Churches a go-go

(Warning: This post is boring and history-heavy, but at least it’s a post! Sorry for the delay – I’m moving in a week and what with this paper hanging over my head, I have barely been able to write my name, let alone a blog post. Also, sorry, but I’m doing a couple themed posts rather than a day-by-day account of Corey’s visit, because believe me, four posts that say something like, “Got up. Ate an amazing scone. Trudged through rain to [insert site here]. Ate. Trudged. Went to sleep,” would be much more boring even than this.)

St Patrick's! All photos courtesy of Corey.

It’s probably odd that after almost a year in a hugely Catholic country, I had not stepped foot in a Dublin church until Corey (who is, ironically, half-Jewish) came to visit. Considering that the Irish are not keen on Protestants in general (especially Protestants attending Mass), and that Dubliners are not that likely to practice their Catholicism anyway, it’s understandable, certainly, that I hadn’t entered a cathedral at all, but it’s still strange.

And it’s a shame, too, because as we found out, Dublin has some pretty amazing churches.

The most famous, of course, is St. Patrick’s Cathedral. After a leisurely brunch at Lemon and a long catch-up, Corey and I made the trek over to Patrick Street with the idea of starting our church tour with the best.

St. Patrick’s is the national cathedral, and is unusual because it’s a cathedral that is not the seat of an archbishop, but instead has a Dean that presides over it. Like everything in Ireland, it’s insanely old, built around 1190 near the site of a holy well where St Patrick is said to have baptized the first Irish Christians.

There are several very cool things about St. Patrick’s:

1)      Jonathan Swift and his muse Stella are buried there. Jonathan Swift is most famous for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, but he was also Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He was an amazingly prolific writer, and considered A Description of a City Shower one of the best things he had ever written…incidentally, even though it’s about London, parts of it are a pretty accurate depiction of a Dublin rain as well (except the drowned puppies part).

The heraldic banners.

2)      It used to be the chapel of the Most Illustrious Order of St. Patrick (i.e., the Knights of St Patrick).  Though the last remaining knight died in 1974 and no new ones have been created since 1936, it’s still cool that there are actually knights who are associated with this place. Though they moved the chapel, the heraldic banners of the members of the Order as of 1871 are still hanging over the choir stalls where they used to sit for services.

3)      There are many items of historical interest, including a few ancient Celtic crosses and a giant door that (legend has it) the Earl of Kildare hacked a hole through in 1492 in order to offer the arm of peace to the Earl of Ormond in an attempt at a truce.

Though all of this was amazing and very interesting, we still had Christ Church to get to. After a couple of pictures and a stop at the gift shop for little St. Patrick’s medals (which may or may not protect us from snakes), we pressed on.

Part of the crypt at Christ Church

If you can believe it, Christ Church (or The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, if you prefer its official name), is even older than St. Patrick’s. It was built in 1038 at the end of Dame Street by a Viking King of Dublin named Sitric Silkenbeard. It’s seen the Anglo-Norman invasion, and is so old that it was actually rebuilt in 1171, and restored and expanded regularly since then. It also holds the tomb of a man named Strongbow, a Norman-Welsh warlord who, by all accounts, was pretty nifty (though quite short, judging from the size of the effigy).

The Victorians attempted to renovate and restore the building, and managed to preserve the church just fine; while it’s gorgeous, though, the problem this has caused for historians is that they are sometimes unsure of which parts of the cathedral are genuinely medieval and which are Victorian. However, there is still plenty of history preserved within the crypt under the nave, which is filled with silver altar settings, old statues, and tombs, and is delightfully creepy. The famous skeletons of the cat and rat that were found trapped and naturally mummifed behind the organ only add to the effect.

The last church on our list was probably the least tourist-inhabited than all of them: the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church. This is quite possibly the most Catholic church I have ever been to, with at least 20 shrines along the walls, all with candles lit in front of them. Needless to say, I was a bit awkward regarding protocol — should I genuflect out of respect when crossing the altar, even if I would undoubtedly do it wrong? Should I at least cross myself? Is it blasphemy for a Lutheran to cross herself while in a Catholic Church? Is it blasphemy for a Lutheran to even enter a Catholic church of this ilk? Was I about to be struck down by a lightening bolt of righteous anger, courtesy of the intercession of the saint who I didn’t light a candle in front of?

With all of this overwhelming Catholicism, it would be understandable to wonder why we went at all. Actually, though the church is out of the way and not well-known (we got so lost trying to find it), it also houses one of the coolest relics I’ve seen: the remains of St. Valentine.

I think you can guess what this is!

Apparently there were three St. Valentines, and I cannot find anywhere that specifies which one is resting in Dublin. I do know, though, that the remains were given as a gift to the church from the Holy See in the 19th century, and that there’s a beautiful shrine to St. Valentine to the right of the nave, where his remains rest in a little box under what might be an altar and what is definitely a kind of creepy statue of the saint himself. There’s also a book where you can place a written request for St. Valentine’s intercession on your behalf.

A quick visit to the life-sized Our Lady of Dublin ended our tour of Dublin’s churches — after all, we only had four days, and three churches in that time was plenty! Though if you’re going to be in Dublin longer and you feel the need, there are a few more churches you could visit: St. Anne’s on Dawson, St. Andrew’s on Westland Row (I pass this every day on my way to Centra and have not yet been inside) and the chapel at Trinity College (only open sometimes, sadly).

Next: Our trip to Howth, with starts with a depression-inducing caffeine withdrawl and ends with fish in a box. Whoo!

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