The imposing Christ Church Leeson Park in Dublin 6 has been deconsecrated by Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson and is to be put on the property market.
Originally the Molyneux Asylum for the Female Blind, which moved from Dublin’s Peter Street to Leeson Park in 1862, the Molyneux Chapel was rebuilt and renamed Christ Church Leeson Park in 1874.
The area then had a large Church of Ireland population. Among worshippers at Christ Church Leeson Park in those years was writer George Bernard Shaw, who lived at nearby Hatch Street.
He also attended Sunday School there “to sit motionless and speechless in your best suit in a dark stuffy church … hating the clergyman as a sanctimonious bore and dreading the sexton”, according to Vivien Igoe in his Literary History Guide to Dublin.
The church received the dedication of Christ Church, Leeson Park, in 1873 and in 1892 it became a separate Church of Ireland parish.
Its rector during the 1916 Rising was Rev J Percy Phair, who recalled later how he and one of his three curates there went daily to Ballsbridge for bread, which they brought back for residents at the Molyneux Home.
He was awakened early one morning when the bodies of two parishioners were brought to the rectory on a lorry. He cycled to Aungier Street to get coffins from an undertaker there, only to be met by the proprietor with a pitchfork. He was allowed in when he said who he was. The body of another parishioner who had been killed accidentally was later found in the city morgue.
Through the later decades of the 20th century the number of worshippers dropped off rapidly, and it faced closure. In 1972 it was united with nearby St Bartholomew’s parish on Clyde Road.
Around the same time, the Methodists lost their church at Stephen’s Green in a fire and moved to Christ Church Leeson Park, which they shared with its small Church of Ireland congregation. The Methodists built a new hall in the grounds, designed by architect Michael Scott, which they named after founder John Wesley.
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Numbers continued to fall and Christ Church Leeson Park was closed as a Church of Ireland parish in 2007, but continued to be used by the Romanian Orthodox Church for some time. Soon it proved too large for their purposes too. Last year it was decided to sell the property.
First, it had to be deconsecrated. The last spoken Eucharist took place there on March 7th, with the deconsecration ceremony last Tuesday. It included prayers for all who had worshipped there over the generations.
Participants at that ceremony included Archbishop Jackson, the vicar Canon Andrew McCroskery, registrar Rev Robert Marshall, and curate Rev Dr Mathew McCauley.
Canon McCroskery read the petition to Archbishop Jackson, requesting that he secularise the building and release it from consecration. The Archbishop then read the Act of Deconsecration.
Estimates as to its likely value on the property market have proved difficult to establish. However, the nearby former Church of Ireland St Mary’s on Anglesea Rd in Ballsbridge was sold to the RDS in 2022 for €3.75 million, while a former Methodist Church at Charleston Road in Ranelagh, now known as Trinity Hall, was sold for close to €4 million in 2015.
