St. Anthony’s Scotland Road, Liverpool

Michael O’Neill

An inner-city English Catholic parish, close to Liverpool docks, which embodies two hundred years of Liverpool's heritage and history. Using documentary evidence and the reminiscences of the people who have lived and worked there, this book tells the fascinating story of the parish, from its origins in the aftermath of the French Revolution with the mission of Fr Jean Baptiste Antoine Gerardot. Woven into its rich history are the threads of Recusancy, of Portuguese, Lithuanian, Italian and Irish influences, of the Great Famine, Immigration, Epidemics, Riots, the Blitz and the baleful impact of the urban planners' post-1945 dreams, the divided loyalties of the parishioners split between supporting Liverpool and Everton football clubs, and even Cilla Black, who attended the parish school.

978 085244 726 0

560 pages illustrated

£25.00hb                                                  

A Brief History and Guide
to the Church of St Vincent de Paul

Michael O’Neill

St Vincent de Paul is frequently referred to as 'The apostle of the poor'. The church which bears his name in Liverpool was commissioned by Fr Bernard O'Reilly, later third Bishop of Liverpool, and designed by Edward Welby Pugin in 1852 to serve the poorest community in the Liverpool of the time. Today, it continues in its role as a catalyst for its inner-city community. Making extensive use of original source material, this study concentrates particularly on the establishment of the parish and the construction of its church which stands today much as Pugin left it in 1852.  

978 085244 795 6                    

120 pages                                

£7.99

St. Patrick’s Park Place, Liverpool
A Parish History 1821-2021

                                                                Michael O’Neill

St Patrick's is the oldest of Liverpool's early post-Reformation Catholic churches to remain in use. Erected in the third decade of the nineteenth century, close to the city's expanding docks, and designed to seat 1,800 people, it has a fortress-like construction, which took six years to complete, the foundations and burial pits being cut into the solid sandstone bedrock.

In 1816 a group of far-sighted laymen took out an unusual 5,000 year lease on the site. From the time of its opening in 1827, St. Patrick's has always been a hub of local community activity in the Toxteth area of Liverpool.

The burial place of three of the ten 'martyr priests' who died during the 1847 typhus epidemic, the church in which Adolf Hitler's nephew was baptised, the parish of Jack Traynor, miraculously cured at Lourdes in 1923, the survivor of street riots, massive bombing between 1940 and 1942 and the earthquake of 1974, with close links to the Australian Archdiocese of Adelaide, proud to have had footballers such as Robbie Fowler and Ian Callaghan attend its school, and currently the subject of detailed investigations by the University of Liverpool Department of Archaeology, St Patrick's has a remarkable and unfolding story to tell as it approaches the start of its third century.

978 085244 981 3

272 pages

£14.99