72 It Happened in Iona

community. Even though St. Michael’s number two was never finished inside and may have lacked some of the niceties of worship found in larger centres, yet deep down we were deprived of nothing. As the 50s wore on Father McKenna and parish- ioners were beginning even to feel the possibility of seeing the church completed. Then on a bitterly cold evening of January 6, 1959 and just an hour before the holy-day Mass of the Epiphany, this majestic structure literally exploded in a ball of flames and disappeared from the face of the earth. That summer the present church, running east and west like the first one, took shape and opened in the fall.