Greg DalyFr Bryan Shortall tells Greg Daly about the Capuchin experience during the Rising
For the Capuchin friars of Church Street the Rising began with an explosion.
“Frs Columbus and Aloysius both have the same memory of the morning of Easter Monday 1916,” says Fr Bryan Shortall OFM Cap of two of his famous predecessors.
“There was an explosion, a bang, outside the church on Church Street,” he says, when the friars “were having dinner, just finishing their midday meal which was at twelve o’clock because they got up so early. They went outside and they noticed that there was a child who they called ‘Baby Foster’ in his pram, killed, and that was the first casualty and the first child killed in the Rising.”
Despite his nickname, Sean Foster wasn’t quite a baby, but a toddler, just two months shy of his third birthday. His mother Katie had been wheeling him with his little brother Terence in their pram to the Capuchin’s Father Mathew Hall, where Katie was a member of the choral society and was planning on helping with the annual Father Mathew Feis.
On the way there she passed a group of Volunteers behind a makeshift barricade at the junction on Church Street and North King Street, and spotting her brother among them teased him for “playing soldiers”, saying he should go home as he was “only fooling around”.
Ammunition
Hardly had she said this when a group of British Lancers passed by, escorting several lorry-loads of ammunition to the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park.
The Volunteers fired on the convoy as it passed Church Street Bridge, as Katie raced towards the Church hall, only to be caught in a crossfire with Sean being hit under his left ear by a bullet Katie would always maintain had come from a Volunteer’s pistol.
“So began a chaotic week in the city and in the life of the priests,” says Fr Bryan, explaining that this was the last thing the friars had expected. “Columbus talks about how Easter Monday dawned crisp and bright,” he says. “You’ve got to remember that they’d just had three of their busiest days with the Easter Triduum – they were flat out and Monday was a bank holiday. It was a different time – Sunday and Monday, nothing was open. “
There were five priests active in the Church Street community at the time, Fr Bryan explains: Fr Aloysius Travers, Fr Albert Bibby, Fr Sebastian O’Brien, Fr Columbus Murphy and Fr Augustine Hayden. The provincial of the Capuchins’ Irish province would have lived in the house at the same time, he explains, but his life was quite separate from that of the regular men.
“Reading Columbus’ memoir it was chaotic,” he says, continuing, “I mean the men took their life in their hands. At one stage, Columbus says in his memoir that he wasn’t actually afraid if he died. He talks about going down to Jervis Street Hospital where he was supplying, saying Mass for the nuns, early in the morning.
“He describes himself dodging bullets and taking shelter in doorways, and describes very powerfully the destruction of the city stage by stage from his vantage point in Jervis Street Hospital where he holed himself up with everybody else including nurses for a few days because it was too dangerous to go out onto the streets.”
Fr Columbus’ descriptions of the executions are “sort of surreal”, Fr Bryan says. “The men don’t seem to be afraid, they tell them they’re not afraid, and the conversation between the men and the soldiers, the soldiers and the priests, the priests and the men, and so on.
“Two soldiers come to either side of the men and bring them to the ante-chamber where they’re blindfolded and where a white card is put across their hearts, then they’re brought out into the stonebreakers’ yard where the two soldiers step aside, the firing squad fire, and as Columbus says, the men fall down in a heap.”
The friars, he says, would be driven from the priory in the dead of night in order to hear the men’s Confessions and give them Holy Communion and the Last Rites before being driven back to the priory for five or six in the morning, there to say Mass for the souls of the dead rebels.
“Columbus blew me away with this statement when he said ‘And then I was to go up to Dundalk where I was to give a two-week mission’,” Fr Bryan remarks. “So going from this week of chaos, of bloodshed, of high drama and traumatic stress up to a rural parish to give a two-week mission – and we think in an era of counselling and psychotherapy and in an era of supervision for ministry, how did he stay sane? How did these men stay sane?
“I actually spoke to a counsellor about this,” he continues, “to a priest who is skilled in counselling, and he said that that kind of ministry – that kind of counselling – wasn’t around then, but they were men who were single-minded in their decisions for the salvation of souls. They were men who were single-minded about doing as much as they could and more than they could to minister to these men and to their families.”
The salvation of souls was the absolute number one priority for the friars, he explains, adding that Dublin’s secular clergy would have had the same concerns and the same determination to bring pastoral care and the sacraments to the injured and dying.
“Columbus Murphy’s memoir shows that first and foremost they were really pastors of souls,” he says. “They really cared for the fellows’ souls – they didn’t want them to go to Hell. That was the kind of the theology of the day: it was Heaven or Hell, or a long, long term in Purgatory, so they were really interested in saving these guys’ souls, making sure that they died with the priest, making sure they died in the favour of God with forgiveness and the oil of anointing on their bodies.”
Describing how the priests ministered not just to the rebels but to their families, he says during the Rising, “the priests met great faith in people, and shared in the belief that they were there to save souls but that in doing that, built into it was pastoral care”. Nowadays pastoral care tends to entail being a “listening ear” and a “shoulder to cry on”, he says, but “a hundred years ago it was a bit more stoic than that”.
Recalling how at the launch of his book Children of the Rising Joe Duffy described Dublin during the Rising as a city “a hundred years and a million miles away from us”, Fr Bryan observes how much smaller and slower things were in 1916. “That world is a completely different world to the world we live in today.”