Christ Church Cathedral: Dublin's oldest Christian church

Christ Church Cathedral, or more formally The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, is the cathedral of the United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough and the cathedral of the Ecclesiastical province of the United Provinces of Dublin and Cashel in the Church of Ireland. It is situated in Dublin, Ireland and is the oldest of the capital city's two medieval cathedrals, the other being St. Patrick's Cathedral.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Christ Church is officially claimed as the seat of both the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic archbishops of Dublin. In practice, it has been the cathedral of only the Church of Ireland's Archbishop of Dublin, since the English Reformation. Though nominally claimed as his cathedral, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin uses St. Mary's in Malborough Street in Dublin, as his pro-cathedral.

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Christ Church Cathedral is located in the former heart of medieval Dublin, next to Wood Quay at the end of Lord Edward Street. However a major dual carriage-way building scheme around it separated it from the original medieval street pattern which once surrounded it, with its original architectural context (at the centre of a maze of small buildings and streets) lost due to road-building and the demolition of the older residential quarter at Wood Quay. As a result the cathedral now appears dominant in isolation behind new civil offices along the quays, out of its original medieval context.

The cathedral was founded sometime after 1028 when King Sitric Silkenbeard, the Hiberno-Norse king of Dublin made a pilgrimage to Rome.

The first bishop of this new Dublin diocese was Dúnán or Donat, and the diocese was at that time a small island surrounded by a huge Diocese of Glendalough, and was for a time answerable to Canterbury rather than to the Irish Church hierarchy.

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