St Mary's Pro-Cathedral - Plans For A Full Cathedral

Plans For A Full Cathedral

The Pro-Cathedral was never intended to be other than a temporary acting cathedral, pending the availability of funds to build a full cathedral. Various locations for the new cathedral were discussed. W. T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State (prime minister) from 1922 to 1932 and a deeply religious Catholic, suggested that the burnt out shell of the General Post Office, the location of the 1916 Rising, be turned into a cathedral, but the idea was not acted on, and the GPO was restored for use as a post office.

John Charles McQuaid, who served as Archbishop from the 1940s to the early 1970s, bought the gardens in the centre of Merrion Square and announced plans to erect a cathedral there, but to the relief of Dubliners, for whom the gardens were an oasis of nature in the centre of a busy city, his plans never came to pass and the gardens were eventually handed over by his successor to Dublin Corporation and opened to the public. While it is suggested periodically that the Church of Ireland, which has a relatively small membership, might hand over one of its cathedrals to the Roman Catholic Church, no serious proposals have been made for such an arrangement. (The Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral (which serves as the "national cathedral" of the Church of Ireland - Christchurch is the diocesan cathedral of Dublin) did suggest allowing Roman Catholic Masses to be celebrated in his cathedral but the idea was dropped after opposition within the Church of Ireland.) (Anglican opposition was irrelevant, in any case, as the then Catholic Archbishop ridiculed the idea and rejected the Anglican offer out of hand). Though theoretically the possibility of erecting a new Roman Catholic cathedral remains on the agenda, in reality most of the funds collected for the building of a new cathedral have been spent erecting new churches in the rapidly growing archdiocese. As a result, few expect a new cathedral to be erected, with instead the Pro-Cathedral at some stage likely to be raised to full cathedral status, as happened to St Peter's Cathedral, Belfast in the late twentieth century.