St Joseph’s, O’Reilly’s

Check times with O’Reilly’s Guesthouse (07 5544 0644).

Originally situated at Gleneagle, St Joseph’s was the first Catholic Church in the Beaudesert area and was opened in 1876 on a four acre block of land donated by William Rafter. Prior to the building of the church, Mass was celebrated in ”Ballymoonie” the home of the Rafter Family. The church was variously known as Tullamore, Veresdale, or Gleneagle.

St Joseph’s, Gleneagle, no longer stands on that four acre block but is in regular use in the national park resort of O’Reilly’s, Canungra. Originally the area on which St Joseph’s stands was part of Green Mountains. From 1934 until 1955 Green Mountains had been a parish Mass station utilising ”Goblin Wood”, the home of Mr and Mrs Bernard O’Reilly.

By the early 1950s Saint Joseph’s, Gleneagle, was falling into disrepair and its congregation numbers were dwindling. As such, Fr Steele reluctantly made the decision to move the church to O’Reilly’s. The church was dismantled by Messrs J. Nisbet and N. Barker and transported to Green Mountains by Mr Garret Fitzgerald, of Canungra. Others known to have worked on the re-erection of the building were Messrs Tomkins and Tom Draper.

On November 27^th 1955, the first Mass was said in the re-erected church by Father Steele, and by lunch time, a crowd of some 400 people had assembled to hear Archbishop Duhig perform the opening ceremony.  Mr Bernard O’Reilly recalled riding 14 miles to Kerry for Mass, and of the first Mass held on Green Mountains having been said in the old humpy on Moran’s Creek in 1922 by a much younger Fr Steele.

The church building is now owned by the O’Reilly Family, however, St. Joseph’s still maintains strong links with the Beaudesert Parish of St. Mary’s.