http://www.sakaaltimes.com/SakaalTimesBeta/20101219/5127886616320126673.htm
CAMIL PARKHE
Sunday, December 19, 2010 AT 06:12 PM (IST)
Tags: City Church, Christmas 2010
PUNE: This Christmas will be of an added significance for the City Church, the mother of all churches in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad. It was on Christmas feast exactly 218 years ago that the Catholics in Pune had celebrated the first mass on a land gifted by Sawai Madhavrao Peshwa in appreciation of their services in the Maratha army.
It was on this land that the Church of our Lady of Immaculate Conception, popularly known as the City Church, stands today. This first church in Maharashtra (excluding the churches in Mumbai and Thane district) has been the mother of various Catholic churches which have come up in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad during the last two decades.
Today there are altogether 22 Catholic churches in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The British, who took over power in Pune, gifted the adjoining three acres and 14 gunthas land to the church whose population has increased by then. A new church was built on this land in 1852. Exactly a century later, the church’s premises was extended to cater its parishioners whose strength by then had risen to 7,000.
Although the oldest church in the city, the number of parishioners of the City Church has been shrinking during the past few decades. This is because a large number of parishioners during this period have sold their houses in the local area and purchased more spacious houses in Fatimanagar and neighbouring areas, the church’s parish priest, Fr George D’Souza, told Sakàl Times.
As a result now, St Patrick’s Cathedral, the city’s second oldest church built in 1850, has the largest Catholic population of over 1200 families. Now there are around 300 Catholic families in City Church’s jurisdiction.
The church has derived its name ‘City Church’ as it stood at one of the entrances of Pune, the Quarter Gate, which had existed there.
