin’s Church) and Sophia Baker (whose brother, Andrew Baker, founded the cider Barrel and helped to found the Germantown Bank that houses the Historical Society today). “Miss Sohpie,” as she was known, taught a Sunday School for the Black children of Germantown on the Baker estate and worked with Black organizers in the group to facilitate several of the ceremonial and community service functions that a church would ordinarily do.

The group was named after St. Rita of Cascia, the Patron Saint of the Impossible.

In the early 1940s, Father Finnerty helped the group procure a bus that would allow Black Germantowners to attend Mass regularly at St. Rose. This combined with the growing availability of cars, detracted from St. Rita’s group, but it continued to exist as an active religious community until Sophie Baker’s death in 1946. After that, the estate was sold and is now the site of several townhouses near the Germantown Train Station.