On Thursday evening, the Feast of All Saints, the Dean of Christ Church, Dublin, the Very Rev John Paterson, will preach in All Saints' Church, Grangegorman, at the Solemn Patronal Eucharist. This year, the festival marks the re-opening of the church after a major restoration and conservation programme, designed to restore its interior to the condition it was in before the fire of 1966. The original brickwork of the walls has been revealed, new floor tiles have been laid and the organ has been re-sited.
All Saints' Church was built on the Phibsborough Road in 1828 and served the newly formed parish of Grangegorman, which had been created out of the parishes of St Michan and St Paul. Its early years were dominated by William Maturin and Henry Hogan, successively incumbents from 1843 to 1923, who were the personification of the church's tractarian tradition and its attention to high liturgical standards. For more recent generations, All Saints' was virtually synonymous with the name of Archdeacon Raymond Jenkins, who was vicar from 1937 to 1976. Today, the parish is part of the Christ Church Cathedral group and is served by the vicar, Canon David Pierpoint, and a curate, the Rev Roy Byrne.
In Bandon, the Rev Dr David Hewlett, principal of the South-West Ministry Training Course in the Church of England and formerly lecturer in Systematic Theology in the Church of Ireland Theological College, will lead a parish weekend on the theme "forgiveness".
Today and tomorrow, the services in Christ Church Cathedral will be sung by the choir of Leicester Cathedral. In the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, the preacher at the Sung Eucharist tomorrow will be the Rev Jonathan Pierce from Taney parish.
On Wednesday, the lunchtime lecture in Christ Church Cathedral, in the "2000 Years of Christianity" series, will be given by Dr Ailbhe MacShamhrain, NUI Maynooth, on "Monastic Organization of the Irish Church with reference to Glendalough".
The autumn series in the Centre for Christian Studies in St Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork, begins at 8 p.m. in the Chapter House. The first speaker in the series, which is based on the recent book by the Bishop of Meath and Kildare And is it True?, will be Dr Fiachra Long from UCC.
The Armagh Choral Festival will be held in St Patrick's Cathedral on Thursday evening when the celebrant will be Canon Michael Kennedy and the preacher, the Rev Alistair Warke.
In St Peter's Church, Derry, the Church's Ministry of Healing will hold an Evening Conference with the Rev Russ Parker, director of the Acorn Christian Healing Trust.
On Friday evening, the St Cecilia Singers will top the bill at a concert in All Saints' Church, Blackrock, Co Dublin, in aid of the parish and the Irish Heart Transplant Association.
Church-state relations in Europe have for some years been the subject of a joint study by Cardiff University Law School and university departments in France, Greece and Romania. As part of a recent colloquium on "The Notion of the National Church in the United Kingdom", the historiographer of the Church of Ireland, Dr Kenneth Milne, presented a paper on the past role of the Church of Ireland as an established church, and its present position in two political jurisdictions.