About St. Saviour’s Church
St. Saviour’s church is located on Dominick Street in Dublin 1. It is home to a community of Dominican friars, including both priests and student brothers who are based in the adjoining priory building. The church serves the place of worship for the Dominican friars and the people of Dominick Street parish. This year, 2024, the Irish Dominican Province is marking the eight centenary of the Order of Preachers first arriving in Ireland. The Dominicans arrived in Dublin 1224 and have had a presence in the city over the eight centuries which followed. Please find below a short historical account of the founding of the Dominican Order and the Dominican presence in Dublin.
The Dominican Order & History of St. Saviour’s Church
St. Dominic and the Foundation of the Dominican Order
The Dominican Order was founded in the early thirteenth century by Saint Dominic. Dominic de Guzman began his religious life as a cathedral canon in Osma in northern Spain. As part of his role as a canon regular, he was asked to accompanying his bishop Diego on a diplomatic mission to northern Europe. It was during his travels as part of this diplomatic mission that Dominic encountered the Albigensian heresy. In encountering this heresy and seeing how its false teachings were adversely affecting those who held these beliefs that Dominic was moved with compassion for these people and began a preaching mission to bring these people back to the truth. Dominic seen that there was a need for friars who would live together in community, lives of poverty, study and prayer directed towards preaching for the salvation of souls. It was against this backdrop and through the working of Divine Providence that the Order of Preachers was founded. It received papal approval from Pope Innocent ⅠⅤ in 1216 and over the last eight centuries, the Order has continued its preaching mission of bringing people to know the love of God as revealed through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
To find out more about the Dominicans in Ireland, please check out our website: https://dominicans.ie
To find out more about the Order worldwide, please check out the website: https://www.op.org
The History of St. Saviour’s
Foundation and Early Years
The Dominicans came to Dublin in 1224, only three years after the death of St. Dominic. The Archbishop of Dublin, Henry de Londres had been present at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome in 1215, where he may have met St. Dominic and certainly met St. Dominic’s great sponsor, Pope Honorius the Third; he likely invited the friars to Dublin where they were given a chapel on the north bank of the Liffey, for the price of one candle a year. For three centuries the Dominicans of St. Saviour’s flourished.
A mark of their popularity among the people is the fact that the feast of St. Dominic was one of only four days in the year when the streets of Dublin had to be cleared of all pigs, which probably means that the feast was marked by a festal market or a religious procession. The medieval Dominicans also took part in the attempted foundation of Dublin’s first university in 1312.
Cromwellian Persecution
The monastery was suppressed by Henry the Eight in 1539 and the building eventually became what is today The Four Courts. The Dominicans went underground in Dublin, ministering in various locations around the city but imprisonment, slavery and martyrdom did not blunt their devotion in the following centuries.
Present Church Building
In 1861, the friars could consecrate the present church of St. Saviour’s in Dominick Street. Ireland’s most prolific architect of the nineteenth century, J.J. McCarthy, graced them with a magnificent gothic church which, even following the loss of much of its artwork over time, still impresses and inspires. The magazine The Irish Quarterly of 1858 writes of the church, built “not for a fashionable congregation, but for the poor, devout, toil-hardened population. From the long line of pure stone pillars, arches spring aloft; and windows and vaulted roof are rich with intertwining traceries.”
Recent Decades
In 1974 St. Saviour’s became the parish church for the surrounding area and in the year 2000 was made the Studium for the formation and training of priests for the Irish Dominicans. A further major step in these years was the establishment of the Dominican Polish Chaplaincy in St. Saviour’s which today sees large numbers of Polish faithful attending Mass and services every week, along with the Irish and Spanish-language congregations, making St. Saviour’s a truly international church in the heart of Dublin.
More Information
To find out more about the history of St. Saviours and the friars in Dublin, please find the link to the booklet below. The booklet written in 1961, contains a detailed historical account of the life and mission of St. Saviour’s church from the arrival of the friars in Dublin in 1224 to the activities and groups associated with the church in 1961.