Tower a striking feature of Geraldine Church

We are back in the town of Geraldine this week looking at the attractive church at 19 Hislop St: The Church of Immaculate Conception Church, St Mary Mackillop Parish.

The territory that the earliest priests in the South Island had to travel around in the first few years of European settlement was vast. Initially the first resident priest, Father Chataigner, covered from Geraldine to Waimate.

Six years later The Rev Father Louis Fauval was appointed the first resident priest of Temuka and he built the first Catholic Church in Geraldine in 1878. In 1884, Geraldine was made a parish separate from Temuka.

When the original 1878 church came to the end of its useful life a new church was built. For a time it stood to the right of the old one.

This new church was completed in May 1936. It cost 10,000 pounds to build and was opened free of debt due to the generosity of the local population and the enthusiasm of the parish priests.

In style it is semi-Gothic. It is built out of reinforced concrete and brick and features triple panelled leadlight windows above the main doors. It stands 13.5 metres tall and topped with a Welsh blue slate roof.

A striking feature along the south side is the square battlemented tower at just over 15m in height, the bottom floor of which contains the baptistery. This also features louvre windows, frequently used devices for ventilation.

The dressed facings for the windows, mullions, sills, heads and tracery work are carried out with Oamaru ¯ stone.

The church seats 300 people comfortably and has a beautifully decorated interior. The altar of Ō amaru stone is a copy of the All Hallows College, Dublin. An exterior of weathered Ō amaru stone surrounds this ornate altar, with a frieze of the Last Supper and Stations of the Cross all carved from the same stone.

The floor is of polished red pine, and a dado, about 1.5 metres in height, runs round the walls of the nave and of the three porches. The interior arches are carried out in Oregon beams.

These days it forms part of the Ō pihi Parish and is administered from Temuka. It is beautifully set against the background of the Geraldine Native Bush Reserve.