BURIALS 1995-

 

 

The four graves of staff members in this section of the cemetery, located behind the rows of small Celtic crosses marking the graves of students who died between 1840 and 1940, is the most recent area to be used for burials (the grave markers are shown at the very upper left hand corner of the photo above); the order of interment is from left to right, i.e. beginning at the farthest point from the cemetery entrance. 

 

The recording of staff biographies up to 1995 was carried out in summary fashion by Patrick Corish as an appendix to his bicentenary history of the college Maynooth College 1795-1995. With the opening up of some of the college's academic departments, and their incorporation into what is now Maynooth University, the profile of priests who transferred to the new institution was raised, and significant information on their background and achievements made available in newspaper obituaries and notices and tributes in academic and other specialist media. As part of a broader project to document the lives of people connected to the history and development of Maynooth College and University, more extended accounts of individual lives have been completed and are now made available here.

 

 

GERARD WATSON  (1933-1998)  Armagh Born Randalstown, Co. Antrim; studied at Maynooth 1951-8 and ordained in Rome February 1959; immediately appointed to Chair of Classics at Maynooth, completing a Ph.D at Queen's University, Belfast with a thesis on the Stoic theory of knowledge. A specialist in Greek Philosophy and Patristics, he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1978 at the age of thirty-three, having already been involved in the expansion of Classics education under the new regime at Maynooth that led to the establishment of its emergence as a respected secular university (by the 1980s NUI Maynooth had the largest proportion of Classics scholars per head of student population of any third-level institution in Britain or Ireland). His published works included The Stoic Theory of Knowledge (1966), Plato's Unwritten Teaching (1973), St Augustine, the Platonists and the Resurrection Body (1984), Phantasia in Classical Thought (1988), and Greek Philosophy and the Christian Notion of God (1994). He also contributed articles to a number of theological, pastoral and philosophical publications.

 

Note that the following burial took place in the Pioneers' Plot by special arrangement; details of the interred are included here to observe the sequence:

MICHAEL CASEY O.P. (1902-97) Born in Waterford; graduated from UCD and became Assistant State Chemist and a founder member of the Chemical Association before entering the Dominican order at the age of 26; after ordination in 1934 he was science master at Newbridge College for over twenty years before joining the staff of Maynooth in 1957 as lecturer, and from 1960, professor of Chemistry; died aged 95 and is buried adjacent to Nicholas Callan at his own request.

 

JAMES DESMOND BASTABLE*  (1918-2000)  Dublin Born 25 October 1918 in Blackrock, Co. Dublin into a family that also produced a second priest and philosopher, his twin brother Patrick, who entered the Columban order.  James attended the Christian Brothers in Westland Row before entering Holy Cross College, Clonliffe from where he was ordained in the Pro-Cathedral by Archbishop McQuaid on 30 May 1942. His first appointment was as chaplain to the Loreto Convent, Foxrock and later that year he transferred to the Carmelite Monastery in Ranelagh where he remained as chaplain until 1944.  He was then appointed Professor of Philosophy at Maynooth. In 1968 he was appointed curate to the Wicklow parish of Aughrim-Greenane and the following year he went to UCD as a member of the staff of the Department of Philosophy, where he joined his brother. He retired in 1977 and in 1988 was made chaplain to St. Clare's Convent, Stillorgan where he remained until 1996.  He died on 9 August 2000.

 

THOMAS A. F. KELLY  (1956-2009)  The first lay member of the academic staff of Maynooth College to be buried in the college cemetery, Thomas Augustine Francis Kelly was born in Dublin and educated in Philosophy at UCD, the University of Dublin (TCD) and the University of Fribourg, where he was awarded his Doctorate in Philosophy. In the mid-1980s he joined the staff of St. Patrick's College, Maynooth as a Lecturer in Philosophy, a position he occupied for seventeen years. With the integration of the seminary Philosophy department into the National University of Ireland at Maynooth at the turn of the century, he quickly established himself in a challenging new environment, being shortly afterwards appointed Professor, the first lay person to occupy such a position since the foundation of the original Maynooth College. He was widely active in the promotion of philosophy as a university subject and as a key to the understanding human existence and the practice of good living. He lectured on the subject in mainland Europe and in the U.S. and Asia; was a promoter of the Process/New Thought movement in philosophy; served as President of the Irish Philosophical Society and was editor of its journal; and acted as editor of the Maynooth Philosophical Papers, an anthology of current research in his academic department. His published works included Language and Transcendence: A Study in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl-Otto Apel (1994); Language, World and God: An Essay in Ontology (1996); Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship (Ed. 2004, with Philipp W. Roseman, a collection of essays 'in medieval thought and beyond' published in honour of Fr. James McEvoy (1943-2004), an erstwhile colleague at Maynooth) and Between System and Poetics: William Desmond and Philosophy after Dialectic (Ed. 2007, a study of the work of the Cork-born philosopher (b. 1951) of international repute, a professor at Villanova University and the Catholic University of Louvain, who also became Head of the Department of Philosophy at Maynooth University), as well as many articles in academic journals. In addition to his scholarship in his chosen area, he was also an accomplished musician, painter and creative writer. His accidental death, while out walking near Maynooth, was universally lamented by colleagues and students alike, many of whom had joined in the typical applause that marked the conclusion of his regular lectures. He was survived by his wife Marian and his widowed mother.

 

PATRICK CORISH (1921-2013) Ferns Born Ballycullane, Co. Wexford into a family of teachers, he was educated at St. Peter's College, Wexford and entered Maynooth in 1938, where he took a degree in Arts. He continued his studies at the Dunboyne Institute, where he attained the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and at UCD, where he was awarded a Master of Arts degree for his study of the Wexford bishop Nicholas French (1604-78), and where he worked under the two leading secular historians of the day, R. Dudley Edwards and T. W. Moody.

   In 1947 he was appointed as Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Maynooth, succeeding his mentor John Francis O'Doherty (1901-54), for whom he had the greatest admiration and respect, on the latter's retirement to a pastoral position due to ill-health. In 1967 he was appointed president of the college in succession to Monsignor Gerard Mitchell on the latter's appointment as parish priest of Ballinrobe, but found the administrative burden uncongenial and returned to his original position, being succeeded in turn in the presidency by his colleague Jeremiah Newman.

   In 1975 he became Professor of Modern History at the expanding recognised college of the National University of Ireland following the appointment of his longtime colleague (later Cardinal) Tomás Ó Fiaich as President of Maynooth College. He remained in this position for the next eleven years, retiring in 1986 but serving as college archivist and residing in the college for the next quarter of a century as he continued to carry out his own research and to advise others on theirs.

   His interaction with the wider world of scholarship focused mainly on involvement in organisations dedicated to the advancement of ecclesiastical history and learning, principally the Irish Catholic Historical Society and its publication Archivium Hibernicum (of which he was editor for a period), the Irish Manuscripts Commission and its publication Analecta Hibernica; and the commission (which he chaired) established by Archbishop Dermot Ryan in the early 1980s to study the history and cause of Irish martyrs for the faith (he had a particular regard for Conor O'Devany, a scholar-bishop of Down and Connor, who was executed in 1612 at the age of eighty). He also contributed to the Catholic Historical Review published by the Catholic University of America Press. He was elected to membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 1956 at the age of thirty-five.

   Apart from articles and book reviews in the latter-mentioned outlets, in Maynooth-originated reviews and in local historical journals, his formal publications were relatively few, and only seriously began, by his own admission, when he encountered the challenge and stimulation of dealing with post-graduate students. One of the most ambitious early projects in which he was involved, a multi-part history of Catholicism in Ireland, resulted in the production between 1967 and 1972 of a dozen 'fascicules' that represented about two-thirds of the projected output. In 1981 he produced The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Helicon History of Ireland series. His own remedy for the partial nature of the earlier project was to produce The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey in 1984, taking his observations to the period just before the calling of the Second Vatican Council. In 1990 a publication in his honour, Religion, Conflict and Co-existence in Ireland, was edited by his former student and successor as professor, Richard V. Comerford and was made up entirely of contributions from former students. In 1995 he produced the official history of Maynooth College as part of the celebration of the bicentenary of its founding. 

   In his later years he emphasised the importance of approaching church history from the point of view of the church's relations with its clergy and members, rather than with the state, which has tended to pre-occupy historians; he also promoted the inputs of secular clergy, 'the simple country priest,' in an Ireland dominated by monastic foundations.

   He had a special interest in gardening in general and in alpine gardening in particular, a pastime he admitted he took up in the 1960s 'in order to preserve my sanity', and took particular pleasure in the Junior Garden established as a rock garden in the 1930s by the then President, Monsignor D'Alton, and developed by Monsignor Corish in conjunction with gardener Jimmy Murray, who, with the Monsignor's encouragement, at one time lectured Maynooth students on the topic.