Courtney McGrailA prominent Jesuit scholar and leading commentator on modern Irish Catholicism has died after being ill for some months. Fr Michael Paul Gallagher SJ died on Friday, November 6, in St Vincent’s Private Hospital, after the Anointing of the Sick and prayers with three Jesuit friends. He had been suffering from cancer since January.
Born in Collooney, Co. Sligo, in 1939, he was educated at Clongowes Wood College and UCD. After joining the Jesuits, he studied Renaissance literature in Oxford, and was ordained in 1972.
A well-known lecturer and author of books on faith and contemporary culture, he lectured in English in UCD before going to Rome, where he was rector of the Collegio Bellarmino and lectured at the Gregorian University, serving as dean of the latter’s faculty of theology between 2005 and 2008.
Shortly before his death he recorded a series of short videos about Jesuit advice on making good decisions, and wrote the text for an Advent Retreat to be published on the Irish and British Jesuits’ websites.
‘The Prospect of Dying’ his final article for The Sacred Heart Messenger, to which he was a regular contributor, is in the magazine’s current issue, and Into Extra Time, an account of his path through illness, will soon be published.