Our Church
Since 1792, St Patrick’s has been the Catholic community serving the people of Soho. Today, our mission remains the same.
To draw people into a deep life of prayer,
to share the beauty of the Catholic faith,
to serve the poor
and to be an active hub of mission.
At the heart of our parish life is the celebration of Holy Mass, from which we receive the continual opportunity to adore Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. These cornerstones of parish life provide the grace-filled foundation from which we live, serve, and witness.
‘We started very simply on our knees ... praying to the Lord and asking the Lord, what did He want with this place?’
Fr Alexander tells the story of arriving at St Patrick’s Church eighteen years ago and how St Patrick’s has grown into what it is today.
In 2020 we unveiled six fine stained glass windows which chart the history, spirituality and mission of the parish. Each of these saints inspire a different part of our work at St Patrick’s.
From 1690 to today, St Patrick’s has over 230 years of history, full of strange and wonderful events and intriguing characters that have passed through over the years. The St Patrick’s Church that we know today was consecrated on the 29th of September, 1792 and was likely one of the first Catholic parishes established after practising Catholicism was made legal again in England.
‘As a community, through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are inflamed with a burning, personal love for Christ and desire to invite and empower our brothers and sisters to reach out to the streets of Soho and beyond, bringing many to recognise that they are both loved and known by their Heavenly Father.’
St Patrick’s follows its patron saint in being, at heart, an evangelising church. From 2002 to 2014, we ran the St Patrick’s Evangelisation School (SPES), a nine-month programme of formation for young people in the Catholic faith.
In 1983, and again at the turn of the millennium, Pope St John Paul II implored us to ‘look to the future with commitment to a New Evangelisation, one that is new in its ardour, new in its methods, and new in its means of expression’.
This New Evangelisation calls each of us to deepen our Catholic faith in response to the God who lovingly comes down to us in Christ, and to go forth to share this with the world. Pope Benedict XVI called for the re-proposing of the Gospel ‘to those regions awaiting the first evangelisation and to those regions where the roots of Christianity are deep, but who have experienced a serious crisis of faith due to secularisation.’
