Saint Mary Magdalen Church on Comerford Road began as a mission in Brockley in 1895

Saint Mary Magdalen Church, on the corner of Comerford Road and Howson Road, Brockley, was designed by Young Bolton and built in 1898-1899 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

When I was visiting Comerford Road in Brockley, south-east London, earlier this week, I visited Saint Mary Magdalen Church, which stands on the corner of Comerford Road and Howson Road. Saint Mary Magdalen is a much-altered Italianate church built in 1898-1899 and designed by the little-known architect Young Bolton, who died in 1903.

The mission at Brockley began in 1895 and a plot measuring 1,321 square yards was bought. A school was opened that year, with an upper floor that was used as a temporary chapel. This was soon inadequate and Bishop Francis Bourne sanctioned building an inexpensive church, for which he advanced £2,000. Bishop Bourne was Bishop of Southwark (1897-1903) and Archbishop of Westminster (1903-1935), and in 1911 he was made a cardinal.

At the time, about 370 Catholics were living in the area, and the church was built to seat 300 people. Bishop Bourne blessed and laid the foundation stone on 9 July 1898. The new church was blessed and solemnly opened by Bishop Bourne on 16 March 1899.

Inside Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

A new Angelus bell was blessed and hung in one of the towers in 1900 and was rung for the first time on Easter Sunday 1900.

The stone pulpit was blessed and used for the first time on 24 July 1904, the patronal feast. It was presented to the mission priest, Father James Hayes by parishioners from his previous parish in Sutton.

When two new missions were opened in Nunhead and Forest Hill in 1905 and 1906, they took away parishioners from Brockley. Subsequently, the Bishop of Southwark, Bishop Peter Amigo, decided to place the Augustinians of the Assumption in charge of Saint Mary Magdalen. Bishop Amigo is often remembered as the bishop who imposed ‘minor excommunication; on the Modernist priest George Tyrrell and restricted the possibility of a full Catholic burial when Tyrrell died in 1909.

The Assumptionists, formally the Congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption (AA), were founded in Nîmes, France, in 1845 by Father Emmanuel d’Alzon. In late 19th century France, the Assumptionists were controversial at the time of the Dreyfus Case as they actively promoted the conspiracy theory that unnamed Jews were destroying French institutions, in particular the army and the Catholic church.

The Assumptionists were suppressed throughout France in 1900, accused of accumulating a fund to support a royalist movement to overthrow the Republic. Many priests went abroad, including the Assumptionist priests who arrived on Comerford Road in 1906. They remained at Comerford Road for 91 years, until July 1997.

The first Assumptionist mission priest at Comerford Road was Father Marie-Louis Deydier, who spent three terms at Brockley.

The sanctuary and High Altar in Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The richly decorative high altar is one of the few original furnishings to survive in the church. It was designed by Father Gregory Chedal, was blessed on 10 December 1911 and survives as the present high altar.

A Calvary designed by Joseph Dutton was unveiled as a war memorial in 1917, and it was completed a year later with the addition of a marble tablet in the form of an open book with the names of the war dead.

When Father Chedal returned from World War I in 1919, he began completing the four side altars dedicated to the Sacred Heart, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Peter and Saint Joseph. But, apart from their statues, nothing survives of these four side altars.

Father Chedal also began work on the Lady Chapel with a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. By December 1919, the altars were in place, the sacristy was enlarged by removing a wall and inserting a door that connected the sacristy and the presbytery. The new altars were blessed at the silver jubilee service on 7 October 1920, and Brockley became an independent parish that year.

The Lady Chapel in Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The presbytery on Comerford Road was refurbished, the church roof repaired in 1926, and a statue of Saint Theresa was blessed. The church was repaired in 1926-1927 and the Lady Chapel was decorated.

Two bells cast at the Paccard foundry at Annecy, France, were blessed and hung in the tower in 1929. Electricity was introduced to the church along with an electric organ blower by the end of 1930.

During the inter-war years, the Catholic community in the Comerford Road area and in wider Brockley grew to over 2,000 with the development of the Honor Oak Estate, rehousing people from Deptford, Rotherhithe and Bermondsey.

The organ was repaired and overhauled about 1937, and repairs were also made to the west front, towers, and the wall along Comerford Road.

Inside Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road, facing the west end, entrance and organ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

During World War II, a time bomb fell nearby on 16 September 1940 and the parish priest removed the Blessed Sacrament and the Lady Chapel’s altar stone before the bomb exploded the next day. The Lady Chapel was completely destroyed, the north wall pushed inwards and the sanctuary furnishings were severely damaged. Only the high altar and Saint Peter’s altar remained intact. Although the presbytery was rendered uninhabitable, the priests returned to the house by late 1940.

A school room served as a temporary chapel until the church reopened on Easter Sunday 1943 while repairs were continued.

The second phase of restoration began in late 1948, the sanctuary roof and the Lady Chapel were rebuilt and the smashed pulpit was reconstructed. New coloured glass was inserted in all the windows and an upper room was added to the sacristy. The restoration was almost complete by 1950. A new floor was planned, as well as refurbishing seats and kneelers, repairing the organ, and works to the lighting and cleaning.

Bishop Cyril Cowderoy blessed the new Lady Chapel and the new altar in December 1951.

Father Patrick O’Neil repositioned the west doors in the tower in the 1950s, creating a central large door in place of a row of five windows, and the two side doors were replaced by windows. The former south-west porch inside became a baptistery but is now a toilet.

The organ choir gallery in Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

There were plans to demolish the presbytery and three adjoining houses to build a larger church, but these came to nothing. The parish bought Saint Cyprian’s Hall from the Anglican parish of Saint Hilda, Crofton Park. There were renewed plans to build a new church in 1968, but once again these plans were not realised. The font was moved closer to the sanctuary in 1980. A new hall was built behind Saint Cyprian’s Hall in 1981 and opened in 1982.

The organ was overhauled in 1985 and alterations involved raising the sanctuary floor, removing the altar rails and the pulpit, and inserting a sound-proof confessional.

The Lady Chapel altar was brought forward and a reconciliation room was created. When the Lady Chapel was renovated in 1996, its small tabernacle was removed.

The high altar survives largely as it was designed by Father Gregory Chedal in 1911. It is made from Bath and Portland stone and marble. The frontal depicts the Last Supper and is flanked by statues of the four evangelists. The reredos includes a Calvary with a kneeling Saint Mary Magdalen. On either side are niches with the patron saints of the Assumptionists, Saint Monica and Saint Augustine of Hippo, mother and son.

The west façade of the church facing Howson Road has a second floor niche with a statue of Saint Mary Magdalen. The side elevation now facing Comerford Road has five large round-headed nave windows separated by shallow wall strips.

The World War I memorial in the ground of sSaint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The World War I memorial in the church grounds has a wooden cross with a sculpture of the Crucified Christ, set on a brick plinth with plaque. It has been designated with a Grade II listing because of its design and ‘as an eloquent witness to the tragic impact of world events on the local community’ during World War I. The memorial was the idea of Father Marie-Louis Deydier, who had been a military chaplain. It was unveiled on 7 July 1917 at a ceremony attended by the Mayor of Lewisham, Sir John and Lady Knill, the Assumptionist Provincial, the Lord Mayor of London, and relatives of the dead. The marble tablet designed by Joseph Dutton was added the following year.

The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, or the Cabrini Sisters, opened a day and boarding school in Wickham Road in 1902, and stayed until 1922, when their lease expired. Three years after they left, the Oblate Sisters started a new school in Wickham Road. Saint Cyprian’s Hall was sold in 2009, and the school hall is now used as a church hall.

The Assumptionist Fathers left Comerford Road in 1997 due to a fall in vocations, although they continue to run communities in Bethnal Green, London, and Hitchin, Hertfordshire. The parish is now under the care of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit or Spiritans, known to many as the Holy Ghost Fathers. In Ireland, they are associated with places such as Kimmage Manor, Blackrock College, Saint Mary’s College, Rathmines, and Saint Michael’s in Dublin and Rockwell College, near Cashel, Co Tipperary.

• The parish priest is Father Nathaniel Ewusi; Father Christian Enechukwu is the assistant parish priest; and the Revd Willian Dunphy is the parish deacon. Weekend Masses: Saturday, 6:30 pm Vigil Mass, Sunday, 8:30, 10 and 11:30 am; weekday Mass: Monday to Saturday 9.30 am; Holy Day Masses: 9:30 am and 8 pm.

Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road, is under the care of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit or Spiritans, once known as the Holy Ghost Fathers (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Daily prayers in Ordinary Time with USPG: (5) 2 June 2023

The portico at the church at Kimmage Manor … the Spiritans or Holy Ghost Congregation moved to Kimmage Manor in 1911 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The Fifty days of Easter season came to an end on Sunday, the Day of Pentecost (28 May 2023), or Whit Sunday, and Ordinary Time resumed on Monday (29 May 2023).

Before this day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for prayer and reflection.

In this first week in Ordinary Time, between the Day of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday (4 June 2023), I am reflecting each morning in these ways:

1, Looking at an image or stained glass window in a church or cathedral I know depicting Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, or the Feast of the Day;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

Kimmage Manor was the home of the Holy Ghost Missionary College from 1911 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

My photographs this morning (2 June 2023) are from Kimmage Manor, Dublin. I studied theology at the Holy Ghost Missionary College, later the Kimmage Mission Institute, in 1984-1987 on a course leading to the BD from the Pontifical University Maynooth, and in my final year I was a student member of the Theology Faculty Council.

I was studying theology full-time there while holding down a full-time position as a journalist with The Irish Times. Although I was a complete outsider – most of the other students were members of religious communities, such as the Spiritans and the Redemptorists – I was made welcome and I still keep in contact with friends I made over those three years.

All the lands of Kimmage, Terenure and Milltown were owned by Peter Barnewall in 1641, and they included a castle on the lands of Kimmage. Through the years that followed, there were various owners and tenants, and Rocque’s map from the mid-18th century shows extensive buildings on the site of the present Manor House.

Frederick Shaw (1799-1876), his wife Thomasine-Emily, and their children came to live in Kimmage House in 1829. Shaw was the second son of Colonel Sir Robert Shaw (1774-1849) of Bushy Park, Co Dublin. The Shaw family originally came from Co Kilkenny and Frederick Shaw’s grandfather, Robert Shaw (1749-1796), first leased Terenure House (Terenure Castle or Terenure College) from Joseph Deane in 1785. His younger brother, Bernard Shaw (1768-1826), was the grandfather of the playwright and Nobel Prize laureate, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

Sir Robert Shaw, who inherited Terenure House, was MP for New Ross, Co Wexford, in the Irish House of Commons and voted against the Act of Union. Later, he was MP for Dublin from 1804 to 1826 in the British House of Commons. He was a founder of Shaw’s Bank, which later became the Royal Bank of Ireland.

He inherited a vast estate in south Co Dublin, including Bushy Park House and Kimmage House (now Kimmage Manor), through his marriage to Maria Wilkinson of Bushy Park, a wealthy heiress.

His second son, Frederick Shaw, was Recorder (or part-time municipal judge) for Dublin and Dundalk. A year after moving into Kimmage House, Shaw was elected MP for Dublin City in 1830, and was then sat MP for Dublin University (1832-1848).

Shaw rebuilt Kimmage House on the banks of the old Dublin watercourse in the style of Tudor manor, with high, triangular gables, spiral turrets and tall chimneys. The windows, especially the projecting oriel window, the doorways and the interior designs – including the vaulted vestibule, miniature great hall, panelled ceilings and ornate mouldings – are all modelled on Elizabethan architectural styles.

The Shaw family lived in an L-shaped section of the present manor house. The historian of Kimmage Manor, Father Paddy Ryan, who was my lecturer in Church History, estimates this L-shaped section of the house is at least 250 years old.

Within two years of their arrival, the Shaw family had built a two-storey addition to the south side of the L-shaped existing building and more than doubled their floor area, building the front entrance, entrance hall, reception area and staircase.

Frederick Shaw’s younger brother, the Revd George Augustus Shaw (1815-1839), was the perpetual curate or Vicar of Rathfarnham when he died of typhus fever at their father’s house, Bushy Park, at the age of 24 in 1839.

When his elder brother, Sir Robert Shaw, died in 1869 and Sir Frederick Shaw inherited the family title, he decided not to move to Bushy Park, and continued living at Kimmage Manor. He died at Kimmage House in 1876 and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross. His eldest son, Sir Robert Shaw (1821-1895), became the fourth baronet and the moved with his family to Bushy Park, where he lived until he died.

Kimmage House was leased to various tenants. Edward Chetwode later sold his lease to Edgar Kenyon, but the house was often unoccupied. Mrs Mary Ida Clayton leased the house and lands in perpetuity in 1898, and came to live in the house with her two sons. By the beginning of the 20th century, Kimmage House was known as Kimmage Manor.

The Spiritans bought Kimmage Manor in 1911, and the new foundation was named the Holy Ghost Missionary College, Kimmage, Dublin.

Students from other orders, including Redemptorists, and lay people were accepted in Kimmage Manor from the 1970s, and from the 1980s students received our BD degree from the Pontifical University Maynooth. The college church became the Kimmage Manor Parish Church in 1990.

The Kimmage Mission Institute of Theology and Cultures (KMI) was founded in Kimmage in 1991, in association with other Irish missionary congregations. KMI moved to the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy in 2003, and formally merged with Milltown in 2006

The Milltown Institute closed in 2015. Kimmage Manor is now the location of the Spiritan Mission Resource and Heritage Centre. Training for Transformation, which has worked with the Spiritans, is based in Kimmage Manor.

Kimmage Manor … remodelled by Sir Frederick Shaw as Kimmage House after moving in 1829 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 8: 1-4 (NRSVA):

1 When Jesus had come down from the mountain, great crowds followed him; 2 and there was a leper who came to him and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.’ 3 He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. 4 Then Jesus said to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’

The oriel window at Kimmage Manor … part of the Elizabethan and Tudor restyling of Kimmage House by Sir Frederick Shaw (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s prayer:

The theme in the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) this week is ‘Pentecost.’ USPG’s Chaplain, the Revd Jessie Anand, introduced this theme on Sunday, reflecting on Pentecost and languages.

The USPG Prayer invites us to pray this morning (Friday 2 June 2023):

Let us pray for peace and stability in the Philippines. May its government build a nation free from fear and oppression and work to build a society that is just and fair.

Collect:

Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts
whereby we call you Father:
give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that we and all creation may be brought
to the glorious liberty of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion:

O God, whose beauty is beyond our imagining
and whose power we cannot comprehend:
show us your glory as far as we can grasp it,
and shield us from knowing more than we can bear
until we may look upon you without fear;
through Jesus Christ our Saviour.

The Spiritans offered me a warm welcome at Kimmage Manor in 1984-1987 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Praying in Lent and Easter 2021: 23, Kimmage Manor, Dublin

The portico at the church at Kimmage Manor … I was a student at the Holy Ghost Missionary College from 1984 to 1987 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During Lent and Easter this year, I am taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, a photograph of a church or place of worship that has been significant in my spiritual life;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week I am offering photographs from seven churches that have connections with my education. My photographs this morning (10 March 2021) are from Kimmage Manor, Dublin. I studied theology at the Holy Ghost Missionary College, later the Kimmage Mission Institute, in 1984-1987 on a course leading to the BD from the Pontifical University Maynooth, and in my final year I was a student member of the Theology Faculty Council.

Luke 11: 14-23 (NRSVA):

14 Now he was casting out a demon that was mute; when the demon had gone out, the one who had been mute spoke, and the crowds were amazed. 15 But some of them said, ‘He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.’ 16 Others, to test him, kept demanding from him a sign from heaven. 17 But he knew what they were thinking and said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls on house. 18 If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? – for you say that I cast out the demons by Beelzebul. 19 Now if I cast out the demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. 20 But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you. 21 When a strong man, fully armed, guards his castle, his property is safe. 22 But when one stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armour in which he trusted and divides his plunder. 23 Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.’

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (11 March 2021) prays:

Let us pray for all who are unemployed and seeking employment during these difficult times.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

The house at Kimmage Manor was built by the Shaw family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

A ‘Day in the Sun’ in mid-November with RTÉ and the Cardinal

AWN Pugin (1812-1852)

Patrick Comerford

We were a disparate and motley group of half a dozen who arrived from Kimmage Manor in Maynooth for our conferring on one dark November day in 1987. In my first year at Kimmage Manor there were 13 of us on the BD course. Now, three years later, we were just six.

The Theology Faculty at Kimmage Manor has long since been absorbed into other schools and colleges. But in the 1980s, it had a special relationship with Maynooth that allowed its students to sit for the degree of bachelor of divinity.

It was an unusual arrangement, and in academic fiction it was supposed to apply only to students preparing for ordination and sponsored by either the Spiritans at Kimmage Manor or the Redemptorists at Marianella. But I had been brash and cheeky enough to knock on the front door one summer evening and ask John O’Brien could I sign up for the three-year programme.

My lecturers and professors were mainly either Redemptorists or Spiritans. The Redemptorist Con Casey coached me through the philosophy requirement Maynooth sought before completing the course in theology. The Spiritan Paddy Ryan taught us Church history. Another Redemptorist, Brendan McConvery, who had lectured on New Testament studies, would present us to the chancellor of the Pontifical University, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, who would die within three years.

We were the only six from Kimmage Manor that day, and I was the only member of the Church of Ireland. The other five teased: Would I be presented as a Redemptorist? Would I be presented as a Spiritan?

Outside, the late Eddie Kelly of the Irish Times was waiting to take photographs. He too teased me: would I like my photograph in the paper tomorrow morning – the very paper where I was a staff journalist? The story is still told of an embarrassing moment when Eddie was covering the funeral of Cardinal Conway in Armagh ten years earlier – a gust of wind carried Eddie’s hat into the grave, along with the cardinal.

I sat in the chapel comfortably, waiting for our names to be called and for Brendan McConvery to lead us up. My great-grandfather, James Comerford, had worked with the architects A.W.N. Pugin, Richard Pierce and J.J. McCarthy on their churches in County Wexford. After Pugin died in 1852 and Pierce died in 1854, James Comerford moved from Wexford to Dublin, married, and found new architectural commissions with the Board of Works and designing public houses. As I gazed up at the stucco work and ceiling, and admired the craftsmanship throughout the Gothic Revival chapel, I wondered whether James, who became the patriarch of our branch of the family, had ever worked with any one of this great architectural trio in Maynooth.

As our names were called out, I realised how we were less than half the number who entered the first lectures three earlier. As I was introduced to Cardinal Ó Fiaich, I was greeted with a broad, knowing grin. Yes, he remembered me. He knew of my work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); Seán MacBride had given him a copy of my recent book; he knew me from the Irish Times; he had listened to Christian CND while the Irish bishops were preparing The Storm that Threatens, their joint statement in 1983 ‘on war and peace in the nuclear age,’ and he had appreciated my comment on it in the Furrow later that year.[1]

As we processed out, to applause from our families and our professors, the television cameras were waiting for us too. It was one thing to bump into a photographer who was a colleague on the Irish Times; it was another thing to find RTÉ cameras had turned up at our graduation.

We rushed home that evening, not just to share a bottle of bubbly and cut a special cake, but also hoping to be in time for the six o’clock news. However, earlier that day, the loyalist politician and paramilitary George Seawright – whose calls for ‘revenge and retribution’ made him too toxic for both the Democratic Unionist Party and the Free Presbyterians – had been shot in a black taxi on the Shankill Road in Belfast.

Once again, events in Northern Ireland dominated the evening news. Maynooth had slipped down the list of news priorities, and Cardinal O Fiaich’s interview must have been heavily edited. Nevertheless, he still got his point across: a large number of women were among the BATh graduates that day, and he expressed his hopes that women with inquiring theological minds would one day find a greater role in the life of the Church. Some of those women graduates served to illustrate his argument.

The six of us from Kimmage Manor could be seen in the background on the news report that evening – although, perhaps, only by ourselves and those who loved us. We had our day in the sun, even if it was mid-November.

George Seawright was shot on 19 November and died from his wounds on 3 December; Tomás Ó Fiaich died just over two years later on 8 May 1990. Two men of very different backgrounds, temperaments and values had been brought together on the news for very different reasons on the day of my graduation in Maynooth. As for Eddie Kelly, his trademark hat sat on his coffin at his funeral in January 2010.

Of the six of us from Kimmage Manor who arrived in Maynooth that day, one is a now well-known broadcast journalist, one is working in London on development programmes, and one quickly resigned from active priestly ministry; two are Redemptorist priests; and I was ordained in the Church of Ireland by Archbishop Walton Empey thirteen years later.

Many years after our ‘day in the sun,’ as I was thumbing through some forgotten books on my bookshelves, I came across a well-thumbed postcard from Tomás Ó Fiaich which had been used as a bookmark. My regular return visits to Maynooth have included a quiet day in the chapel on my own self-designed retreat shortly before my ordination, many book launches, as a visiting lecturer and as a guest when Brendan McConvery was given an honorary doctorate.

[1] Patrick Comerford, 'The Storm That Threatens: A Comment', in The Furrow Vol 34, No 10 (October 1983), pp 620-625.

This is a chapter in We Remember Maynooth: A College Across Four Centuries, ed Salvador Ryan and John-Paul Sheridan (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2020, 512 pp), pp 363-365.

Notes on Contributors (p 496):

Patrick Comerford is a priest in the Church of Ireland Diocese of Limerick, a former adjunct assistant professor in TCD, and a former lecturer in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute

Contributing to a new book on the cultural reception of the Bible

‘The cultural reception of the Bible: explorations in theology, literature and the arts’ … a new book from Four Courts Press this summer

Patrick Comerford

In recent days, the Four Courts Press in Dublin has published its catalogue for 2018.

As is usual, the list ranges over almost 2,000 years, and takes readers from mediaeval Santiago de Compostela and the Elizabethan court via the revolutionary Atlantic, by way of the grave of Wolfe Tone and mass graves in mediaeval Donegal to Louth, Derry and Limerick in the Irish revolutionary period.

On the way, the catalogue offers a wide variety of reading matter, including the lives of saints, some mediaeval epigraphy, explorations of the Bible, the contents of various 18th and 19th century libraries, assorted Irish music documents, extracts from the Irish Citizen, as well as a selection of regional and Sunday newspapers.

Fellow travellers include Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, the land-grabbing Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, reformers Lord Cloncurry and Archbishop Whately, Lady Butler, Victorian war artist, members of the Redmond political dynasty and a whole host of Revenue Police, suffragettes, Dublin goldsmiths, Brigidine Sisters and Irish fishermen.

I am delighted to be included among the contributors to one of the new books in this catalogue. The cultural reception of the Bible: explorations in theology, literature and the arts is edited by Salvador Ryan, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Saint Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and Liam Tracey, Professor of Liturgy at Maynooth.

This book is a festschrift in honour of Brendan McConvery, who I first got to know when he was Lecturer in Sacred Scripture at the Holy Ghost Missionary College, Dublin, when I studying for a Maynooth BD. Later, he was Dean of Faculty of Theology at Saint Patrick’s College, Maynooth, editor of Reality, and archivist for the Irish Redemptorists. As might be expected, many of the contributors to this new book include his fellow Redemptorists and his former colleagues in Maynooth.

In 30 essays, this wide-ranging volume examines the cultural impact of biblical texts, from the early Middle Ages to the present day, on areas such as theology, philosophy, ethics, ecology, politics, literature, art, music and film.

Contributions range from Saadia Gaon’s 10th century Arabic translation of the Pentateuch to Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ; from the biblically inspired writings of a late 17th century French galley slave to Paul Ricouer’s reading of The Song of Songs; and from the deep Biblical culture of fifth century Rome to the divisions that biblical verses perpetuated in late 20th century Ulster.

The contributors to this volume include: Cardinal Joseph W Tobin (Newark); Thomas O’Loughlin (University of Nottingham); Cornelius Casey (Trinity College Dublin); Jeremy Corley (Saint Patrick’s College Maynooth); Noel O’Sullivan (SPCM); Michael A Conway (SPCM); Jessie Rogers (SPCM); Martin O’Kane (University of Wales, Trinity Saint David); Kerry Houston (Dublin Institute of Technology); Michael O’Dwyer (Maynooth University); Brian Cosgrove (MU); Diane Corkery (University of Strathclyde); Raphael Gallagher (Alphonsianum, Rome); Terence Kennedy (Alphonsianum, Rome); Padraig Corkery (SPCM); Carol Dempsey (University of Portland, Oregon); Thomas R Whelan (National Centre for Liturgy, Maynooth); Liam Tracey (SPCM); Penelope Woods (SPCM); Ruth Whelan (MU); Elochukwu Uzukwu (Duquesne University); Hugh Connolly (Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris); John-Paul Sheridan (SPCM); Helen Cashell-Moran (TCD); Katherine Meyer (TCD); Seamus O’Connell (SPCM); Jonathan Kearney (DCU); Patrick Comerford (CITI/TCD); Martin Henry (SPCM); Paul Clogher (Waterford Institute of Technology); and the poet John F Deane.

My contribution to this book, written while I was a lecturer at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and an adjunct assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin, looks at the life and work of FJA Hort (1828-1892), the Dublin-born member of the ‘Cambridge Triumvirate’ who was an influential figure in translating the Revised Version of the Bible.

Four Courts Press expects to publish The cultural reception of the Bible: explorations in theology, literature and the arts, edited by Salvador Ryan and Liam Tracey, later this Summer. It is planned as 320-page book with colour illustrations (ISBN 978-1-84682-725-9) and a cover price of €50/£45/$70.

‘The Enigma of Cashel’ and ‘one of the most corrupt pluralists in Irish Church history’

Father Patrick Ryan’s new study of Archbishop Miler Magrath on sale at the book launch in Rathmines this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Patrick Comerford

I was in Rathmines earlier this week [7 October 2014] for the launch of Father Patrick Ryan’s new book Miler Magrath, 1522-1622 – The Enigma of Cashel.

The invitation came from Father Marc Whelan, CSSp, the Spiritan Provincial in Ireland, and Peter O’Mahony, Communications Manager for the Spiritans.

The speakers included Dr William Nolan, Professor Emeritus of Geography, UCD, the Chief of the Magrath Clan, Sean Alexander McGrath, and the author himself. There were greetings from the Revd Terri Woolgar in Canada, who can trace her ancestry back to Magrath in an unbroken line of 12 generations. I was honoured to be singled out by Marc Whelan in his welcomes, along with Bishop Eamon Walsh.

Paddy Ryan taught me Church History in the Kimmage Mission Institute at Kimmage Manor 30 years ago, when I quickly became aware of his deep and unchallengeable knowledge of the enigmatic Elizabethan Archbishop Miler of Cashel, which dated back to Paddy’s days as a schoolboy in Cashel, Co Tipperary.

Appropriately, Tuesday’s launch took place in another Spiritan venue, Saint Mary’s College, Rathmines, across from the landmark copper dome of the local Catholic parish church, lit up and resplendently green under an almost-full moon.

Father Patrick Ryan speaking at this week’s book launch in Rathmines (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Miler Magrath died at the age of 100 in 1622, when to have lived to being a centenarian was an achievement in itself. But the author’s attention is drawn not so much to the archbishop’s unusual longevity but to his unusual ecclesiastical, political and social achievements.

Magrath was born near Pettigo in 1522 into a family of Gaelic chieftains who owned Lough Derg, a centre of pilgrimage in Co Donegal already a place of pilgrimage. He joined the Franciscans and was received part of his theological educated in Rome at the same time as the Council of Trent. After travelling on Continental Europe, he returned to Ireland in 1565, when he was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor by Pope Pius IV.

Back in Ireland, however, he took the Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, although he did not take the Oath of Supremacy until he was arrested in London on his way back to Rome. In return, he was appointed the Church of Ireland Bishop of Clogher in 1570, although in the eyes of Rome he remained Bishop of Down and Connor for the next 10 years.

When the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Cashel died suddenly, Magrath replaced him in 1571. For the half century that followed, Magrath had a turbulent life as Archbishop of Cashel. But he also added the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore (1582-1608) and, later, the Diocese of Killala and Achonry (1608-1622) to his spiritual and temporal possessions and titles.

In an ‘Irishman’s Diary’ in The Irish Times earlier this year [21 August 2014], Joe Carroll, who was at the launch too, quoted me as describing him as “the infamous Miler Magrath, one of the most corrupt pluralists in Irish Church history.” Pope Gregory XIII, tiring of this double role, finally excommunicated him in 1580.

In his late 80s, he was still seeking new episcopal appointments in Derry and Raphoe or failing that, “some competent pension.”

The former Franciscan friar married Amy O’Meara from a Roman Catholic family from Toomevara, near Nenagh, Co Tipperary, and they were the parents of nine children. Anny remained a practising Roman Catholic all her life. Once when her husband asked why she refused to eat meat on Friday, she replied: “Because I do not wish to commit sin with you.”

“Surely,” he retorted, “you have committed a far greater sin in coming to bed with me, a friar?”

Magrath enriched himself from his dioceses and used the property he acquired for the benefit of his large family. Willie Nolan suggested he was a property magnate who today “would be the envy of Nama.” Although these nine children were educated as Roman Catholics, they still secured lucrative incomes through his church holdings.

As well as being a lord spiritual, Magrath was a lord temporal, deeply involved in Anglo-Irish politics as he worked closely with the senior government figures in Dublin and London to suppress the Desmond rebellion in Munster and to counter Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion which ended at the Battle of Kinsale.

This handsome and generously illustrated, scholarly, new book is ¬an exhaustive study of Magrath and his career, drawing extensively on archival and contemporary sources.

Magrath has been “reviled, demonised and scapegoated” and was dismissed as being “irascible, wild and unstable,” but was also praised as a diplomat, a politician, and a “man of gravity and learning.”

Paddy asks the inevitable question of whether Magrath returned to Rome in his final days. The Pope legitimised his children in 1619, but whether there was a deathbed conversion is not clear. He died in 1622 at the age of 100.

The Latin epitaph on his tomb in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on the Rock of Cashel reads:

The ode of Miler Magrath, Archbishop of Cashel, to the passerby.
Long ago the most holy Patrick,
the great glory of our country, came to Down.
I his successor in Down wish I were as holy as he.
So at first I was Bishop of Down.
For fifty years, England, I served your government,
and pleased your rulers in times of noisy wars.
Here where I am placed I am not. I am not where I am not.
Nor am I in both places, but I am in each.
It is the Lord who judges me. I Cor. 4. – 1621.
Let him who stands take heed lest he fall

Paddy wonders whether Miler is saying he was in neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Church of Ireland, but had a foot in both.

Magrath was once described as “the handsomest man in Ireland in his day.” But his only known portrait is in the Clogher episcopal gallery and it provides the cover illustration for this new book.

Patrick J. Ryan, Archbishop Miler Magrath, 1522-1622 – The Enigma of Cashel (Roscrea: Lisheen Publications, €39 hb, €25 pb).

The church dome in Rathmines under the moonlight on Tuesday night (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

The Works of Love: incarnation, ecology and poetry

The current edition of Search – a Church Ireland Journal (Vol 35, No 1, Spring 2012), which is published this week, includes the following book review (pp 63-65):

The Works of Love: incarnation, ecology and poetry, John F. Deane, Dublin, Columba Press, Paperback, 416 pp, €19.99 / £16.99, ISBN 9781856077095).

For many years, Achill Island was one of my favourite places to retreat to in search of quiet and solitude. At the time, there were no mobile phones, not even a dial telephone, making Achill was the perfect place to find time and space to think, to be creative and to write.

But Achill was also inspiring as the island of Edward Nangle and mission, and inspiring as the island beloved by the German Nobel Prize winning writer Heinrich Böll. There he wrote his Irish Journal and his cottage remains a retreat for writers and artists. The island attracted artists such as Paul Henry and Robert Henri, writers such as Graham Greene and Honor Tracy.

Unlike these artists and writers, who were all from outside Achill, John Deane is an Achill-born writer and poet. He comes from a strongly creative and intellectual family: his brother Raymond Deane is a composer and musician; another brother was the Jesuit theologian, the late Declan Deane,

John Deane is the founder of Poetry Ireland and The Poetry Ireland Review, a member of Aosdána, has published many collections, and has received numerous awards, nationally and internationally.

He once considered the priesthood, and spent some time as a seminarian with the Spiritians (then known as the Holy Ghost Fathers) in Kilshane and in Kimmage Manor. And so it is natural that this new book, The Works of Love, introduced by Professor Enda McDonagh, is a study of poetry in the context of religious faith. In 40 short essays, he looks at major poets in the religious tradition, from the Psalms, Saint Patrick’s Breastplate and the Deer’s Cry, through the early Anglo-Saxon poets, the poets of the Reformation era, including the Jesuit Robert Southwell and the Anglican George Herbert, the Caroline and Civil War poets Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, to more recent poets including Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Here too, from Ireland, are Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Patrick Kavanagh and the Augustinian poet and priest Pádraig Daly, who “moves from the innocence of instinctive praise through the desolation of near despair, back through a sense of real redemption into a hope, through a sense of real redemption into a hope, through the incarnation, of ultimate salvation.”

But we are introduced also to Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Saint John of the Cross, the painter Edvard Munch, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Rowan Williams as poets, to Tolstoy, Gogol and Pushkin, and to the English theologians Margaret Barker, a Methodist, and Elizabeth Jennings, a Roman Catholic.

While George Herbert and others are familiar to many Anglican readers, they are largely unknown to many who will come to this book – as Deane recalls from his school days with the Jesuits in Limerick: “There were no poems by George Herbert on any course in Mungret College … Indeed, during my five years of struggle in that institution, I gathered no care for, or true awareness of poetry.”

He has overcome all this in a masterly yet tender way, and now he introduces us through these poets and their poetry to his own redemptive account of his life. Vignettes scattered through the essays or chapters draw on childhood memories from Saint Patrick’s Day and Corpus Christi processions on Achill Island or climbing Croagh Patrick to a searing recollection of being cruelly beaten at school on the bare buttocks with a leather strap by one of his Jesuit teachers.

It is particularly moving to read his accounts of burying his father in Bunclody, Co Wexford, and of how his wife Barbara died in hospital two days before Christmas:

But it is I who have loved you,
have known the deepest secrets of your grace;
I take the golden ring from your finger,
I kiss the bride –

and they close the heavy doors against me
of that silent, vast, cathedral.

“By taking back the ring from her finger I felt that I was not letting God have the satisfaction of taking her from me, that I was still the one to care for her, that she was mine, as the sacrament of matrimony had stated. The truth is, I was lost, lost to faith, lost to myself. Lost, for the moment, to God.”

He revisits his mother’s grave in Bunclody, “a soft-toned town, to retire to”, and is reminded of

… the rising recurrent sorrow of the merely
human before loss, its unacceptability, its disdain.

In a collection of essays on poets, love and sacrament, it is surprising that there are only passing references to John Donne and TS Eliot. Yet, this is a book not just about poets and poetry, but about love and sacrament. And poetry and theology find truth when they return constantly to our experiences of and the revelations to us of love and in sacrament. For, as Enda McDonagh says in his introduction, “poets and poetry play a serious … [and] a revealing and redemptive role in the divine economy of creation-redemption.”

Patrick Comerford Dublin

Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Celebrating 100 years of Kimmage Manor

Kimmage Manor … the Spiritans are celebrating 100 years here this month (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

For three years, I was a student at the Holy Ghost Missionary College in Kimmage Manor. I was there from 1984 to 1987, studying theology full-time while holding down a full-time position as a journalist with The Irish Times.

Although I was a complete outsider – most of the other students were members of religious communities, such as the Spiritans and the Redemptorists – I was made welcome and a part of the student body. For a year, I sat as a student representative on the Theology Faculty Council, and I still keep in contact with friends I made over those three years.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Holy Ghost Mission College at Kimmage Manor in 1911.

In 1641, all the lands of Kimmage, Terenure and Milltown were in the hands of Peter Barnewall, and they included a castle in good repair on the lands of Kimmage. Tthrough the years that followed, there were various owners and tenants, and Rocque’s map from the mid-18th century shows extensive buildings on the location of the present Manor House.

Kimmage Manor … remodelled by Sir Frederick Shaw as Kimmage House after moving here in 1829 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In 1829, Frederick Shaw (1799-1876), right, his wife Thomasine-Emily, and their children came to live in Kimmage House. Shaw was the second son of Colonel Sir Robert Shaw (1774-1849) of Bushy Park, Co Dublin.

The Shaw family originally came from Co Kilkenny and Frederick Shaw’s grandfather, Robert Shaw (1749-1796), first leased Terenure House (Terenure Castle or Terenure College) for £325 a year from Joseph Deane in 1785. His younger brother, Bernard Shaw (1768-1826), was the grandfather of the playwright and Nobel Prize laureate, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

Sir Robert Shaw inherited Terenure House from his father. He was MP for New Ross, Co Wexford, in the Irish House of Commons, when he voted against the Act of Union, and later was MP for Dublin from 1804 to 1826 in the British House of Commons. He was a founder of Shaw’s Bank, which later became the Royal Bank of Ireland.

He inherited vast tracts of land in south Co Dublin, including Bushy Park House, named after the Bushe family, and Kimmage House (now Kimmage Manor), through his marriage to Maria Wilkinson of Bushy Park, a wealthy heiress and the only daughter of Abraham Wilkinson.

His second son, Frederick Shaw, was educated at Trinity College Dublin and Brasenose College, Oxford. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1822 and later become Recorder (or part-time municipal judge) for Dublin and Dundalk.

A year after moving into Kimmage House, Shaw was elected MP for Dublin City in 1830, and was re-elected in 1832. He then sat as MP for Dublin University from 1832 until 1848. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1835. At the time, Shaw was regarded as one of the most brilliant orators and ablest leaders and debaters in the British parliament. One of his greatest parliamentary triumphs was a speech in 1834 against Daniel O’Connell’s motion calling for a select committee to inquire into the conduct of Baron Smith in introducing politics into his charge to a grand jury.

The oriel window at Kimmage Manor … part of the Elizabethan and Tudor restyling of Kimmage House by Sir Frederick Shaw (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Frederick Shaw rebuilt Kimmage House on the banks of the old Dublin watercourse in the style of Tudor manor, with high, triangular gables, spiral turrets and tall chimneys. The windows, especially the projecting oriel window, the doorways and the interior designs – including the vaulted vestibule, miniature great hall, panelled ceilings and ornate mouldings – are all modelled on Elizabethan architectural styles.

The Shaw family lived in an L-shaped section of the present manor house, facing the present Mission House. This embraces the present manor basement, the mezzanine floor used today as a meeting room, classroom 3 and the APA office. The top floor comprises the present staff office, classroom 4, administration office and the office of the MA co-ordinator. The historian of Kimmage Manor, Father Paddy Ryan, who was my lecturer in Church History, estimates this L-shaped section of the house is at least 250 years old.

Within two years of their arrival, the Shaw family had built a two-storey addition to the south side of the L-shaped existing building and more than doubled their floor area. The front entrance, entrance hall, reception area and staircase were built. On the same floor, reception rooms that later became classroom 1, the computer room and Friere room were added.

Upstairs, there were bedrooms that later became the assistant administrator’s office, the DEA office, the KDSC Director’s office, the boardroom, and the assistant director’s office. These rooms are about 175 years old.

Kimmage Manor in the snow ... happy memories of student days in the 1980s

Frederick Shaw’s younger brother, the Revd George Augustus Shaw (1815-1839), was the perpetual curate or Vicar of Rathfarnham when he died of typhus fever at their father’s house, Bushy Park, at the age of 24 on 1 September 1839. Like many members of the Shaw family, he was buried in the old Church of Ireland churchyard in Rathfarnham Village.

When his elder brother, Sir Robert Shaw, died in 1869 and Sir Frederick Shaw inherited the family title, he decided not to move to Bushy Park, and continued living at Kimmage Manor with his family until his death in 1876.

Sir Frederick died at Kimmage House on 30 June 1876, at the age of 76, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross. His eldest son, Sir Robert Shaw (1821-1895) became the fourth baronet and the moved with his family to Bushy Park, where he lived until his death in 1895.

Kimmage House was leased to various tenants. The first tenant was Edward Chetwode, but he later sold his lease to Edgar Kenyon, but the house was often unoccupied. In 1898, Mrs Mary Ida Clayton leased the house and lands in perpetuity and came to live in the house with her two sons. By the beginning of the 20th century, Kimmage House was known as Kimmage Manor.

The Spiritans bought Kimmage Manor from Mrs Clayton on 7 June 1911, and it was agreed immediately that the new foundation would be known as the ‘Holy Ghost Missionary College, Kimmage, Dublin’.

By then, the Shaw connection with Terenure House was long ended, and the Carmelites opened Terenure College there in 1860. The Shaw family connection with area came to an end 60 years ago when the house and lands at Bushy Park were sold to Dublin Corporation in 1951.

For other postings on the architectural heritage of South Dublin see:

Berwick Hall.
The Bottle Tower, Churchtown.
Brookvale House, Rathfarnham.
Camberley House, Churchtown.
Dartry House, Orwell Park, Rathfarnham.
Ely Arch, Rathfarnham.
Ely House, Nutgrove Avenue, Rathfarnham.
Fernhurst, 14 Orwell Road, Rathgar.
Fortfield House, Hyde Park, Terenure.
No 201 Harold’s Cross Road, the birthplace of Richard Allen.
Homestead, Sandyford Road, Dundrum.
Kilvare House, also known as Cheeverstown House, Templeogue Road.
Knocklyon Castle.
Laurelmere Lodge, Marlay Park.
Marlay Park.
Mountain View House, Beaumont Avenue, Churchtown.
Newbrook House, Taylor’s Lane, Rathfarnham.
Old Bawn House, Tallaght.
Rathfarnham Castle.
Sally Park, Fihouse.
Scholarstown House, Knocklyon.
Silveracre House, off Sarah Curran Avenue, Rathfarnham.
Synge House, Newtwon Villas, Churchtown, and No 4 Orwell Park, Rathgar.
Templeogue House.
Washington House, Butterfield Avenue, Rathfarnham.
Westbourne House, off Rathfarnham Road.

New deacons and warm sunshine in Dublin

The River Liffey looked blue beneath the summer sky in Dublin yesterday (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Patrick Comerford

These days are like Mediterranean days in Dublin. The sun is shining brightly, the skies are clear blue, and the temperatures are in the mid-to-high 20s, and there’s a relaxed, carefree attitude in the streets and in the city centre.

The warm smiles on faces everywhere just show how much we appreciate the summer when it arrives and lingers for a little while in Ireland.

The Italian Quarter in Dublin had a Mediterranean feeling yesterday (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Between cathedral services, I had lunch in the Italian Quarter yesterday and the weather, the atmosphere, and the sea of Italian blue shirts were almost enough to tempt me to stay and watch the match between Italy and New Zealand.

In the morning, I subdeaconed at the Sung Cathedral Eucharist, and the preacher was the Right Revd Christopher Senyonjo, a retired bishop from West Buganda in Uganda, who is visiting Ireland as part of a six-week tour of Europe and the US. This was an opportunity to hear the personal witness of a courageous man of faith who has proclaimed God’s inclusive love and spoken truth to power in Uganda.

He has been inhibited from officiating as a priest and bishop in the Anglican Church of Uganda because of his support of Integrity Uganda and the greater LGBT community. He is one of the few voices in Uganda to speak out against homophobia and the “anti-Homosexuality” bill before the Ugandan parliament.

In the afternoon, four new deacons were ordained in the cathedral by Archbishop John Neill – the Revd Paul Arbuthnot, the Revd Terry Lilburn, the Revd Ken Rue and the Revd Martha Waller. Bishop Christopher Senyonjo was present again, as were Bishop Samuel Poyntz, and Bishop Jered Kalimba of Shyogwe. Bishop Jered has been a guest in my house during previous visits to Ireland, and some years ago he made Ken a canon of his cathedral in Rwanda.

The procession in the cathedral garth after the ordination of deacons (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

It was a joy-filled afternoon, and as we processed out of the cathedral into the sunshine in the cloister garth afterwards, tourists and passers-by were caught up in the liturgical drama – it was a powerful illustration of the church’s witness to the city and the mission that underpins the ministry of every deacon.

It was impossible not to want to linger out there in the sunshine, chatting with families and friends as the sun continued to shine down on us all.

Evening sun on the Camac in Kilmainham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Later, after coffee in the crypt, I stopped off first in Kilmainham. There, the Camac River is not one of the most beautiful or clean rivers in Dublin; but it was shining and silvery in the sun. At Kimmage Manor, my old theological college, the old manor house looked majestic against the clear blue sky.

Kimmage Manor and an oriel window against the evening sky (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

By 11 in the evening, I was still sitting out in my back garden, sipping a glass of Pinot Grigio and listening to the water bubbling out of the Lion’s Mouth behind me. It was only dusky, even though midnight was approaching, and the sky was still clear.

It brought back memories of many warm, balmy summer evenings, sitting out on a terrace in a small mountain village in Crete. Oh well, I’ll back there soon.

The Lion’s Mouth bubbling on a balmy summer's evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Remembering Breifne Walker

Kimmage Manor in the snow ... happy memories of student days in the 1980s

Patrick Comerford

It was a sad occasion, but it was one of real privilege. This morning [Wednesday 13 May] I was asked to take part in the Funeral Mass in Kimmage Manor for my old friend and priest-colleague, Breifne Walker (right).

I have known Breifne for almost thirty years. We were both involved in many of the same campaigns for peace, human rights, social justice and prison reform, including the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Amnesty International, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and campaigns for the victims of miscarriages of justice. I got to know him even better while I was a student at Kimmage Manor in 1984-1987, and when I began working for the Church Mission Society Ireland (CMS Ireland) in 2002, he made a special presentation of a copy of Andrew Rublev’s great icon, “The Visitation of Abraham,” to mark my next stage in ministry and mission.

Breifne’s social activism was a model for mission for the contemporary urban church. As a scholar and outspoken advocate of human rights at home in Ireland abroad, Breifne was always quick to champion the cause of the oppressed with courage and conviction – as another priest said at his funeral this morning, “he was as good as you get for a Spiritan.”

The Revd Dr Breifne Walker, who died earlier this week just five days short of his 62nd birthday, was born in Bray on 16 May 1947. He was educated by the Spiritans – then known as the Holy Ghost Fathers – in Blackrock College, then entered their novitiate in Kilshane in 1964 and was professed in 1965.

Breifne went on to study philosophy at Kimmage Manor and graduated from UCD in 1969 with an honours BA in 1969. He received an MA in history three years later in 1972.

For a year, he worked at Rockwell College, Co Tipperary, as a prefect (house master), and he returned to Kimmage Manor in 1973 to study theology, receiving his BD from the Pontifical University, Maynooth, in 1976. He was ordained that summer, on 13 June 1976, by the great missionary Bishop Thomas Whelan.

Breifne was sent to Ghana in 1977 and worked there in pastoral ministry until 1979. When he returned to Ireland, he joined the prison chaplaincy team in Mountjoy Prison. While he worked there he developed a keen awareness of prisoners’ needs and an acute interest in prisoners’ rights.

He was back in Kimmage Manor in 1982, and while I was a student there in the 1980s, we shared New Testament classes while he was pursuing graduate studies in Trinity College Dublin. He received his PhD in moral theology in TCD in 1989.

He returned to West Africa a year later when he went to Nigeria in 1990 as a lecturer and formator at the Spiritan International School of Theology (SIST) in Attakwu, Enugu. As a teacher and mentor at SIST, Breifne was greatly respected and loved by the students and staff.

After his return to Ireland, Breifne continued to pursue further research and did some part-time teaching at Kimmage Manor. He was a valued member of the Spiritan Formation Team and in recent years also served as the Provincial Delegate for Mission Appointments to Ireland.

One of his last public engagements was at a lunch hosted by President Mary McAleese in Arus an Uachtarain. He developed brain tumours in recent months, and died last Monday (11 May).

It was an honour to be asked to read the Gospel of the Annunciation at his Funeral Mass in the Church of the Holy Spirit, Kimmage Manor, this morning. He was buried in Dardistown Cemetery later in the day.