The Parish of Saint Catherine & Saint James with Saint Audoen
Canon Mark Gardner (Editor) Tel: 01 454 2274 Mobile 087 266 0228
The Revd Martha Waller (Curate-Assistant) Tel: 01 868 1655
Email: markgardner300@gmail.com
Review Distribution: Doris Brooks Tel: 01 453 0887
Website: cja.dublin.anglican.org
Service times every Sunday
10.00 Eucharist, St Audoen, Cornmarket. (Parking in Francis Street is free on Sundays)
11.30 Eucharist (and Sunday School, in term time) St Catherine & St James, Donore Avenue. (Family Service and Church Coffee, usually Second Sundays)
First Wednesday of the Month
10.30 Service of Wholeness and Healing, with Laying-on of Hands and Anointing.
Diary dates
Sunday 10 April Sunday School resumes.
Holy Baptism
On Palm Sunday 20 March at St Audoen’s Church, Fionn Jack, son of Stephen Paling and Nichole Quinn, of Ivar Street, Stoneybatter. New life in an old place.
Visitor Centre
The Office of Public Works will keep St Audoen’s Church and Visitor Centre open to the public daily from Thursday 21 April. We are grateful to them for their support for the Church and Church service.
Bellringing
Thanks to the volunteers from among our ringers, who carried out some necessary maintenance before the recent Lindoff Cup competition at St Audoen’s won by Christ Church Cathedral. Seven teams took part.
St Catherine’s NS
Well done, first of all, to our Senior Orchestra for coming second in the prestigious Wesley College Interschools Music Feis. The children, their conductor, their teachers and their parents all did the school proud with their excellent performance and great suppport. 6th Class have taken part for the first time ever in the Terenure College Spring Drama Competition for Primary Schools with a play, “The Wolf Who Cried Boy”. The children wrote the play themselves and created all their own props, as well as learning their lines and adding sound effects. Brilliant work! Our hurlers have recently won two matches and it’s clear that this sport has taken off in a big way in our school. Thanks to Karen Jordan for all her organising and her encouragement of the children. Big congratulations to Katy Donnelly for coming third in the national Chessossity final for chess puzzle-solving in Galway, and to Katy and her partner Andrew Whyte for winning the Chessossity Swap-Chess Championship. Our two chess teams will be in the finals of the Leinster Schools Championships. Team A (Katy Donnelly, Andrew Whyte, Shane Reid and Samuel Roantree) have a realistic chance of a top-three placing in Division 1 and Team B (Hugh Nevin, Eithne Ogbata, Joseph Pepper and Ivo Fallon) are through to the quarter-finals of Division 2. The finals are being held in our school.
April Cronin
St James’ Church
The late Canon John Crawford was a fine historian. We cannot be so sure about David Carr, who writes for the Fountain Resource Group (15 May 2015): ‘the spire’s height proved to be its downfall. Canon John Crawford, Vicar of St James’ Church from 1889 to 1923, noted that the spire presented problems. “In 1941, Dublin Corporation’s surveyor of buildings drew attention to its dangerous state. It had been struck by lightning some years before. It was agreed reluctantly in 1948 that thirty feet of spire was to be removed. Had the finances been available, a complete rebuilding would have been necessary. As it was, the parish had to borrow £1,353 to have the work completed.”
With an ever dwindling congregation the church eventually passed into commercial hands in the early 1960s. However, recent weeks have seen the church turn a corner. The current scaffolding enveloping the building is part of a €5.7 million conversion into a whiskey distillery by Irish led animal nutrition giant Altech. This development, a few yards from St. James’ Gate, is set to be the most eye catching one of a number of new distilleries in the liberties, and is also on the ‘Dubline’ tourist trail stretching from Trinity College to Kilmainham.
It seems the church’s many past lives may have led to its own rebirth. Behind the church and not too evident to a passer-by is the churchyard, which was Dublin’s main cemetery during the 18th and 19th century and which may contain as many as 80,000. As it turns out one of those reposing there, John Hubert Lyons, lived his life as a distiller and was grandfather to Altech CEO, Pearse Lyons.
Initially Altech planned a craft brewery for the area but Lyons said, “When I saw the church I thought, why not house a distillery instead of a brewery close to Guinness?” Altech already had matured whisky stills in Carlow but when it came to relocating he thought, “where better to put it than the place my grandfather grew up, in the heart of the liberties which was originally the distillery part of Dublin.”
Pearse Lyons has big plans for St James’ Church. Along with the distillery a visitor centre is set to “tell the story of the liberties, coopers, distillers and entrepreneurship” and in the long term it’s hoped that the new distillery will act as gateway for visitors to the historic cemetery.’
Irish Cultural Centre Paris
On his most recent official visit to Ireland, the Prince of Wales gave a speech during which he referred to ‘these Atlantic islands’, diplomatically avoiding the term ‘British Isles’, which, as a rule, is not used by the Irish government as a term to describe the UK and Ireland. What unites and divides the two islands? Where do the similarities and differences lie? Over the course of 2016, a number of discussions organised by CCI will tease out the complexities of our long relationship. For the first conversation chaired by comedian, writer and broadcaster Colm O’Regan, we gather philosopher Richard Kearney, journalist Gemma Tipton, archaeologist and member of the Royal Irish Academy Peter Harbison and academic Wesley Hutchinson to discuss the term ‘British Isles’ – its origins and alternatives, the politics of language – within the historical context of interaction between the two islands and their influences upon each other.
