A church or Cathedral was never consecrated until it was fully paid for. It took 100 years for example in the case of Letterkenny Cathedral. It took incredible courage and vision on the part of Mulvany to see it through. Including interior decoration, it cost £275,000. This was at a time when the average wage of some labourers was 5p an hour, less than £2.50 for what was then the normal six day working week. It is hard to get a decent comparison, but you are probably talking about a €30 million project today. That it was built and paid for in ten years is extraordinary.

The formal celebration of the consecration of the Cathedral was set for Sunday 3 September. But the actual consecration ceremony took place the previous week. The evening of 29 August, solemn matins and lauds were sung by the clergy and the bishops of Meath and Kilmore. The solemn consecration began next morning at 8am. The seats in the main aisles had been pushed aside for this ceremony. It began outside Due to the illness of Dr. Mulvany, Dr. Patrick Lyons of Kilmore was the officiating bishop. He began by going round the outside of the Cathedral three times sprinkling it with holy water, once for the top, once for the middle and once for the bottom of the building. He then went inside with a few attendants leaving the people and priests locked out. Inside there were two piles of ashes on the floor going diagonally from the back to the sanctuary. Starting on the left side going to the chair side he traced the Greek alphabet in the ashes with his crozier. Then he started at the right side and traced the Latin alphabet up to the ambo. The Greek symbolised the Jews who were first offered the faith, the Latin symbolised the Gentiles. He then went and made the sign of the cross with his crozier on the top and bottom of the entrance door of the Cathedral. The people were then let in and he placed relics and a scroll in the altar and finished by anointing with chrism the twelve consecration crosses. The ceremony finished at 11.45am after a low Mass. Bishops certainly earned their living in the 1930s. [i]

The consecration celebrations concluded with a solemn High Mass celebrated on Sunday 3 September; the same day that Britain declared war on Germany. James McNamess, the bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, was the principal celebrant. The Cathedral, which had been floodlit on several of the previous nights, had to be blacked out that evening due to the outbreak of the war. The following is a description of part of the ceremony by a reporter in the Westmeath Examiner.

The scene at the Cathedral as 12 o’ clock approached almost defy adequate description. In spite of a thin drizzle of rain, an immense crowd gathered outside the Cathedral in which ticket holders had already taken their places and filled the sacred edifice to capacity. A few minutes before noon the procession of clergy left the bishop’s palace headed by a cross-bearer. Almost two hundred prelates in their purple robes, including the Lord Abbot of the famous Cistercian Abbey of Mount Melleray, in his robes of pure white preceded His Eminence the Cardinal. Walking under a canopy of cloth of gold, His Eminence bestowed his blessing on the kneeling throngs who lined his route to the Cathedral door. As the head of the procession entered the nave the choir of boys, girls and men’s voices under the conductorship of Mr. Philip Dore, rendered the people’s welcome to a great priest indeed in the ‘Ecce Sacerdos Magnus’.

Archbishop Glennon once again was the homilist. He began using the words from Genesis 28:17 which are inscribed on the mosaic floor of the entrance porch – This is no other but the house of God and the gate of heaven. After a lengthy and powerful sermon that incorporated the history of the faith in Ireland and the adherence of its people to the true faith, he concluded with the cry – Christ lives, Christ Conquers, Christ Reigns. [ii]