By: Matthew Scherber
In June and July 2025, I had the opportunity to make a small but meaningful contribution to a long-term research project which will enhance the breadth of available sources on the subject of Irish ecclesiastical and parochial history as well as democratize their use.
In recent decades, institutional challenges such as disaffiliation and demographic shifts have forced the Irish Catholic Church, once the most powerful and diffuse entity in the nation, to grapple with its identity and in very real ways to reimagine a material future which will look different from its past. All these changes have made the need to document and preserve the material heritage of the Irish Church all the more pressing because—as every new chapel is closed or sold off, the public loses access to valuable information written in the very fabric of its walls.
As a documentary photographer for the PARISH Project (Preserving And Recording Irish Sacred Heritage), I made my way across the Emerald Isle stopping at churches ranging from former horse stables converted into a sanctuary to major urban cathedrals. PARISH is a cooperative initiative of the Maynooth University Dept. of History and the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies to collect information and documentation on the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. It eventually hopes to catalog every Catholic place of worship on the island.
Much of the work relies on photographs and transcriptions of memorial and dedication inscriptions found in stonework and stained glass windows as well as carved into pew plaques in Irish churches. These inscriptions often contain important personal information useful to genealogists and social historians including, but not limited to birth, marriage and death dates, addresses, and the names of family relations.
I began my work in Maynooth, the small village an hour west of Dublin which served as my home base for my time in Ireland. From there I took buses from village to village, stopping in and photographing each local parish and chapel. Occasionally, there were obstacles to my research, mainly finding the keys to get buildings unlocked and navigating a nation efficiently on only public transit.
I explored the quaint neighborhoods of Galway and Cork and spent a lovely three nights with the Benedictine Sisters at scenic Kylemore Abbey, sleeping in the old servants' quarters above the chocolate kitchen. Meanwhile my more extreme efforts included hiking three hours up Croagh Patrick, a mountain in Northwestern Ireland, in a blasting gale to photograph the chapel at the top—a special chapel not often opened to visitors outside of the all-important weekend of Reek Sunday each July which commemorates St. Patrick's forty days of fasting on the peak.
It's safe to say forty days in that weather would be difficult for anyone to endure. My time in Ireland not only exposed me to the three to four dozen churches I had the honor of adding to the database but also to a wide swath of Irish history and culture. From the medieval castle just beyond the campus of St. Patrick’s College Maynooth to watching a show at Dublin’s Abbey Theater and a semifinal match in Gaelic Football at Croke Park, the rich heritage of the island was all around me. I had the chance to see how wild Irish lobsters are prepared when I stopped by the Ballymaloe Cookery School outside of Cork and to smell peat brick burning in the fire while I ate my breakfast near Adara in Donegal. A conversation with a session player in Matt Malloy’s Pub in Westport even inspired me to take up learning the banjo, an effort that is very much still a work in progress.
I am grateful to have had the chance to visit and pray in so many rural sanctuaries across Ireland, all of them unique testaments to the faith and devotion of generations of Irish families. Most of these were humble country churches built of stone and wood built up by local craftspeople in the years immediately following Catholic emancipation in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century; even in the midst of harsh persecution, famine, and destitution the churches still went up. It was moving to see how communities had relocated shops from central squares to make way for the churches and how community members of all socio-economic backgrounds gave what they could to contribute to the building projects, even down to the cost of just one stone or brick for the walls. These buildings are truly at the heart of Irish patrimony, the collective heritage of the entire nation, and a central element of Ireland's cultural identity.
The PARISH Project has the potential to change how historians of Ireland, genealogists, and even artists and architects explore the rich Catholic heritage of the Irish people for decades to come, especially those among the Irish diaspora, like so many of us here at Notre Dame. It is an ambitious undertaking, one which will take many years to complete, but once finished will represent a dramatic leap forward in the digital infrastructure available to academics and amateurs alike for the exploration of Irish identity and devotional history.
I want to thank the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies for their generous support of my research and their commitment to the study and preservation of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Without their support neither this project nor my participation in it would have been possible. It is my hope that in the coming years PARISH will continue to grow as an aid to researchers and hibernophiles everywhere as they explore the rich heritage of Ireland and her churches.