DIOCESAN PUBLICATION RECORD OF THE UNITED DIOCESE OF LIMERICK, KILLALOE, ARDFERT and AGHADOE
It has been a great pleasure and a significant learning experience to be involved with the past
history of diocesan magazines in the dioceses of Limerick, Killaloe and Ardfert and Aghadoe
before and after their uniting. This uniting occurred in September 1976 for the dioceses of
Limerick and Killaloe. The date for the uniting of Ardfert and Aghadoe with Limerick was
1661. I am most grateful to Dr. Susan Hood and her staff in the Representative Church Body
Library for their outstandingly gracious and most efficient help which they gave me in
providing the published material needed to make this exercise possible. As the integrating
process of a further uniting of dioceses continues, now that Tuam has been joined to
Limerick, Killaloe and Ardfert and Aghadoe, it may prove helpful to have a sense of the
earlier diocesan magazine publishing record.
The first collection of magazines was that from the Diocese of Limerick, Ardfert and
Aghadoe, the publication of which commenced with a magazine for the months of June/July
in 1956. The magazine was published bi-monthly in printed format with a likeness of St.
Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick by F. Hazlebeck on the front cover. It was launched by Bishop
Evelyn Charles Hodges, who writes of it being a magazine which ‘brings the diocese to each
parish and the Church of Ireland to the doors of its members’; it fulfills ‘a felt need for a local
newspaper which helps to bind us together in fellowship’. The diocese in extent is ‘an area
120 miles by 40 miles of Ireland’. This first issue and those following, more than fulfil the
need as perceived by Bishop Hodges. The annual subscription was 5 shillings for 6 issues and
each issue carried some 30 advertisements.
The contents covered parish news for 12 parishes in the Limerick end of the diocese and 11
parishes in the Ardfert and Aghadoe territory. There is detailed information on Easter General
Vestry meetings; diocesan news with a calendar of 10 separate events for the month of June;
General Synod news, with an opening description of the meeting as ‘in no way a remarkable
gathering’ but it did ‘approve a Bill setting up a Commission to examine the problems of the
Church in sparsely populated areas and another Bill appointing a Canon Theologian in St.
Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast’.
More general news referenced a presentation to Dr. Shier of 100 guineas, a thermos flask and
a hot water bottle, and news of the World Council of Churches Evanston Meeting and the
follow-up of that event in Ireland. There is also information about bursaries for teacher
training; about Church of Ireland collection for pensions for clergy, widows and orphans; of a
Church of Ireland memorial to Dr. Kathleen Lynn.
Dipping into later issues I noted how fulsome the reporting is of the death of clergy and of
their Institutions. Similarly it becomes obvious how much leadership the agents of banks
contributed to the Select Vestries and other aspects of parish life as they moved station
around the country.
The February/March issue of 1969 was the last of this series. It carried the information that it
could no longer continue because of rising costs, falling sales and declining advertisements.
Between 1956 and 1969 the number of parish groupings had reduced from 23 to 15; 9 in the
Limerick end of the diocese and 6 in the Ardfert and Aghadoe area. The number of
advertisements in each issue had reduced from 30 to 15. The Bishop was the Right Reverend
Robert Wyse Jackson.
There will be a further instalment of this record of diocesan magazine publications in the next
issue of Newslink. The first issue in this 1956-69 series carried a note to the effect that there
was a memory of a previous diocesan magazine that ceased publishing around 1920. No
record of such exists in the RCB Library. We will continue to try to identify what was being
remembered.
W. Salters Sterling,
September, 2024.