Courtney McGrailFr Joe Murphy reminisces with Rachel Beard on a life spent travelling the world and serving God
Rachel Beard
When people think of San Francisco, they don’t normally think of Ireland. But Fr Joe Murphy didn’t have any trouble maintaining his Irish connections in the sunny Californian city.
“San Francisco is a very Irish city,” he says. “There’s a huge Irish community there, and besides that, I have a number of first cousins. My father’s two older brothers immigrated to San Francisco, and their kids would be my first cousins so I was surrounded. I couldn’t get out of jail.”
Although originally from Wexford, Fr Joe served as a parish priest in San Francisco for over 30 years. While there, he travelled across the Pacific frequently.
“I always took a month’s vacation in San Francisco from the parish,” Fr Joes says. “But many times, I took that month’s vacation travelling in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, places like that and Central and South America, because you’re closer to it there than here.”
A lot Fr Joe’s visits to Asia were holiday trips, but some of them were for a much more serious concern.
“What I was doing was I used to go with Vietnam veterans who had seen service in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,” he says. “And at one stage, I was a civilian chaplain to the Coast Guard in San Francisco and some of these guys ended up in the Coast Guard after being out in Vietnam. So they were organising these trips to go back to sort of get a lot of the stuff out of their system, so they invited me to come along with them in Vietnam five or six times.”
Fr Joe travelled to Asia with these veterans in order to help them come to peace with what had happened there during the war.
“We’d go out, maybe 14 of us,” he says. “I was the only one who wasn’t a veteran. In the evenings, we’d stick around, and they’d visit the places where they had served and they were getting a lot of heavy stuff out of their systems, guilt and everything that went with it. So I was kind of facilitating a lot of that with them.”
Aside from taking veterans back to Vietnam, Fr Joe also travelled on his own time, taking advantage of how much closer San Francisco is to Asia and Oceania than Ireland is.
“A couple of trips I took out of curiosity,” he says. “I went to Australia to see relatives and for fun. I went to New Zealand to see some friends and for fun. Went to Brunei, Philippines, Japan, South Korea, China three or four times, Vietnam about five times, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, all those places.”
After travelling across the Pacific, Fr Joe returned to Ireland to work as chaplain at the Carmelite Monastery in Delgany.
“My health is not great, so I retired last year and I’d been a priest all my life,” he says. “I wanted somewhere where I could have some little light ministry that would suit my age and also handy in Ireland, somewhere to live. So I contacted the sisters here as well as some other communities and Sr Gwen returned my email almost on the spot so she got me.”
The Carmelite monastery seemed like a perfect fit, he explains.
“In California, I was doing 14- or 15-hour days,” he says. “I didn’t want anything like that. I just needed somewhere, preferably somewhere where I could live nearby.
“I sent this out, a mass emailing, to a number of places,” he says. “And within five minutes, I got a response from here, and they said, ‘let’s talk and we do have a place where you could actually live on the property’.”
Fr Joe currently lives in a small cottage on the monastery property and says Mass in the monastery’s church every day.
“A lot of people, as I say, come up here to Mass every day,” he says. “And quite frequently, people will say to me, ‘oh, I don’t think you were on your A-game today’ or ‘you hit a homerun there’, that sort of stuff. They’ll talk to me, and people will call me up and say ‘I’d like to talk to you more about what you said this morning, can we meet for coffee somewhere?’ or it could be something else.”
Great change
Although he describes his new position as a “great change”, his work at the monastery feels familiar to Fr Joe. “It sort of reminds me of when I was a parish priest in San Francisco,” he says.
Most Sundays, Fr Joe isn’t the one saying Mass at the monastery’s church.
“One of the priests in the parish comes in because they like to get a feel for who the nuns are and what it’s like here,” he says. “So I go and say Mass in one of the – there’s seven churches in this pastoral area, so I get my turn in different ones every Sunday.”
After spending his career as a parish priest travelling the world, Fr Joe feels content settling down at the Carmelite Monastery in Delgany.
“But I would just want to continue in my health for as long as I can,” he says. “And I’m very happy to stay here until I can no longer live here. Whatever the next stage is for me, I don’t know, but I’m very happy to stay here and to be as useful as I can to the sisters.”