St Mary's Pro-Cathedral

History

A much earlier St Mary's, a Benedictine and later Cistercian abbey founded in the twelfth century, held lands on the north side of the Liffey. The monks surrendered them in 1539, and the ground stayed largely unoccupied until 1676, when the opening of Essex Bridge, built from the stones of the ruined abbey, drew the city north of the river and the abbey lands were laid out as streets.

The state created the Protestant parish of St Mary by Act of Parliament in 1697, and ten years later Archbishop Byrne, although in hiding, made it a Catholic parish as well. Its first pastor, John Linegar, was appointed to a parish with no church or chapel of any kind and said Mass in rooms lent by sympathisers while collecting for one. It took him twenty-two years to save enough, and a modest chapel in Liffey Street opened in 1729.

The present church was dedicated on 14 November 1825, the feast of St Laurence O'Toole, as the Roman Catholic Metropolitan Chapel. Dr Daniel Murray, fortieth successor of St Laurence O'Toole as archbishop, celebrated the inaugural High Mass in the new church, which was dedicated to the Conception of the Virgin Mary. Known for the following two centuries as the Pro-Cathedral, it has hosted national occasions including the funeral of Michael Collins in 1922 and a papal visit in 2018, and on its 200th anniversary the Archbishop of Dublin announced that the Holy See had designated it the Cathedral for Dublin.