St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Yorkville, one of the last German-speaking parishes in the city, will host Pope Benedict XVI next month.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York has confirmed that the pontiff has accepted Edward Cardinal Egan’s invitation to come to the Italianate limestone church on East 87th Street at First Avenue and lead an ecumenical prayer service there April 18.

“The pope will pray with Christian leaders at the church and take time afterwards to meet with a few of them,” the spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said.

The vestiges of Manhattan’s once-bustling Germantown include a Bavarian restaurant and the annual Steuben Day Parade. Of the German Roman Catholic and Lutheran parishes that remain in Yorkville, only a handful still hold services in German.

“One of the reasons Cardinal Egan invited the Holy Father, who was born in Germany, to St. Joseph’s is that we offer a German mass,” the church’s pastor, Monsignor John Sullivan, said. The prayer service led by the pope next month will be in English, however.

St. Joseph’s has the historical distinction of being a German national parish; in the early 20th century, instead of delineating its parish neighborhood with traditional geographical boundaries, it did so culturally: It was open to any Roman Catholic of German descent, no matter where he or she lived in New York City.

Until the 20th century, most of the city’s German immigrants lived in Little Germany, or Kleindeutschland, in what is now the area around Tompkins Square Park. But a German church outing on the steamship General Slocum in 1904 ended in disaster when the ship caught fire and more than 1,000 German-Americans drowned in the East River.

The fire claimed more lives than any other disaster in New York City history until September 11, 2001. The 1904 event so traumatized the German population of the East Village that most families moved uptown to Yorkville, establishing German-speaking parishes like St. Joseph’s.

“Many years ago, a church like St. Joseph’s would have offered just about everything in German, except the Mass,” Mr. Zwilling said. “That, of course, would have been in Latin in those days.”

Benedict’s other New York City visits this spring have received far more publicity. He will celebrate Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for local bishops, priests, and nuns, and lead a service at Yankee Stadium at which 60,000 people are expected.

His appearances next month are relatively modest compared to the 1995 visit to the city by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. During that visit, John Paul II celebrated Mass before 80,000 people in Giants Stadium and followed with open-air services for 80,000 at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens and for 125,000 worshippers in Central Park.

Just a few hundred invited guests representing other Christian denominations from the New York area will attend the St. Joseph’s Church prayer meeting, Mr. Zwilling said.