All Saints, Drimoleague, and Catholic visual culture under Bishop Cornelius Lucey in Cork, 1952-9 (Pre published)

Abstract

All Saints, Drimoleague, designed by Cork architect Frank Murphy and built in 1954-6, was the first church built in a modernist architectural style in the Cork and Ross diocese since Christ the King, Turner’s Cross, in the 1920s. It contains a very unusual mural on the sanctuary wall and a distinguished series of stained glass windows by Harry Clarke Studios. This article sets out a framework for the study of the ten new churches that Bishop Cornelius Lucey oversaw during his first years in charge of the diocese of Cork and Ross. It argues that one of them, All Saints, Drimoleague, is a building of national importance and it places its artwork within the broader context of Catholic politics and social teaching in the diocese in the years before Vatican II.