A tale of two churches

Any Catholic visitor to Kilcullen from Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada will feel very much at home in the Kildare village's Church of the Sacred Heart & St Brigid. Because the similarities between it and St Patrick's Church in the Canadian city are striking.

There's a good reason why, and it lies in the person of one Joseph Connolly, an architect who practiced in Toronto in the last quarter of the 19th century.

It is a solid chain of circumstance that links the two places of Catholic worship. Connolly was born in Limerick in 1840 and after completing his education he worked in the Dublin offices of the renowned architect James Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy was one of the most respected in his profession in Ireland at the time, and he specialised in designing churches for the Dublin Archdiocese. He was a keen follower of Pugin's revival of the 12th century Gothic church architecture, and his design for Kilcullen's new St Brigid's parish church in 1869 was a classic example of this revival.

Connolly by the time of this design was McCarthy's chief assistant, but moved out into his own practice in Dublin in 1871. He moved to Toronto two years later, and for the next quarter of a century he designed or rebuilt up to 40 churches in the Ontario and Michigan area.

It is widely accepted that he used the Kilcullen church as his model for St Patrick's, built between 1875-1877 to serve the Catholic community around King Street and Victoria St in Hamilton.

A comparison of the facades of the two buildings shows very similar doorway and windows treatments, as well as the positioning of statues and the pointed enclosing arch above them, with a distinctive round window. The stepped buttress vertical dividers and the hammered stone finish are also similar, the Kilcullen church's version in more formal vein.

The Hamilton church differs from the Kilcullen one in that it has an angle tower on the right front, although it never did get the spire that is indicated in Connolly's presentation drawings for the edifice, which are still in the possession of the parish. The Kilcullen church was supposed to get a similar tower and spire, which is clear in a stained glass window on the right-hand side altar, depicting St Brigid presenting a model of the church to Jesus.

Inside, there are other marked similarities, including the 'two-storey' design with upper level windows and the double row of Gothic vaulted arcades dividing the nave from the side aisles. The Kilcullen church has classier polished granite shafts than Connolly's Hamilton one, though it has a more decorative roof style than the simple timber arching in St Brigid's.

Both churches use large windows at the back of the sanctuary to provide natural light on the main altar area, though the St Patrick's ones are larger and there's one more than the four in Kilcullen.

All in all, the likes outweigh the unlikes in these two churches some 5,300 kilometres apart, in yet another example of the world being smaller than we think.

Brian Byrne.

(Written from an article in 'Raise the Hammer', a Hamilton magazine, by Malcolm Thurlby, PhD, FSA, Professor of Visual Arts at York University, Toronto. By kind permission.)