14.04.2025
Palm Sunday Service Marks 175th Anniversary of ‘Unique’ St John’s Sandymount
One hundred and seventy five years of witness and worshiping God at the unique St John’s Church, Sandymount was celebrated on Palm Sunday. The special service marked the anniversary of the church’s dedication and also looked to the future with the sacraments of baptism and confirmation.
Led by Archbishop Michael Jackson, the service was attended by the Lord Mayor of Dublin Emma Blain. St John’s Chaplain, Canon Robert Jones was joined by Canon Alistair Graham, who is a member of the board of trustees. The regular congregation was joined by family, friends and well wishers of Josefine, who was baptised, and Paul, who was confirmed, as well as the many people who have had a long association with the church.
The service began with the Liturgy of the Palms Gospel and a procession. Afterwards those in attendance enjoyed a specially commissioned cake.
In his sermon the Archbishop looked back on the colourful and sometimes controversial history of St John’s Sandymount, which with its High Church tradition holds a special place in the Church of Ireland. It was dedicated on Palm Sunday in 1850 having been gifted to Sandymount and Merrion by Sidney Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea and younger brother of the 12th Earl of Pembroke. It was a time of growth for the Oxford Movement which offered an invitation to return to pre–Reformation liturgy and doctrines of the church while continuing to reject the authority of a Pope.
St John’s is a Trustee Church which stands in some ways outside the jurisdiction of the Church of Ireland but chooses to adhere to its principles and come under the umbrella of the Archbishop of Dublin. Archbishop Jackson said it navigated the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, a succession of Ecclesiastical Courts of the General Synod, a shift in tone to High Church life and practice, two World Wars and Irish Independence. Its organist Cecil Grange MacDowell was responsible for a noteworthy 1917 arrangement of Ireland’s national anthem at a time when fellow parishioners were giving their lives in the trenches in the service of freedom in Europe during the First World War.
The Archbishop noted that much of St John’s colourful liturgical life was associated with Father le Fanu and Father Colquhoun, the latter of whom was suspended for six months from his ecclesiastical duties.
“A testimony to the endurance of the spirit of St John’s surely is to be found in the fact that so many of the things that brought it notoriety in earlier times have been mainstreamed in the contemporary Church of Ireland such as seasonal stoles, altar frontals and candles. This in no way is said in a spirit of triumphalism. It is not my way to diminish another tradition within the totality of the tradition itself. It is simply to state a fact. In its earliest description, The Dublin Evening Mail of the day spoke of the simplicity, massiveness and durability of St John’s. We continue to live in its slipstream today,” he said.
He added: “But: Why would you dedicate a church building on Palm Sunday? This surely is a question that any of us might ask on this day when we celebrate the dedication of this unique church: unique in its beauty and its fabric, unique in its liturgical tradition and unique in its continuing witness to something that the Church of Ireland needs in 2025 as it would have needed in 1850: a strong cord of connection between catholic sensibility and intentional community. St John’s Sandymount is a community dedicated to holy deeds and holy things first and foremost… With faithfulness and fruitfulness, St John’s has kept the flame of God alight in an extremely important and invitational way to everyone and most especially to those of catholic sensibility”.
You can read Archbishop Jackson’s sermon in full here.
