Celebrations will get under way this month for the 80th anniversary of St Patrick's Church in Braddon, the festivities made doubly sweet after recent concerns about the future of the building.
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The distinctive red-brick building in Donaldson Street was blessed and opened as a church and school on October 20, 1935. According to a new history of St Patrick's by Elizabeth Baxter, it was the first Catholic church opened on the northside and the second in Canberra, after St Christopher's in Manuka.
Ms Baxter said in the history that the opening of the church had been a "tremendous achievement by the local Catholic community of 1935 in a Canberra just emerging from the Great Depression".
For the anniversary on Tuesday, the church will be open for prayers and mass from 11am to 2pm.
On Sunday, October 25, the 8am mass will be followed by a special morning tea, with the entire community invited to take part.
Parishioner Vin Kane said the morning tea would be a great opportunity to "meet old friends and to look at photographs and memorabilia of those olden days".
Ms Baxter wrote in the history that St Patrick's school opened for classes on September 10, 1935, with 35 children from kindergarten to grade four.
"The teachers were Good Samaritan sisters like those teaching at St Christopher's and came across each school day by bus from their convent in Manuka," Ms Baxter wrote.
The Mercy Sisters took over teaching at the school in 1955 and by the next year, the school population was bursting at the seams with 500 children enrolled and three students to a desk.
The school was renamed St Mary's in 1959 but, Ms Baxter writes, enrolments started to decline in the 1960s as Canberra expanded and more schools opened. Faced with fewer than 100 enrolments, the school closed in 1973.
St Patrick's is now known as the city church and mass is celebrated at 8am on Sundays and at 12.30pm Tuesday to Friday.
Ms Baxter has recorded little gems of information about the church, including that the current altar was part of one used by Pope John Paul II at a papal mass held at the National Exhibition Centre when he visited Canberra in 1986.
She also notes that Father Patrick Haydon, the driving force behind the church, apparently, before St Patrick's was built, used to hear confessions "sitting on his motorbike under a tree", because it was more private than whatever small shed or hall was otherwise available.
The future of the church has not always looked secure.
Then archbishop Mark Coleridge in 2010 raised the prospect of selling the St Patrick's site to the ACT government for redevelopment but the plan was ruled out by the church three years later.
The ACT Heritage Council did grant St Patrick's a heritage listing in 2011, but the archdiocese challenged the listing and it was revoked by the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal in 2013.
This week, Helen Delahunty, financial administrator of the archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, said the church's push to have the heritage listing was not about redeveloping the site any time soon. She said despite all the discussion at the time, selling the site "was never a real possibility".
"The lifting of the heritage listing was never, ever about knocking the building down or selling it," Ms Delahunty said.
"And that is the case now. We're not selling it. For the forseeable future, the church will stay as it is and have a robust community attending mass.
"In 10 or 20 or 50 years time, when we're not here, when there may be other uses for that land, that option is taken away from us. We wanted options for the future. We were never about demolishing, ever. We're not selling this property."
Ms Delahunty said the archdiocese was fully supportive of marking the 80th anniversary of St Patrick's.
"It's a wonderful celebration," she said.
ACT Heritage Council chairman David Flannery said the council respected the decision made by the tribunal about St Patrick's but "I am sure there was a level of disappointment, including within certain parts of the ACT community".
"St Patrick's was significant for its role as a church and a school during the early development of Canberra. Through its use by many people over the years, strong, faith-filled and long-lasting bonds were forged in the community," Mr Flannery said.
