Greg DalySt Joseph’s Church in Carrickmacross has sustained the people and witnessed two centuries of dramatic history in the area, Bishop Liam MacDaid has said during a Mass on Sunday, August 7, to mark the 150th anniversary of the church’s consecration.
Work began on the south Monaghan church in July 1861, with the gothic building, designed by J.J. McCarthy, a renowned architect of the era, being dedicated on Sunday April 22, 1866, by the then Bishop of Clogher, James Donnelly. It replaced the nearby St Mary’s Church which had been dedicated in 1786, serving as a parish church until the dedication of St Joseph’s.
Emancipation
Likening St Joseph’s to a “stone owl” standing watch, Dr MacDaid said it had observed “two centuries of our people’s history from the early days of emerging emancipation after the penal laws, to the beginning of a school system and the building of churches, the horrors of famine years and wholesale emigration, to establishing a form of independence with our own parliament and Constitution, coping with a civil war, creating a modern state, living in a spin of apparent wealth and now waking up to start coping with reality again”.
Throughout this period, he said, St Joseph’s nourished the people with the Word of God and the Lord’s Body and Blood, serving in a very real way as a home to the families of the area, a place where children were received into their parish families, where God’s mercy was experienced, where lives were committed to each in marriage, and where the dead were prayed for.
The evening’s music was led by the parish’s combined choirs under the directorship of Tom Clarke and Pat Cotter, with Padraig O’Reilly as organist, featuring material from the 1866 dedication, such as the 1741 hymn ‘Magne Joseph fili David’, as well as the singing during the offertory of ‘A Íosa a Aon Mhic an Athar’s a Uain’ by the 18th-Century poet and composer Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, who lived in the south-Monaghan area.
During the celebration Carrickmacross’s parish priest Fr Larry Duffy spoke of the parish’s deep links with the Kenyan diocese of Kitui, where a new church has been built with the help of financial support from Carrickmacross.
He thanked the parish’s liturgy group and the St Joseph’s 150 Organising committee, led by Fr Padraig McKenna, who had co-ordinated the celebrations, which extended to an exhibition of memorabilia associated with the church, including the silver trowel used by Bishop Charles McNally to lay the church’s foundation stone in 1861.