Clonard Church and Monastery has stood in west Belfast for almost 100 years.

The building has been a focal point for people expressing and sharing faith —and a backdrop for the beginning of the peace process.

Now the church vitally needs £1m to repair the walls, roof and floors that housed those historic and important moments in the lives of many.

It has launched an appeal to have repairs completed by its centenary in 2011.

Construction of the church, which straddles the peaceline, began in 1908 and was completed in 1911.

Its famous annual Solemn Novena in June attracts over 10,000 people on each of its nine days from across the province. It was founded by US Army chaplain Matthew Meighan— the ‘chaplain who came with the Yankees’, stationed in Northern Ireland with US troops in 1943.

But the church isn’t just a sanctuary for Catholics; during the 1941 Belfast Blitz women and children from both Shankill and Falls roads sheltered in its crypt.

The Redemptorist Community at Clonard Monastery has worked hard for the reconciliation of both Catholic and Protestant communities.

Preaching in Clonard Church in 1983 Bishop John Baker of Salisbury acknowledged this role of the monastery: “Every pew, every brick seems soaked in prayer, in the longing for grace to love God and Man, to live in forgiveness and peace with all our neighbours.”

One priest, Fr Alec Reid, came to prominence after he helped encourage those involved in renouncing violence and replacing it with negotiation during the 1980s. In 1988 a stark photograph showed Fr Reid delivering the last rites to two corporals killed by the IRA after they drove into a Republican funeral.

He also initiated secret talks at Clonard between Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and former SDLP leader John Hume.

During the IRA hunger strikes of the early 1980s, the priest helped search for a settlement to the Maze protest, and later helped in the process of an exchange of ideas between Gerry Adams and the Irish government.

In 1991 he said: “We must begin by lifting our eyes to a vision of the peace we want to create. That, in general, can only be a new political situation where the people of Ireland, in their national and unionist traditions are living together in friendship and mutual co-operation for the common good of all.”

Clonard is not a ‘parish’ church within the diocesan system and all of its income, has to be raised by the Redemptorists and its congregation from across the city.

Anyone who would like contribute towards fundraising can log on to www.clonard. com or telephone 028 9044 5950.