The village of Cleator was in need, or so that was what Father William Gregory Holden thought. The year was 1853 and Father Holden was a Catholic priest from Whitehaven who travelled regularly to the Cleator area to minister to the ill and needy. He was doing so much travelling between various villages and homesteads that he thought his time could be better spent. So on behalf of the English Benedictine congregation (he was a member of the order of St Benedict) he bought a half acre of land at Brookside and founded a mission.

The village of Cleator had started off as just a few stranded farm houses such as Todholes, Aldby, Jack Trees, Cross Fields and Birks. In 1801 the population had been just 362 but because of the growth of the coal and more specifically iron ore mines, the population was set to rise dramatically. The influx of Irish catholic immigrants from the counties Down and Antrim in Northern Ireland created even more need for a place of worship. By 1881 the population had grown to 10,420 people and there were round 20 mining companies. The town of Cleator Moor was actually designed and built to hold all the immigrants and miners from Cleator and was built on what had originally been a boggy moor. (Hence the name!)

Many of the men and miners of this new parish volunteered to help build the church and the official opening of the original church was in December 1853. That church was dedicated to St Bega and it wasn’t until 1872 when the present church was opened that it was dedicated to ‘Our Lady of the Sacred Heart’ and renamed St Mary’s. In 1854 Father Holden came to live at the priory and that began the 118 year old Benedictine influence that the priests had on the church. Now the original church only had a maximum capacity of 600 and so it wasn’t a surprising sight at a Sunday morning sermon to see the extended congregation kneeling in the porch, on the steps or even out in the road. Father Holden unfortunately died in 1859 at the age of 68, but was succeeded by a great line of Catholic priests, all devoted to their flock.

The church as it is today was opened on the 23rd June 1872 and could now hold up to 1000 congregants. The style is Gothic and was designed by Edward Welby Pugin 1834-1875. He like his father was one of the great gothic architects of his time and also like his father died in a lunatic asylum. (Hopefully it had nothing to do with him being in Cleator!) The younger Pugin had designed more than one hundred Catholic churches and had also designed St Begh’s church in Whitehaven in 1868 and the Church of Our Lady in Workington 1876. Pugin senior helped design the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and the son had a hand in designing Big Ben, but neither of them were credited as having done so, for various reasons, and jealously of their talents was apparently one of them.

St Mary’s was now 75 feet across it’s transepts and 65 feet high, parts of The Lady Altar were made from Caen stone. Due to certain parishioners’ generosity it was designed to be unrivalled and even the ornamented backdrop to the altar was a gift of John Mooney, a Cleator Moor business man. The run of Benedictine monks came to an end in 1972 with Father M’Cann’s death and the head of the Benedictine order in the UK based at the Douai Abbey in Berkshire were unable to send any more Benedictine priests.