On our first visit to Ireland last year, we somehow missed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, originally on our must-see list. So, on a three-day revisit some months later, it was near the top of our list, and well worth it, if cluttered.
It’s a fact: 800-year-old cathedrals tend to accumulate a lot of ‘stuff’ and 800-year-old cathedrals sitting on land too soggy to permit a basement or crypt tend to have a lot of the ‘stuff’ visible. Especially if the church has a history of changing hands over and over.
And, of course, there’s always a family or two with an inflated view of its importance—you’ve seen the pictures, no doubt, with favored ancestors painted into manger scenes—but the Boyle family may take the cake with a memorial that’s so big I couldn’t get it all in one picture. In the lowest rank, shown as a baby, is the only really significant member of the family, Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry and author of Boyle’s Law.
But I digress from the story.
Saint Patrick’s is one of Dublin’s two Anglican cathedrals—there’s also a Catholic one, but that’s another story—is the example at hand, a poster child for peculiar history. Its construction was started started late in the 12th century as an intentional rival to the even older Christ Church Cathedral, a short walk away.
Found during renovations in 1901, the upper stone is said to mark a well used by St Patrick in the 5th century; the other is likely an ancient gravestone.
In the end, a treaty between the two churches allowed them to share the title for nearly 600 years, until in 1870 Saint Patrick’s was named the National Cathedral and Christ Church became the Dublin Cathedral. The treaty was so detailed it specified taking turns as the site for election and burial of archbishops and which ceremonies were to take place in each, and which was entitled to the belongings of deceased clergy!
Which brings us to money, often given by the wealthy to glorify themselves, but always also asked of the rest of us. Like most churches, there are collection boxes, and some of them a bit unusual, such as this one which on closer inspection turns out to be an empty Guinness keg.
George G, the ace Gumbo puzzle-solver, used the Organ Fund keg to identify this as the answer to this week’s One-Clue Mystery.
Over the years, Saint Patrick’s grew more chapels and spires and outbuildings, so that in the end it became the largest church in Ireland and its spire the tallest. Along the way, it went through periods of turmoil, abandonment and decay followed by periods of reconstruction.
Not a small factor in the turmoil was the Reformation. Originally, of course, a Catholic church, St. Patrick’s changed hands repeatedly as Henry VIII and later monarchs switched back and forth, although one particularly flexible bishop, Hugh Curwen, managed to keep his seat when Henry VII switched, and then became Catholic again under Queen Mary, and then Anglican again under Queen Elizabeth.
As far as Oliver Cromwell was concerned, it was Catholic, Anglican…all the same and all too royal. He showed his contempt for both by stabling his horses in the Cathedral, and having some of the images on the walls destroyed.
A major reconstruction and restoration in the 1860s, paid for by the beer-brewing Guinness family was so scantily documented that there are serious questions of how much of what we see is medieval and how much Victorian. The beautiful floors, though, are definitely recent!
The Guinness money also tore down some of the church’s neighbors to create the open land around it. That’s now St Patrick’s park, seen in the exterior view near the top.
Under the two-cathedral treaty, the official seat of the bishops and archbishops of Dublin was at Christ Church, and Saint Patrick’s was headed by a chapter of church officials headed by the Dean. The most (if not only) famous Dean was Jonathan Swift, master of English satire and author of Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposition. He was Dean from 1713 to 1745. Much of his work was considered either too common or too sharp-tongued toward the British rulers; all was published under pseudonyms, but at St. Patrick’s he’s not in hiding.
Note the donor took feature spot on Swift’s bust. Swift would have laughed. The tomb below is that of Thomas Jones, one of Swift’s predecessors. He was also Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of Dublin, Bishop of Meath—all at one time!
It’s easy, wandering the aisles and chapels of this immense cathedral, to lose sight of the irony that in a country where there are about 39 times as many Catholics as Protestants, the two largest cathedrals in its capital should be Protestant, serving a declining audience.
The stone statesmen above have stood and sat long enough to be used to it, but for the rest of the world, St Patrick’s seating doesn’t look too inviting.
There have even been occasional proposals to give St. Patrick’s back to the Catholic Church, but these have gone predictably nowhere, although there are now two ‘ecumenical canons,’ one Presbyterian and one Catholic, who occasionally serve in the Cathedral.
This bell, now retired, is a reminder of another episode in Ireland’s Protestant history. It commemorates the arrival of Huguenots, French Protestants fleeing massacre and persecution in the late 17th century. The Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s was set aside for them in 1666, and a French-speaking congregation worshiped there until 1816. By then their descendants had completely assimilated into Irish life.
Another token of the role St. Patrick’s played in Ireland’s official life is its collection of regimental colors, the flags and symbols of British army units raised in Ireland.
It’s a tradition that regimental colors that have been replaced, or from units that have been disbanded are ‘laid-up’ in a place of honor, and allowed to age and crumble, echoing the song that says that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
The colors of the Irish regiments, mostly disbanded after Ireland’s independence, hang in St. Patrick’s.
And last, but not least: St Patrick’s has a wonderful array of stained glass, in different styles and forms.
