His prayer for relief fell on deaf ears.
A frail worshipper found out the hard way that St. Patrick’s Cathedral, unlike other landmark city churches, synagogues and mosques — and even St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome — has no restrooms open to its faithful.
Wei Li, 57, of Brooklyn, who recently suffered a stroke and uses a cane, urgently needed to use the john in the middle of Mass at the Midtown cathedral the Sunday after Easter.
The retired doctor and his neighbor, David Johnson, approached a lay church official and told him, “We had a bathroom emergency,” Johnson said.
“We were seconds away from a bathroom accident . . . The worker didn’t even make eye contact with me and just told us to go next-door,” recalled Johnson, 43.
The worker sent them outside to an office building across Fifth Avenue to use a tiny atrium bathroom there.
St. Patrick’s is “a special place for the respect of God, [but] there’s no bathroom,” Li said incredulously.
He waited on line for the john across the street only to return to the home church of Timothy Cardinal Dolan and find someone had swiped his seat in the crowded pew.
Li, who worked as an ER doctor in China before moving to the United States in 2011, said he had recently turned to Catholicism to give him strength as his health worsened.
“In the future, we’ll go to a different church because of the bathroom situation,” he said.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral has bathrooms, but they are available only to religious and lay staffers.
She said the ongoing $180 million renovation to the cathedral has nothing to do with its lack of public facilities.
Workers at the office building across Fifth A venue said they are tired of the constant stream of churchgoers — including outside nuns and priests — who come in to use the toilet.
“What would Jesus do? He’d let you use the bathroom,” a security guard told The Post.
Meanwhile, most other prominent houses of worship offer restrooms to their congregations.
“Of course, we do,” said Rabbi Yaakov Kermaier of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.
Representatives for the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue, the Roman Catholic St. James Cathedral in Brooklyn and the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on the Upper East Side all said they offered restrooms.
St. Peter’s in Rome is also known for its modern rooftop bathrooms to accommodate the millions of pilgrims who visit annually.