The Catholic inner city faithful face a new dawn this Christmas. St Mary’s in Marlborough Street has recently been elevated to the status of a cathedral. The Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin has welcomed this with “great joy” as it ends St Mary’s temporary designation of procathedral (from the Latin pro tempore) dating from the 19th century. It is extraordinary that a country so steeped in the Catholic faith for so long – some two and a half thousand Catholic churches were built in Ireland between the late 18th and mid-19th centuries – only now has once again a Catholic cathedral in its capital city, nearly 500 years after the Reformation. But church buildings and their status have always been affected by temporal as well as spiritual preoccupations.
The building of St Mary’s was championed by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Daniel Troy, who served from 1786 to 1823. The Marlborough Street site was purchased in 1803, costing £5,100. It was opened in 1825, but the portico was not completed until 1841. In generating funds for church building during that period, there was an expectation that while wealthy benefactors would be generous, it was also incumbent on the devout poor to do their bit. This was no easy path – in 1821 the building committee was perplexed that “a national feeling” relating to its completion had “not been found in the public” to raise the necessary funds.
Appeals were made to Protestants, who were reminded of the historic tithes paid for the upkeep of their church, and a dinner held in November 1825 after the dedication ceremonies saw Catholic Archbishop Daniel Murray pay tribute to the generosity of Protestants. Some working on the project gave their services for free or donated part of their fees, and contractors had difficulty getting paid. Fr John Hamilton, the curate in St Mary’s in 1824, and who served as its administrator from 1831 to 1853, raised much of the £45,000 needed to build the procathedral; according to religious biographer and archivist Mary Purcell, Hamilton had managed to “clear the entire debt by 1844”.
Initially, the official description of St Mary’s was the Roman Catholic Metropolitan chapel; it became known as the Pro Cathedral in the 1880s, signifying the temporary nature of the cathedral, pending the building of a new one when funds became available. Over the course of the 19th century, according to the late Dermod McCarthy, who served at the “Pro” in the 1980s, it established itself as “the centre of life in Catholic Dublin”.
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The real surprise is that the building of a Catholic cathedral did not transpire after the creation of the new Free State in 1922. In January 1923, the Free State’s cabinet planned to hand over the site of the General Post Office to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Edward Byrne, for the construction of a new cathedral, but legal complications prevented that. Byrne declared in 1930 that the Pro Cathedral was “inadequate as a cathedral for Catholic Dublin and is still not worthy of the Catholicism of the Irish nation”. He then, with the assistance of the devout head of government WT Cosgrave, bought Merrion Square from the Pembroke Estate for £10,000 as a site for a cathedral.
[ Pope Leo designates St Mary’s Pro Cathedral as Dublin’s Catholic cathedralOpens in new window ]
By the time the site came formally into his possession in 1938, the ailing Byrne was in no position to progress his ambition. His successor, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, appointed in 1940, regarded Merrion Square as the best site, but Dublin Corporation had a preference for a Cathedral built nearer the Liffey. McQuaid told taoiseach Éamon de Valera that abandoning the Merrion Square site was “gravely to be deplored” but this issue was caught up in concerns about the control and nature of land development in the vicinity of government buildings and Merrion Square. McQuaid, according to his biographer John Cooney, thought de Valera was “elusive and shadowy” about the matter. Church and State, it seems, were not always in sync.
The irony now is that St Mary’s has been elevated to a cathedral at time when Archdiocese of Dublin, the largest in the country with 1.1 million Catholics, faces financial meltdown. It has said its cash reserves will be depleted by 2041 and that there will be 70 per cent fewer priests within 20 years; there are currently 361 priests, mostly elderly, and some serving several parishes, and there were no ordinations in the diocese last year.
At the time of the opening of St Mary’s, Richard Lalor Sheil, a leading light in the Catholic Association and future MP, declared: “At last an edifice worthy of the loftiness of our creed stands in the centre of the metropolis. Our religion has at last lifted up its proud and majestic head.”
The head has been lifted higher now, but at a time when the body underneath is ailing.
