With the permission of His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Very Reverend Canon O'Reilly, Adm., St. Laurence's Catholic Heritage Association organised a pilgrimage to the Pro Cathedral, Dublin, today, to honour the feast of St. Laurence O'Toole, Patron of the Archdiocese, and to venerate his relics enshrined there.
The sacristy staff honoured us by laying out for use at the Mass the vestments made for the High Mass in the Phoenix Park at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and the chalice given as a gift by the People of Ireland to St. John XXIII, gifted by him back to the Pro-Cathedral, and used by St. John Paul II at the Mass that he celebrated in the Phoenix Park when he visited Ireland in 1979.
From
Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road by Christine Casey, p. 126 ff:
ST. MARY'S PRO-CATHEDRAL
Marlborough Street
Of 1814-25. A large and remarkably ambitious metropolitan chapel whose style and scale provided an exemplar for Catholic church building in the city for over half a century. In all but name, this is the Roman Catholic cathedral of Dublin. It is the parish church of the archbishop and since its dedication in 1825 it has played a central role in national religious ceremony. The remains of Daniel O'Connell, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera lay here in state; John Henry Newman was inaugurated here as the Rector of the Catholic University; and in 1903 John McCormack began his career here with the renowned Palestrina Choir, founded in the previous year. At 4,734 square ft (1,320 square metres), it was the largest church built in Dublin since the Middle Ages. The model was French, in particular the basilican church of St Philippe du Roule in Paris (1764-84), a Neoclassical design with a nave, apse and ambulatory... The Pro-Cathedral design is more fastidiously
primitif in its employment of Greek Doric throughout, modulated to Tuscan in the tripartite windows of the s elevation. 'Sublimely Greek by any standards' concluded J.M. Crook, 'pedantic' and 'dogmatic' counters Michael McCarthy, both seeing through the many accretions to the original heroic concept. While substantial C19 and C20 alterations have considerably reduced the potency of the original design, the Pro-Cathedral still ranks among the most powerful Greek Revival church interiors in these islands...
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