The Anglican Church of St John the Evangelist in Sandymount, Co Dublin, which marks its 175th anniversary this month, has had a singularly turbulent history. Before the first World War it was the target of riotous demonstrations by members of Dublin’s Orange Order protesting at its “Romish” liturgy. In the 1930s its priest was suspended by the Church of Ireland for six months because some of his practices were too close to Rome.
St John’s is also unusual, if not unique, in the Church of Ireland in having had as its organist one Cecil MacDowell who, having changed his name to Cathal Mac Dubhghaill, took part in the 1916 rebellion fighting under the command of Eamon de Valera in Boland Mills.
The church was founded in 1850 by Sidney Herbert, later Lord Herbert of Lea, after whom the adjacent area and its railway station was named. Herbert was the son of the Earl of Pembroke and had inherited the estate of his Fitzwilliam cousins, which covered much of south Dublin.
The erection of a sea wall along the Strand Road beside the Martello Tower around 1800 allowed the development of the district behind it, which had previously been marshland and brickfields. After he came of age in 1831, Sidney Herbert promoted residential house-building, granting leases of sites. The new Dublin to Kingstown railway founded in 1835, with halts in the district, made it more accessible.
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It was to provide a place of worship for the growing population and to create work to relieve those affected by the Great Famine that Herbert decided to build St John’s. It was designed in the Romanesque style by Benjamin Ferry, a pupil of Pugin. It cost Herbert £6,000 and was a proprietary church, independently financed and governed by trustees under a deed of endowment.
It thrived through the late 1800s under the benign, 35 year-long ministry of Corkman Bennet Davidson-Houston. Congregations of 300 attended on Sundays. In 1880, a church hall was built; its social activities included dramatic productions, which continued into the second half of the 20th century. Percy French, who lived nearby before his first wife’s premature death, performed there in its early years.
Fletcher Sheridan Le Fanu, a relative of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, became minister in 1899. He was the first minister at St John’s to be addressed as “Father”. He described himself as Anglo-Catholic and introduced into the liturgy a range of practices, such as the use of incense, elaborate vestments, candles, a confessional, altar servers and choral singing at the Divine Service. He founded in 1912 an order of Anglican nuns, which was to remain on St John’s Road until the 1960s.
Practices that smacked of Rome were objectionable to Dublin’s active Orange Order on political as well as religious grounds. Demonstrations outside the church, and interruptions within it by some of its members, led to arrests followed by convictions in the magistrate’s court on charges of “church brawling”. Fines were imposed. Dissent from a section of the regular congregation was also quelled by resort to the courts.
Fr Randal Colquhoun, who succeeded Le Fanu in 1930, shared his convictions. “I am a Catholic,” he asserted, “I teach all the principles of the Catholic Faith with the exception, of course, of the infallibility of the Pope”.
A petition had been brought by a group of laymen before the Church of Ireland Court of General Synod charging him with a list of misdemeanours that included: making the sign of the cross, wearing a biretta, using incense.
This court, which consisted of bishops and Protestant judges of the civil courts, suspended him for six months. He was also forced to get rid of Stations of the Cross presented to the church by artist Evie Hone, a member of the congregation.
Under Fr Le Fanu and Fr Colquhoun, St John’s became less a church serving the local Church of Ireland population than one attracting those from a wider area whose allegiance is Anglo-Catholic.
In the 1960s, St John’s was forced to sell its church hall and vicarage to meet the heavy cost of maintaining its beautiful old building.
In an age where the religious controversies of the past have become less sharp, St John’s survives thanks to generous pastors, its small steadfast congregation and bountiful benefactors.
Immigration has brought worshippers from other countries; there is a bilingual Mass to mark St Patrick’s Day and a packed carol service at Christmas, graced by readers from local churches of all denominations and singers from other choirs.
The Stations of the Cross hang there once more, thanks to the generosity of the Jesuits for whom they were bought when St John’s was compelled to sell them over 80 years ago.
