150 years ago: a chapel built in 16 hours
President McAleese in Mary
Immaculate Church Inchicore
Bishop Eugene de Mazenod met many Irish bishops in Rome for the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, in 1854. He noted that they seemed to welcome the idea of the Oblates setting up a foundation in Ireland. On that basis he sent Fr. Casimir Aubert to Dublin in 1855, but it was only when he was joined by Waterford born Fr. Robert Cooke that things began to move.
Fr. Cooke was fortunate to receive outstanding support from the Augustinian Community at St John's Lane. They invited these first Oblates to give a one-month long mission at St John's Lane, and it was the success of that mission that led Archbishop Cullen to agree to an Oblate foundation in Dublin. He suggested “a spiritually deprived area in the direction of Kilmainham.”
A 25-acre farm, including a farmhouse, adjacent to the workshops of the Great Southern and Western Railway, was judged suitable and purchased for £2,150. Fr Cooke took possession of the property on 21 June 1856—150 years ago this year.
He celebrated the first Mass in the farmhouse the next day, but what of the following Sunday when crowds were expected?
A young carpenter promised, astonishingly, to have a large wooden chapel built by the following Sunday, provided the men of the Railway Works helped. Help they did. On Tuesday, the materials were on the ground and that evening seven hundred skilled workmen started work—after their own full day's work. From six to nine each night they labored to finish it all by ten on Saturday night. In sixteen hours they had built a chapel which continued in use as a church until the present church was ready.
There are so many questions: who drew the plans? Who knew how much and what sort of timber? Who got it there in time? How did they recruit that small army of 700 each evening and who marshaled that army?
One hundred and fifty years later we can only speculate on such questions. What is beyond doubt is the extraordinary bond that developed between the Oblates and the Inchicore community.
On Sunday June 25th, President Mary McAleese, Councillor Catherine Byrne, Lord Mayor of Dublin, and the Oblate Superior General, Fr Wilhelm Steckling will join the local community for a Mass to mark the anniversary of this first Oblate foundation in Ireland.