Patrick Comerford
During our short visit to Belfast last weekend, I visited or revisited a number of places of interest in the city, including Saint George’s Church on High Street and both Saint Anne’s Church of Ireland Cathedral and Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church on Donegall Street.
Saint Patrick’s Church on Donegall Street is a Victorian gem and an oasis of peace in the heart of the city and it is part of community life in the city centre.
The church serves a large local resident community, a thriving population in the Cathedral Quarter, the city’s cultural and social heartland, and the students and staff in the neighbouring Belfast campus of Ulster University, as well as a busy hospital, a large primary school, and a number of residential and care homes.
The first church was built on the site in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo, and it was the second Catholic church built in Belfast since the Reformation.
The first Roman Catholic church in Belfast was Saint Mary’s, Chapel Lane, which opened in May 1784. But with the growth of the Catholic population in Belfast in the early 19th century, Bishop William Crolly, then a priest in residence in the small town, decided to build a new church on Donegall Street.
This church, dedicated to Saint Patrick, opened in 1815. Its construction was made possible – in part – by the contribution of Belfast’s educated Protestants and civic elite. The presbytery was built as residence for the Catholic bishop and his clergy, and is Belfast’s oldest, continuously-inhabited house.
The society painter Sir John Lavery was baptised in the earlier Saint Patrick’s Church on 26 March 1856.
In the post-famine era Belfast’s Catholic population had swollen considerably and, while other churches and new parishes were developed, it was clear by the early 1870s that Saint Patrick’s needed a new, larger church.
The present Saint Patrick’s Church, the second on the site, was designed in the Gothic Revival style by Timothy Hevey (1846-1878) and Mortimer Thomspon. It is said the church was built ‘by the pennies of the poor’.
Timothy Hevey was a son of Timothy Hevey, a Belfast builder, and Martha Alexandra Hevey (née McNeice). He was educated at Saint Malachy’s College, Belfast, and became an apprentice in the firm of Boyd and Batt. He moved to Dublin in 1865 and became an assistant in the office of Pugin and Ashlin. There he was involved in draughting the plans for the Church of Saint Augustine and Saint John, known popularly as John’s Lane Church, the Augustinian church on Thomas Street, Dublin. John Ruskin (1818-1900), the writer, critic, artist and philosopher who is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival movement on these islands, called the church ‘a poem in stone.
Hevey married Florence Eugenie Geret in Saint Peter’s Church (Church of Ireland), Aungier Street, Dublin, on 7 March 1868. He returned to Belfast in April 1869, and worked as a builder and architect in partnership first with James Mackinnon and later with Mortimer H Thomson. He became the city’s leading Catholic architect, enjoying the patronage of Patrick Dorrian, Bishop of Down and Connor, and James McDevitt, Bishop of Raphoe, in Co Donegal.
Hevey’s career was cut short abruptly the following year when he died at the age of 33 on 29 December 1878 following a severe cold caught on a business trip to Newry.
The foundation stone of the new church was laid by Bishop Patrick Dorrian on 18 April 1875. He had spent his early priestly ministry in the parish, and while he was Bishop of Down and Connor (1865-1885), 26 new churches were built in the diocese.
Saint Patrick’s Church was built in different coloured sandstone by Collen Brothers of Portadown and Dublin who built the new church around the old one which was then demolished.
The old church was then demolished in August 1876 and the entire fabric of the new church was speedily completed for blessing on 12 August 1877 by Archbishop Daniel McGettigan of Armagh.
Bishop Dorrian was later buried beneath the sanctuary and behind the priest’s chair. In the left transept, adjacent to Saint Joseph’s Columbarium, is his memorial, rendered in sandstone and alabaster, and it bears the arms of the Diocese of Down and Connor.
The new Saint Patrick’s Church was designed to seat 2,000 people. Both the 7 ft Portland stone statue of Saint Patrick in the tympanum above the main doors and the high altar were carved by the English-born James Pearse, father of the 1916 leader Padraig Pearse.
A two-ton bell, cast by Thomas Sheridan of Dublin, was placed in the spire, which rises to a height of 54 metres (180 ft).
Inside the church, 10 beautiful arches of red sandstone, supported by slender rose and grey Dumfries granite pillars separate the nave from each aisle. Three further arches separate the sanctuary from the nave. As the eye traces the orbit of the 15 metre (50 ft) high centre arch, it comes to rest on the pitch pine ceiling.
To the left of the sanctuary is the shrine of Our Lady of Comfort, designed and cast in bronze by the sculptor Chris Ryan of Howth in 1997.
On the right is the baptistry where seven of the eight sides of the font commemorate the grace given in the seven sacraments. An aumbry beside the font holds the holy oils used in administering the sacraments.
The stained glass windows in the church were added over time. High in the apse, seven windows depict Christ with the saints in glory; a rose window in the Shrine of Mary represents the Magi visiting Bethlehem; the rose window in the baptistry portrays Christ revealing the love of the Sacred Heart to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque.
Four windows in the left transept, reinstalled from Saint Kevin’s Church in North Queen Street before its demolition, represent the Trinity.
The original windows in the right transept were destroyed by an explosion during the ‘Troubles’, but six newly-installed windows illustrate the life and mission of Saint Patrick.
A shrine in the nave is dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua. There is a first class relic of the saint in the reliquary on the left side of the statue.
The altar facing the people (versus populum) is made of Portland stone and was installed in 1997. It stands in front of the original high altar with its reredos of Caen stone and Cork red and Galway green marble columns.
The reredos and its sculptures are the work of O’Neill and Pearse of Dublin.
After a catastrophic fire on 12 October 1995, the church as restored under the then Administrator, the Very Rev David White, and the project manager, Oliver Magill. After a lengthy restoration project, the church was reopened by Bishop Patrick Walsh on 5 October 1997.
The church has a triptych by Sir John Lavery, who was baptised in the older, smaller church. He painted ‘The Madonna Of The Lakes’ with his second wife, Hazel Trudeau, as the model for the Virgin Mary and his daughter Eileen and step-daughter Helen as models for Saint Patrick and Saint Brigid.
Lavery contacted the then Administrator of Saint Patrick’s, Father John O’Neill, in 1917 offering to donate a work of art to the church. The triptych was unveiled in April 1919.
The triptych originally stood on an altar designed by Edwin Lutyens, a friend of Lavery, and was illuminated by two candlesticks by Lutyens. Both the altar and the candlesticks were lost during reordering works out in the 1960s and 1970s, and the frame around the triptych, decorated with Celtic knotwork, remains the only Lutyens-designed artefact in Northern Ireland.
The church has a large collection of relics of saints, including two relics of Saint Patrick. The silver reliquary that holds the arm relic of Saint Patrick was made in the 14th century and is on loan to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
The silver reliquary made in 1645, with the jawbone of Saint Patrick, taken from the burial site of Saint Patrick in Downpatrick in 1194, is now on loan to the Down County Museum in Downpatrick.
The church also holds a small relic of Saint Anthony of Padua.
Because of its splendour and scale, the church has been the venue for the episcopal consecrations of Bishop Henry Henry (who invited the Redemptorists to found Clonard Monastery) in 1895, his successor Bishop John Tohill in 1908 and later Bishop Daniel Mageean in 1929.
Saint Patrick’s Church celebrated its bicentenary in 2015. During the celebrations, Prince Charles, now King Charles, and his wife Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, visited the church in May 2015, and after a short prayer service they viewed Lavery’s work.
Saint Patrick’s School beside the church on Donegall Street was built in 1828 by the Belfast builder Timothy Hevey, father of the architect who designed the church. It was the first Catholic school built in Belfast and was built on land donated by Belfast’s principle landlord, George Chichester, 2nd Marquess of Donegall. For much of its history the school was run by the Christian Brothers and continued as a primary school until it closed in 1982.
• The Very Reverend Eugene O’Neill has been the Parish Priest of Saint Patrick’s since 2022, and previously was Administrator of Saint Patrick’s from 2016. Sunday Masses begin on Saturday with a 6 pm Vigil Mass, with Sunday Masses at 9 am, 11 am and 6 pm.
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