400 Years

Greg Daly learns about four centuries of Capuchins in Ireland

In early 17th-Century Germany, the Shankill-born Fr Nicholas Archibold was crossing a river in Paderborn when he heard a “demonic voice” tell him that he was “a big man with a little nose”.

This annoyed him, according to Dr John McCafferty, director of UCD’s Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute, because, Fr Archibold said, “everybody knows that I am a very small man with a huge nose”. Nonetheless, Dr McCafferty continued, Fr Archibold drew an important lesson from this encounter, which was “that the Devil couldn’t speak the truth”.

So began the first paper at ‘Brothers of the People: 400 Years of Capuchin Service in Ireland’ a conference held on Saturday, February 28 at St Mary of the Angels’ church on Dublin’s Church Street, right beside the Capuchin Day Centre where Bro. Kevin Crowley and his team of volunteers feed hundreds of homeless and struggling Dubliners every day.

A success by any definition, about 250 guests attended the conference, including the papal nuncio Archbishop Charles Brown, the Provincial Minister of the Irish Franciscans, Fr Hugh McKenna, Bro. Michael Burke, General Minister of the Franciscan Third Order Regular in Ireland, and Bro. Paul Coleman, Provincial Minister of the Capuchin Province of Great Britain.

Inability

The Devil’s inability to speak truly was an important theme of the Capuchin mission to Ireland in the 17th Century, Dr McCafferty continued, explaining how Fr Archibold’s life saw him as Guardian of the Irish Capuchin’s exile headquarters in Charleville in France, before being active in Dublin and the Pale between 1626 and 1642, after which he was arrested and deported back to France.

Active again in Ireland in 1645, he served as Guardian in Wexford between 1645 and 1650, when he died tending to plague victims. Many early friars were victims of plagues and epidemics, Dr McCafferty said.

A keen writer, Fr Archibold wrote two histories that Dr McCafferty likened to a “biographical mosaic” of the early friars, detailing the lives of 82 of them, many of whom he saw as saintly heroes.

Comparing his texts to a kind of early-modern Google Earth, Dr McCafferty described how the text could leap between paragraphs from events in Dublin to events in Canada – Fr Archibold loved geography, Dr McCafferty said, and was so well-read in it that visitors often assumed he had been to the places of which he spoke with such enthusiasm.

Like his peers, he saw his mission as being local, but always carried out in a global context: he was profoundly interested not merely in the Catholic missions to newly Protestant parts of Europe, but also in the Philippines, the West Indies, Japan, Mexico, and elsewhere. His accounts, Dr McCafferty said, give “a sense of the torrent of information that he was in receipt of”. In this he would not have been unusual, said Dr McCafferty, pointing out that in the early 17th Century, every friar was “a local instantiation of a global phenomenon”.

The essence of Fr Archibold’s descriptions of matters he witnessed, Dr McCafferty continued, is that “these are local events, but he believes them to have global significance – even cosmological significance”.

Other events he sees in this way too, even momentous scriptural ones like the Last Supper.

Local matters weren’t always harmonious, of course, and Fr Mícheál Mac Craith OFM, Guardian of the Collegio San Isidoro in Rome, spoke on the origins of the Irish Capuchins in ‘Friar Nugent and the Franciscans: a not so friendly rivalry’.

He began with a quotation from Pope Francis’ favourite novel, the Italian classic The Betrothed. “But the conditions of the Capuchins at that time was that nothing was too low for them and nothing too high,” he read. “To serve the weak and to be served by the strong, to enter palace and hovel with the same humility and the same confidence, often to be in the same house both the subject of jest and a person of authority without whom no decision could be taken, to beg everywhere for alms, to distribute them to all-comers at the monastery – these things were all in the day’s work for a Capuchin.”

At a time when friars attracted both veneration and vilification, he read, the Capuchins exposed themselves more openly to both than any of their mendicant brothers.

The Capuchins, he said, have tended to be described in this polarised way, citing as an example one book which described them both as “renegades” from the regular Franciscans and a positive force in the Counter-Reformation Catholic renewal second only to the Jesuits. Drawing such sharp opinions, and under Protestant oppression, it was hardly a surprise that the early days of the Irish Capuchins could be fractious; indeed, the Capuchins could not enter Ireland until the observant Franciscans had left.

The day, of course, was a celebration and an exploration of four centuries of Irish Capuchin life, so hardly had Fr Mícheál’s paper ended before UCD’s Dr Conor Mulvagh leapt into the 20th Century by giving an especially timely paper on ‘Fr Columbus Murphy and his personal narrative on the 1916 Rising’.

Rising

Often neglected in comparison to his peers Fr Albert Bibby, Fr Aloysius Travers, and Fr Augustine Hayden, Fr Columbus wrote an extensive journal of his experiences in the Rising, which is soon to be published. Dr Mulvagh explored this in depth while discussing what diarising the Rising entailed, and considering what could still be learned about the Rising from hitherto unpublished documents, including those remaining under lock and key at the British National Archives in Kew, London.

UCC’s Dr John Bornogovo continued the theme of Capuchins during Ireland’s revolutionary period and its aftermath when he considered ‘The Exile, Death, and Repatriation of Fr Dominic O’Connor, 1922-1958’, before Trinity College’s Sonya Perkins and Ruth Sheehy spoke on ‘Where and what is Ireland? Fr Senan Moynihan and the Capuchin Annual’ and ‘The illustrations of Richard King for the Capuchin Annual, 1940-72’.

Impression

Both papers were fascinating, leaving one with the decided impression that the demise of the Capuchin Annual has long left a profound gap in Ireland’s cultural landscape, and a profound wish that an enterprising publisher could see fit to release a collection of  King’s extraordinary illustrations, influenced as they were by such important artists as Harry Clarke, Eric Gill, and Mainie Jellett, before he found – he believed – his own voice at last in the 1960s and 1970s.

The last paper of the day was reserved for Church Street’s own Fr Kieran Shorten OFM Cap., who spoke on ‘A history of Irish Capuchin missionary work in Africa’, noting in particular the Capuchins’ role in education, citing Zambia’s Capuchin Bishop Timothy O’Shea’s comment on the vital importance of the education of women. “Educate a man and you educate an individual,” he said. “Educate a woman and you educate a nation.”

Fr Richard Hendricks OFM Cap. and the Capuchins’ archivist Dr Brian Kirby should be proud of having organised a superb testament to one of Ireland’s most important religious communities.