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Beautiful windows transform chapel

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Windows featuring the art of Dominican friar, Fr Kim En Joong OP, installed in the Sisters’ Choir Chapel at Cabra Dominican College, were blessed and dedicated in a ceremony held late last year. 

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The chapel is the western wing of the historic Cabra Chapel and was for many years where the Dominican Sisters sat to attend Mass, daily prayer and other services.

Through the assistance of local publisher Hilary Regan, who has worked on a number of projects with the artist, some of Fr Kim’s artwork was selected for the Cabra windows.

The art was then transformed into glass at Glasmalerei Peters Studios in Germany. Owners Jan and Wilhelm Peters were instrumental in the communication with Fr Kim, and the complex logistics of measuring in Australia, creating in Germany, and transporting the windows by ship across the world.

Donors to the Chapel Windows Project were invited to view the windows at the blessing and dedication by Sr Bernadette Kiley OP, leader of the Holy Cross Congregation of Dominican Sisters, on November 4.

Sr Bernadette described the windows as “an expression of divine beauty”.

“Fr Kim En Joong’s artwork beautifully aligns with Cabra’s rich history and is a fitting addition to the chapel,” she said.

“The notion of beauty in a sacred space is reflected through the new Sisters’ Choir Chapel windows, capturing the Dominican ethos of seeking and valuing beauty as an expression of divine beauty.”

The new windows are very different in style to the main Cabra Chapel’s 15 century-old stained glass windows. Created in London by famous window maker
CE Kempe, these windows also came to Cabra by sea, with six of them arriving during World War I in time for the first Mass celebrated there in 1917. The remainder arrived later when travel was safer.

Cabra Dominican College principal Dr Helen Riekie, thanked the community for its involvement in the windows project.

“Just like in 1917, the installation of the Kim En Joong windows into the Sisters’ Choir Chapel has only been possible through donations from a generous community,” she said.

“The women of the Holy Cross Congregation, who continue to be ahead of their time, looked to the future when they decided to move forward with this project. They understood that the Kim En Joong windows would nurture spirit and faith across generations – for all the community, in every celebration held in the Chapel.

“The windows are a fitting tribute and memorial for the Dominican Sisters who founded Cabra Dominican College, and all those Sisters who have dedicated their life’s work to Cabra in the years since.”

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