“A BRIEF HISTORY OF ST. MARK’S UNIVERSITY PARISH, ISLA VISTA (UCSB)

St. Mark’s University Parish was founded in 1965 when the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) began to rapidly expand from a couple of thousand students to 14,000 students. Because of the rapid growth, a 1.5-acre property was purchased very close to campus and a spartan structure was built in 1966 to serve the students at UCSB and in the surrounding student community of Isla Vista, CA. It was staffed for 40 years by the Paulist Priests until 2006, when priests of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles were invited to minister to the community.

Fr. Bob Donoghue, CSP and UCSB Chancellor Vernon Cheadle, PhD
1966 groundbreaking for St. Mark’s University Parish
Today, UCSB is a top-fifty ranked R-1 research university with approximately 24,000 students from around the world and six Nobel laureates. The current pastor is Fr. John W. Love, D.Min. a native of Santa Barbara and solo priest since 2009. He is also the Vicar Forane of Deanery II in the Santa Barbara Pastoral Region, serving under SBPR Regional Bishop Robert Barron. About 1,200 students walk through the doors each year, with about 400-500 of these students active most Sundays during school quarters.

Although St. Mark’s is a canonical parish, in the last 20 years it has become more of a student Newman-style community as real estate investment trusts buy up apartment blocks and local families continue to move out of Isla Vista to make way for new students from both UCSB and the local city college, SBCC. Even so, St. Mark’s still has about 350 parishioner families, mostly Latino and retired folks, who provide a terrific backdrop of family life for lonely and homesick students.

In the late 1990’s under then pastor Fr. Ruben Patiño, CSP, the parish underwent an extensive 1M project to renew the church sanctuary interior. The remodel resulted in a much brighter and more inviting worship space complete with a separate Blessed Sacrament chapel, and new sound and lighting systems. In 2015, a capital campaign was commenced to renew the exterior façade, the parish offices, and rectory along with a complete overhaul of the plant sewer, HVAC and electrical panels. As of Spring 2018, 1.5M has been committed to this project and construction has commenced, with the expected completion of the offices and rectory remodel in Summer of 2019, and the church façade in the next few years.

St. Mark’s Remodel Elevations (Front and Side)
One of the proudest achievements of the student community at St. Mark’s in the past ten years has been the number of fostered vocations to the religious life and priesthood. In the past few years, St. Mark’s has seen 7 vocations in all, with four going to religious orders, and three to diocesan seminaries, with more possible vocations in formal discernment process.”