On Tuesday evening in St Bartholomew's Church, Dublin, Archbishop Walton Empey will institute the Rev William Ritchie to the incumbency of St Bartholomew's with Leeson Park. The preacher will be the Bishop of Meath and Kildare, Dr Richard Clarke, who was curate in the parish from 1977 to 1979.
Mr Ritchie is a Trinity graduate who was ordained in 1986 after training in the Church of Ireland Theological College. His first curacy was Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, and he then spent two years in Egypt as assistant chaplain in Alexandria. Mr Ritchie returned to Ireland in 1992 to be rector of Kells, in the Diocese of Meath, and last year he was appointed to the incumbency of Clondehorkey group of parishes in Co Donegal.
In St Bartholomew's he succeeds the Rev John McKay, who is now chaplain in Venice, and a line of distinguished churchmen including the present Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, the Right Rev John Neill, the present Dean of Christ Church, the Very Rev John Paterson, and the former Dean of Cork, the Very Rev Maurice Carey.
The church in Clyde Road, which was consecrated in 1867 to serve the needs of the developing Pembroke area, has a fine reputation for musical and liturgical excellence in the Catholic tradition. Its history, which was at times turbulent, was written in 1963 by Dr Kenneth Milne, now the Church of Ireland historiographer, and was published as St Bartholomew's: A History of the Dublin Parish by the late Allen Figgis.
Leeson Park is older than St Bartholomew's, having been consecrated as a chapel for the Molyneux Asylum for the Female Blind in 1862. It was renamed Christ Church, Leeson Park, in 1862 and assumed parochial status in 1892. Christ Church was united with St Bartholomew's in 1972, with the Rev John Paterson as the first incumbent of the union. Later in the same year an arrangement was made to share the church with the Methodist congregation from Centenary Church on St Stephen's Green, which had been destroyed by fire. This arrangement has endured to the present.
Today, the chaplain of Trinity College, Dublin, Dr Alan McCormack, will attend a collaborative seminar on "Religion and New Media" in Boston, where he will work on a research project exploring the theological capacity of contemporary cinema. In University College, Cork, an interdisciplinary conference on "Pilgrimage - Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago, Ireland" comes to an end.
Related to the conference will be a pilgrimage in September, details of which may be had from Dr Dagmar O'Riain-Raedel, department of history, University College, Cork.
Tomorrow in Dublin the services in Christ Church Cathedral will be sung by the choir of St Luke's Church, Chelsea, while in St Patrick's Cathedral the visiting choir will be from St Mark's School from Dallas, Texas,
On Thursday evening in St Barrahane's Church, Castletownshend, Co Cork, the recital in the 20th Festival of Classical Music will be given by the RTE Vanburgh String Quartet, whose programme will include Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 and Ravel's String Quartet in F.
The Dean of St Patrick's highly readable, if idiosyncratic short history of the Church of Ireland has been reprinted. Based on a series of lectures which was given in Kilkenny, the history retains the informal lecture style and the many allusions to the united dioceses of Cashel and Ossory with which Dr MacCarthy is so familiar. Ancient & Modern, A Short History of the Church of Ireland by R. B. MacCarthy is published by Four Courts Press at £4.95.