Saint Patrick's Basilica

This guide to Saint Patrick's Basilica traces its first mass on Saint Patrick's Day, eighteen forty-seven, and asks why priests here walked toward a typhus outbreak just weeks after the doors opened. It follows the ships of famine refugees landing in what Ireland remembers as Black forty-seven, the fever sheds built on the edge of the city, and the Grey Nuns and priests who worked alongside the sick. Look up at the columns as you listen: each is a single tree trunk, hand-painted to glow like marble.