St Joseph's Roman Catholic church in Stanley, ministered to by only three priests in 100 years, has celebrated its centenary with an overflowing service.

STANLEY is much changed since the days of men and mines and municipal middens. For one thing, the steel shuttered front street smells of garlic.

The Imperial Hotel, long boarded, rules the waves no longer. There are pizza shops and Palais bingo, tanning parlours, Booze Busters and a fish shop which a few years ago made the front page of the Sun, though memory no longer whispers why the tabloids should splash out in that direction. In any case, the shop's for sale.

A man with an ear ring, two maybe, sits on a bench in the pedestrian precinct. He is holding a vanity mirror (or whatever it is such things are called) and applying face powder. He stinks like a varlet's handbag.

At the other end of the street, St Joseph's Roman Catholic church is celebrating the exact centenary of its formal opening on June 19, 1902. "My goodness," says the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle - as if he, too, has strolled down the early evening thoroughfare - "how different the world was then from what it is today."

It was West Stanley in Edwardian days, founded - like almost everywhere else in north-west Durham - on coal.

The Northern Echo, price one halfpenny, afforded the great occasion just nine lines. We also reported on preparations for the new king's coronation the following week, that an Escomb woman had been bound over for attempting suicide with laudanum - an extreme action prompted when her son threw a bucket of water over her - and that itinerant tripe seller David Main from Sunderland had been left £300,000, and in old money, an' all.

It was the ninth day of the Primitive Methodist conference, Bondgate Methodist church Sunday School in Darlington had 167 officers, 1,067 scholars and three teachers and the June weather forecast - then as now - was for rain and possible thunder.

Stanley's first Catholic school had opened 30 years earlier, the first Mass celebrated in the Board Inn in Shield Row by a priest who rode over from Sacriston.

The church, now truly magnificent, cost £6,000, took two and a half years to build, has survived fire and flood, storm, strike and subsidence - especially subsidence.

The first Christmas midnight mass took place in 1901, however, before the roof was in place.

Remarkably, it had only three parish priests during the 20th Century - Canon Henry Dix, who worried with much cause that he could hear the miners working beneath his study, Fr Daniel O'Brien, reluctant to embrace the reforms of Vatican II, and from 1986, Fr Joseph Park.

"I'm the Johnny-come-lately," says Fr Park, cheerfully.

The church overflows, a panoply of priests arriving with sports bags, for all the world as if preparing for a Sunday morning match in the park. They include Fr Tony Duffy of Birtley, marking two days earlier the 40th anniversary of his priesthood, and Fr Paul Graham, who grew up in the parish.

A little lad wears a Newcastle United away kit, the socks in a relegation position. Now as then, very likely, folk blether before the service. The pious blether kneeling down.

On a sunny evening, the hymn Praise My Soul the King of Heaven begins a quite splendid service, accompanied by two choirs, organ and instrumentalists.

The bishop, the Rt Rev Ambrose Griffiths, talks in his sermon of the "courage and generosity" of those who built the church and of the need to reach out to "inactive" Catholics.

"That is not to criticise them," he says, "much less to condemn them."

Representatives of the town's other churches are also present, though at the point of communion they must - of course - sit it out.

At the end, the bishop dedicates a window given by the Ramsey family, an addition to St Joseph's stupendous stained glass, and hundreds head for refreshments in the hall.

Fr Graham, now in Hammersmith - "a bit different from Stanley" - recalls both how his grandfather was one of 169 miners killed in the Burns pit explosion in 1909 and his time working in South Korea.

He was little surprised by their World Cup success. "They are a very determined people," he says.

Has the old place changed for the better, we ask? "It is not as vibrant as it used to be," says Fr Graham. "A lot of the family streets came down."

Fr Park talks of the need to regenerate the community, of the missing generation which left when the collieries closed and of the work of the church-backed credit union. "There is a lot of demand to make Stanley a basically better place," he says.

It has been a huge concelebration, a gathering of faithful old friends, and none hurries to leave so memorable an occasion.

Another fine Mass, Stanley.

Three weddings and an ordination

Linda Shipp, whom the column met through her work with the Tees Valley Deaf Church, will be ordained deacon in York Minster tomorrow and serve as curate at St Hilda's, Redcar. Deaf Church services on the third Sunday (3pm) will move from Marske to St Hilda's.

The column (May 25) on churches in Hamsterley village agreeing to work more closely together erroneously supposed that Hamsterley Baptist church hadn't, until recently, had a wedding for more than 100 years. Mrs Greta Race from Bishop Auckland is anxious to point out that she and her husband William were married there in 1947 - "and my aunt on Christmas Eve 1923 and my sister in 1943.