ARCHITECTURE
Church of the Sacred Heart, Limerick Paul Waddington describes a spectacular church recently bought by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest
Sacred Heart: the entrance neatly fitted between the houses
T
he port of Limerick on the estuary of Ireland’s River Shannon expanded greatly during the eighteenth century. Growing trade brought with it a demand for housing; and, although much of this was of poor quality, some streets of very fine Georgian terraces were developed during the 1760s for the prosperous, and mostly English, merchants and business people. One such street was George’s Street (now O’Connell Avenue), which widened out at its mid-point to form Richmond Place, where the larger and more elegant houses were located. The most prominent of these was Crescent House on the west side of Richmond Place. In the year 1857, a monument to Daniel O’Connell, the first Catholic to sit in the English House of Commons, was
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erected in the centre of Richmond Place (by this time renamed The Crescent). This was clearly not a welcome development for Richard Russell, the Limerick banker who owned Crescent House at the time. It is said that he insisted that all the shutters on window overlooking The Crescent, should be kept closed, so that he was spared the indignity of seeing O’Connell’s statue. Five years later in 1862, Russell sold Crescent House. Together with three adjacent properties, Crescent House was bought by the Jesuits, for the purpose of establishing a school and Junior Seminary. In the 1960s, the school was relocated to a suburban site; and Crescent House became, and continues to be, the independent Limerick Tutorial College.
In 1864, the Jesuits decided to build a church in the gardens behind these houses. The architect chosen was a local man, William Edward Corbett, who designed a cruciform church in the Romanesque style. It opened in 1868 after some delay due to the roof collapsing during construction. Originally it was to be dedicated to St Aloysius, but there was a change of mind and it opened as the Church of the Sacred Heart. The church was not complete on opening. Corbett designed a massive High Altar, made from 22 types of precious marble, and this was installed in 1876. Above the tabernacle he placed a tempietto to house the crucifix, with adoring angels at either side. Marble altar rails were added in 1927, and the mosaic floor of the sanctuary was not completed until 1939.
AUTUMN 2020
