Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Manchester

In 1860, William Turner, the first bishop of Salford, invited the Jesuits to make a home in Chorlton-on-Medlock, at the time a middle class suburb. As well as the growing middle classes, Manchester was home to a large and expanding population of Irish immigrants who migrated to work in cotton manufacturing, especially after the Great Famine. In the area known as Little Ireland, the Parish of St Mary, Mulberry Street was unable to cope; in twenty years, thirteen priests had succumbed to typhus whilst working amongst the city's poor. The Jesuits had a formidable record of outreach and missionary work, and this was put to good use. Whilst he was rector from 1888 to 1901, Fr Bernard Vaughan SJ…

Bishop Turner was keen to have a church in Chorlton-on-Medlock staffed with priests who could meet the intellectual, apologetic and controversial needs of Manchester. Jesuits from St Helens came to settle, at first in a temporary church (now the site of the Holy Name Hall, which has since been sold). Holy Name was made a parish church to serve the growing populations of the parishes of Longsight and Chorlton-on-Medlock, as villas were replaced by streets as the population of industrial Manchester grew. The construction of the building reinforced the power of the Jesuit order and the revived confidence of the English Catholics. It is the largest church in Manchester and dominates the…

Manchester band, The Smiths, referred to the Holy Name church 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".