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Church of St. Joseph

Glenfin (Kilteevogue) Parish

While the work on completing Our Lady of Perpetual Succour church was ongoing at the eastern end of the parish in Kiltyfergal, Fr. John Murray, Parish Priest, and the people of the parish deemed it necessary that a place of worship would be provided at the western end of the parish. A site was procured in the town land of Letterbrick. Fr. Murray learned that a building that could be renovated into a building suitable to be a chapel was available in Dunfanaghy. It was being used as a hall for the local branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. They no longer needed it and had put it up for sale. It had once served as a British Army hut dating from the time of the First World War and was perhaps even older than that.

Fr. Murray purchased the building and had it dismantled and transported to Letterbrick, where over a period of two years, it was reconstructed and made suitable as a church. It was made of corrugated iron and there were two entrances at the rear of the church, one into the main body of the church and the other into the Sacristy. There was no running water at that church and water was taken from a well above the chapel. Often in the winter time the altar boys had to break the ice on the well to get water for Mass. Mass was first celebrated there in 1929 and it served the people of the area very well until a new church was built and officially blessed and dedicated on Sunday January the 6th 1971. This new church was blessed by the then Bishop of Raphoe,

Dr. Anthony MacFeely. The parish priest of Kilteevogue at that time was Very Reverend Joseph Canon McDaid. This new church was dedicated to St. Joseph the Worker and a finely etched door leading into the Sacristy reminds us of this. It was extended in the late 1980’s and in this chapel every week Masses continue to be celebrated in Gaelic.

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Glenfin (Kilteevogue) Parish