Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Manchester

The Church of the Holy Name of Jesus on Oxford Road, Manchester, is the largest church in the city and one of the great monuments of Victorian Catholicism in England — designed by Joseph Aloysius Hansom, the man who gave his name to the Hansom cab, in partnership with his son Joseph Stanislaus Hansom, and built between 1869 and 1871. Pevsner's judgement was unqualified: "a design of the very highest quality and of an originality nowhere demonstrative; Hansom never again did so marvellous a church." It has been Grade I listed since 1989, having held Grade II* status since 1963; its tower, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott, was added in 1928 in memory of Father Bernard Vaughan SJ.

The church was born from the collision of two Manchesters. In 1860 William Turner, first Bishop of Salford, invited the Jesuits to settle in Chorlton-on-Medlock, then a middle-class suburb — he wanted priests who could meet "the intellectual, apologetic and controversial needs" of the city. But industrial Manchester was also home to a vast and growing population of Irish immigrants, drawn to the cotton mills especially after the Great Famine; in the district known as Little Ireland, the parish of St Mary, Mulberry Street was overwhelmed, and in twenty years thirteen of its priests had died of typhus contracted while working among the city's poor. The Jesuits, with their formidable record of missionary outreach, came from St Helens and worshipped at first in a temporary church — its site later occupied by the Holy Name Hall, since sold. Holy Name was made a parish church serving Longsight and Chorlton-on-Medlock as villas gave way to terraced streets, and its sheer scale proclaimed both the power of the Jesuit order and the revived confidence of English Catholics after centuries in the shadows.

The building's dimensions are those of a fourteenth-century cathedral: 186 feet long and 112 feet wide, built in brick clad with brushed Warwick stone, in a Gothic manner Hansom based on the styles of France. Yet for all its medieval appearance it is a Counter-Reformation church through and through, designed to teach the faith through its liturgical and devotional arrangement. Everything serves maximum exposure of the solemn Mass: a raised altar near the congregation with no rood screen, a shallow, broad sanctuary, the eye carried first to the tabernacle and the exposition throne above it for the cult of the Eucharist; a large pulpit — bearing a mosaic of the English Martyrs — placing the preacher intimately among the people; and the whole north side given over to confessionals, each with its own fireplace, built for long hours of priestly ministration. The pillars are unusually slender, an effect made possible by constructing the roof from hollow terracotta tubes manufactured by Gibbs and Canning. The nave seats 800; small chapels line the south side with the baptistery toward the west, and the Stations of the Cross run between the confessionals and the chapels. Hansom's original design called for a broad, shrine-shaped steeple 73 feet high, never executed; Adrian Gilbert Scott's tower of 1928 completed the composition. Simon Jenkins found the interior to have "an aura unlike any church I know" and an "impression of no expense spared".

The most famous of the church's Jesuits was Father Bernard Vaughan, rector from 1888 to 1901, who engaged the Anglican Bishop of Manchester, James Moorhouse, in a celebrated series of debates over the rival claims of the Catholic Church in England and Wales and the Church of England to be the true Catholic Church in England and successor of St Augustine. In their jubilation, the young men of Holy Name unhitched the horses and pulled Vaughan's carriage from the city centre all the way back to the church. Vaughan also hired, in 1887, an organist named Leslie Stuart — the Southport-born composer who in 1899 would write Florodora, his greatest hit, produced on Broadway; Stuart lived nearby with his family in a villa on Lime Grove. The church's benefactors included Sebastião Pinto Leite, Count of Penha Longa and Viscount of Ganderinha, of the wealthy Portuguese-Brazilian Pinto Leite mercantile and banking family of Porto and Lisbon, whose Manchester fabric-exporting firm Pinto Leite and Brother was based on Sackville Street: the family's funerals, weddings and baptisms were held at Holy Name, where several members are commemorated.

Other lives have threaded through the building. Jerome Caminada — the "Manchester Sherlock Holmes", the city's first CID superintendent — married Amelia Wainhouse here in 1881 and had his requiem Mass here in 1914. The novelist Anthony Burgess wrestled with the church in his youth, writing in 1965 that "at an age when I could not counter the arguments of the Holy Name Jesuits, it was unavoidable agony... As an English schoolboy brought up on the history of the Reformation, I rejected a good deal of Roman Catholicism, but instinct, emotion, loyalty, fear, tugged away." The funeral of the actress Pat Phoenix — Coronation Street's Elsie Tanner — was held here in September 1986. Pedro Ballester Arenas, a Manchester-born Catholic student who died of cancer in 2018 under the care of Opus Dei in nearby Victoria Park, had his funeral at Holy Name and is now a candidate for canonisation. And The Smiths gave the church its strangest immortality, in the opening line of "Vicar in a Tutu": "I was minding my business, lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name church."

The church nearly died in the 1980s. Local shifts in housing and demographics had shrunk the congregation, the building stood closed for most of each day, and in 1985 the bishop asked the Jesuits to close it; the diocese did not want it. A community of secular priests and lay brothers — an Oratory of St Philip in formation — came to Manchester in 1992, beginning a massive renovation project, opening the church daily and rebuilding the congregation. In September 2012 the Jesuits returned to take over the church and the chaplaincy to the universities and the Royal Northern College of Music, while the Oratory community under Father Raymond Matus moved to St Chad's, Cheetham Hill, where Bishop Terence Brain granted them permission to establish a Congregation of the Oratory of St Philip Neri.

Today Holy Name thrives as the Catholic chaplaincy church of Manchester's student mile. Mass is celebrated in English, designed to be catechetical, with solemn ritual and a familiar preaching style; weekday Masses at 12:30pm suit the student timetable, with exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and confessions each noon. The William Hill & Son organ of 1871 — 48 speaking stops over three manuals and pedals, rebuilt by Wadsworth in 1926 and restored in 2004, its case pipes ornately diapered in their original reds, greens and gold beneath two gilded angels — accompanies Sunday music of Gregorian chant and polyphony, with orchestral settings from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries on major solemnities. Students of the university and the Royal Northern College of Music sing in its choirs, perform in its concerts and practise beneath its terracotta vaults — the cathedral-scaled church the Jesuits built for typhus-stricken Little Ireland now filled, daily, with the young of the city.