Thomas Finan (1931-2012)

Killaney Cemetery, Castleconnor, Co. Sligo

 

 

Thomas Finan was born on February 12 1931 in the townsland of Ballymoghenry in the parish of Castleconnor, Co. Sligo, to Michael Finan and his wife Delia (nee Howley). He was one of a family of four boys and two girls, siblings who for the most part remained in the general area of their birth except for one sister who emigrated to Canada and a brother who moved to Galway (another brother became a Garda Superintendent in Claremorris).

   Castleconnor parish is in Killala diocese, and Thomas attended Stokane National School, where his teachers were Mrs. Rouse, Mrs. Hanlon and Mr. Murphy. Of them, and his time there, he wrote a sentimental memoir that began with his acquiring of a love of poetry in Yeats Country — but not a love of dancing, a regular pastime in the locality, though   he recognised the biblical significance of the art, and recounted how once, during an end-of-term free class in Maynooth, he (as professor) was treated to a display by one of his students.

   Another early interest was woodworking, on which subject he attended evening classes, disorienting those who had predicted a professional future for him; but otherwise he enjoyed the social interaction of a typical rural school for both boys and girls — ‘the ducklings and the daughters of swans. the placid and the fiery, the bright-eyed extroverts and the dark-pooled contemplatives with their shadows deep, the teases that teased and the Goldllocks that glistened.’

   His passage to St. Muredach’s in 1945 was assured and smooth, even if a daily round-trip by bicycle of twenty-five miles to Ballina in post-wartime Mayo was the price of an education, marking him out from the typical academic students of the time who had the luxury of boarding at the college. His future promise was indicated almost immediately, when he obtained 100% in his first-year examination in Greek, but his facility for other subjects was equally obvious, including Irish and Maths, in both of which he had received an excellent grounding in Stockane.

James Naughton, then in his early 80s, had been Bishop of Killala for almost forty years, having been administrator of the Cathedral and President of St. Muredach’s previously. After he died in February 1950 there was a brief inter-regnum until another Ballina native, Patrick O’Boyle was appointed as his successor. Like Bishop Naughton, he had also been President of St. Muredach’s, but for thirty years, as opposed to Naughton’s seven. He therefore knew well the potential of the young man from Ballymoghenry who was sent to Maynooth for the diocese in that same year.

   Thomas Finan thus began an association with the National University of Ireland at Maynooth and the national seminary that would endure for over sixty years. His skills and knowledge in Greek and Latin (he had come first in Ireland in the latter in his Leaving Certificate examination) were soon evident; his professors, themselves of relatively recent appointment, were John Hackett (originally of Cashel) and Denis Meehan (of Elphin). The fate of both of these men would have an important bearing on Thomas Finan’s ultimate destiny.

   Thomas achieved his B.A. degree with First Class Honours in 1953, the same year that a new appointment was made to the Classics faculty at Maynooth. William Meany was an Ossory priest some seven years senior to Thomas, and had pursued a brilliant Maynooth career as a student in the late 1930s. Ordained in 1944, he had been working as a teacher of Classics in St. Kieran’s College, Kilkenny.

   Thomas meanwhile proceeded to study theology, being awarded the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1956 and ordained for service in the diocese of Killala in 1957. Along the way he had been able to visit Rome as part of his prize in an international essay competition, and was thus initiated into the charms of experience the very environments that had inspired the literature to which he had dedicated his academic life.

   After ordination he was assigned to return to Maynooth to study for his Higher Diploma in Education, the usual prelude to a career in teaching at a diocesan secondary school, but also undertook a Master of Arts degree, producing a dissertation on Early Christian Attitudes to Greco-Roman Civilisation under Dr. Meany’s direction.

   At the same time, the decision of Denis Meehan to take a sabbatical in America resulted in Thomas’s appointment as a temporary lecturer in Classics, and, in the following year, of John Hackett to resign because of ill-health, and of Fr. Meehan to enter a Cistercian monastery in Caifornia, resulted in two vacancies in the professorial rank.

   To one of these vacancies Thomas Finan was appointed on the 13th of October in 1959, the first Killala priest to be appointed to a Maynooth professorship since John McHale, the future Archbishop of Tuam, in 1820 (McHale had been a lecturer in theology since 1814, when he was still a sub-deacon). He was joined on the staff on the same day by Gerard Watson, a priest of the diocese of Armagh who had been educated at Maynooth between 1951 and 1958 but ordained in Rome in early 1959 in the expectation that he would take up a teaching position in his alma mater (his bishop, Cardinal John Dalton, himself a former Classics professor and President of Maynooth, thought it advisable for the young deacon to have a buffer period before moving from student to professor).

   Meany, Finan and Watson were to form the Classics team that shaped the university education of hundreds of seminarians and an even greater number of lay students over the next four decades. For all of the academics, the gruelling task of lecturing to large numbers of students, however well-disciplined and motivated, in the seminarians’ First Arts and B.A. ‘Pass’ classes, was somewhat mitigated by the challenge of shephering the Honours students through the upper reaches of the academic flumina, and rewarded by the success of students like John Duffy, a Clogher aspirant who became Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Philology and Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, and James O’Sullivan, a Kerry student, who became a senior researcher on the Hamburg-based Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project.

   Thomas Finan tried to give even the humblest of his Classics students a sense of the ancient literatures’ connection to the wider world of culture, famously intoning Herrick’s ‘Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May’ to indicate the theme of some of Horace’s Odes (he did not quote the poem’s proper title, which is ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’). In the era when the only means of communicating with a professor at lectures was via notes, the more erudite students sometimes teased him with observations or queries on obscure references that frustrated him in that he could not ask them to elaborate on their attractive wisdom or reveal the source of their unexpected enthusiasm.

   The integration of the old ‘recognised college’ structure of the National University of Ireland into the new National University of Ireland at Maynooth in the early 1980s gave the Classics faculty a second wind, with the challenges of dealing for the first time with post-graduate students, and this opportunity continued through the retirement of Dr. Meany in 1983 and until the retirements of Professors Finan and Watson in the mid 1990s. All of them continued to live at Maynooth (Fr. Finan had been offered a parish in his native diocese in the mid 1980s after the retirement of his senior colleague, but had decided against it). Dr. Watson died unexpectedly in 1998 and Dr. Meany left for nursing care in his native Kilkenny in 1999 (he died in 2001).

   One of the great pleasures of Thomas Finan’s life as professor and in retirement was to be involved in areas that combined his Classics background with his interest in other areas, including education, philosophy, theology and Irish culture. He contributed an article on the purpose and organisation of higher education in Ireland to a series in the ‘Irish Independent’ in 1967, noting Maynooth’s tradition and potential in the changing third level education scene (a fellow-contributor was Trinity’s Dr. David Thornley).

   He was fascinated by the life and work of St. Augustine, and became involved in a number of movements and events that reflect this and related interests. Some of his research was carried out in France, These included the International Thomas More Conference, whose 1998 gathering he hosted at Maynooth under the title ‘Thomas More in His Time: Renaissance Humanism and Renaissance Law’ and the Patristic Conference, whose 1992, 1995 and 1998 events he helped organise, and whose Proceedings he edited, with his colleague Dr. Vincent Twomey.

   When Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich died in 1990 he wrote a tribute in the ‘Western People’, lauding the former Maynooth Professor and President’s passion for Irish culture and history, his understanding of Irish links to ‘deep Europe’ as well as his silent and reflective mode in which he bore the suffering of his people, not only in Crossmaglen but also in the north Mayo he knew and loved and in all of Ireland.

   In his last years Thomas Finan health, and his once formidable mental powers. went into a sad decline and he was required to enter nursing care at Parke House in Kilcock. He died there on Saturday June 10 and was buried in Killanley Cemetery after Requiem Mass in St. Joseph’s Church, Castleconnor, where he had spoken so movingly at the formal opening of the new church in 1975. Its 420 seats were more than occupied by the huge turnout of clerics and lay people reflected the influence he had as teacher, mentor, friend and champion of the local and the elevated in Ireland’s spiritual life.