THIS week’s Nostalgia looks at the history of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, commonly known as St Mary’s Church.
The original St Mary’s was opened in 1863, 12 years after the first Catholic services in Rhyl were conducted in a pub whose landlord was Irish.
Rhyl’s Catholic mission was founded by Father Etheridge, rector of St Beuno’s Jesuit College at Tremeirchion, and the church was the suspected site of the baptism of Roger Casement, a human rights activist and later a leader in the Easter Rising in Ireland.
His mother Anne secretly had her children baptised as Catholics while she was holidaying in North Wales without her Anglican husband.
St Mary’s suffered structural decay after WWII, partly because it was built on, or near, the former course of the river Clwyd.
Its final mass before demolition was celebrated on December 21 1975 at midday, and at 4pm the same day, the new church – which had been built immediately behind the old one – was consecrated and opened.
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