Overview

St Patrick's is the oldest of Liverpool's early post-Reformation Catholic churches to remain in use. Erected in the third decade of the nineteenth century, close to the city's expanding docks, and designed to seat 1,800 people, it has a fortress-like construction, which took six years to complete, the foundations and burial pits being cut into the solid sandstone bedrock. In 1816 a group of far-sighted laymen took out an unusual 5,000 year lease on the site. From the time of its opening in 1827, St. Patrick's has always been a hub of local community activity in the Toxteth area of Liverpool. The burial place of three of the ten 'martyr priests' who died during the 1847 typhus epidemic, the church in which Adolf Hitler's nephew was baptised, the parish of Jack Traynor, miraculously cured at Lourdes in 1923, the survivor of street riots, massive bombing between 1940 and 1942 and the earthquake of 1974, with close links to the Australian Archdiocese of Adelaide, proud to have had footballers such as Robbie Fowler and Ian Callaghan attend its school, and currently the subject of detailed investigations by the University of Liverpool Department of Archaeology, St Patrick's has a remarkable and unfolding story to tell as it approaches the start of its third century.

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Michael O'Neill, whose origins lie in Ireland and in India, grew up less than a mile away from St Patrick's Church. A graduate of the University of London, since 1981 he has taught Humanities at the City of Liverpool College. His interests include liturgy, theology, local and family history, heritage conservation and pipe organ construction; he regularly plays the historic Bishop organ at St Patrick's. Michael's histories of the Liverpool churches of St Anthony, Scotland Road and St Vincent de Paul, are published by Gracewing.

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