JOHN P. DONAGHEY (1879-1949)

Associate of Roentgen in Physics Research

Student 1896-1903 Professor of Experimental Science and Mathematics 1912-21

John Patrick Donaghey was a native of Ballygreen, Ramelton, Co. Donegal where he was born on December 3rd 1879. After attending local schools he was admitted to Maynooth College in 1896 for service in the diocese of Raphoe. His interest in science was immediately obvious and after a remarkable academic career and his ordination in 1903, he carried out post-graduate studies at the Dunboyne Institute and was engaged in research at Bonn University, where he studied under some of the leading names in Physics, including Roentgen, discoverer of the X-Ray, Sommerfeld and von Bayer. Having secured his Ph.D, he returned to Ireland in 1908 and was on the staff of St. Eunan's, the diocesan secondary school in Letterkenny for the next four years. 

He was appointed Professor of Experimental Science in Mathematics at Maynooth in 1912, being joined there shortly afterwards by Fr. Pádraig de Brún, who had taken his doctorate in Mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris in the same year. In 1921 he left the Maynooth faculty to return to Germany, where he continued his research activities. In July 1924 he left for the United States (on the ship S.S.Assyria, according to immigration records) to take up the position of Professor of Physics at Marquette University in Wisconsin, a Jesuit institution established some forty years earlier and named for a seventeenth-century French missionary of the order. The college had a strong orientation towards serving German immigrants in the Milwaukee area, but for the first quarter century operated with only a small contingent of Jesuit fathers and a single lay professor. It received university status in 1907 and merged with an existing medical school on a new site in the city suburbs, accepting female students for the first time in 1909 and thus becoming the first Catholic co-educational institution at this level in the world. The emphasis on medicine, extended with the incorporation of another medical college in 1913, created a strong demand for basic scientific education and Fr. Donaghey's work was applied across the faculties. The president in the years immediately prior to his recruitment was Fr. Herbert C. Noonan S.J., the son of John and Mary (nee Maroney) Noonan, Irish immigrants from Limerick and Clare respectively, who moved to Creighton University in 1923.

Dr. Donaghey became a U.S. citizen in 1942, by which time he had moved to Texas and become head of the Department of Philosophy at Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, an institution also founded in the early 1880s as a college for women, under the direction of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. The order had been established in Houston from France in 1866, and in San Antonio by a group of French sisters who founded a convent there three years later. Immediately after the San Antonio college's foundation, the Mother Superior had visited Ireland and recruited fifteen postulants. These would form the first cohort of a regular stream of aspirants from Ireland, many of whom would attain leadership positions in the order, beginning with the election of the first Irish-born Mother General, Sr. Mary John O'Shaughnessy, in 1893.  Affiliated to the Catholic University of America in 1912, the original educational facility grew alongside the order's expansion; by 1919 there were over 650 sisters serving in the various mission sites in Texas, Missouri and Mexico, with significant recruitment from Europe, including Ireland (an extensive new Motherhouse on the former Brackenridge estate, 1 college, 40 schools and academies, 12 hospitals, four orphanages, 2 homes for the elderly and a postulate in The Netherlands). In 1925 the order (designated by its Latin name Congregatio Caritatis Verbi Domini, or CCVI) had established its first Irish foundation, at Dunmore, Co. Galway, where they later established a secondary school that they supervised until they handed it over to the Sisters of Mercy in 1979 (of the four CCVI sisters, three moved to San Antonio and one transferred to the Mercy order and remained on in the community).

 

In 1968 a correspondent wrote to the Donegal Democrat as follows (some small alterations and omissions made for sequencing, accuracy and avoidance of repetition) :

Dear Sir

Often when I hear the word "x-rays" mentioned it reminds me of a priest I knew in my childhood. Although born in Scotland I spent my primary school days in Tyrone. The people on the neighbouring farm were a family called Donaghey. The Professor of Physics in Maynooih College was their cousin, Rev. John P. Donaghey. He was born in Ramelton, Co. Donegal but often spent his holidays with his Tyrone cousins. My childhood memories of him touch on chickens, nuts and blackberries. The already neat white rose-covered farmhouse was given an extra sparkle in anticipation of his visits. Special meals were prepared for his arrival. I remember my mother's help being sought to prepare roast chicken and then a day would come when our home-coming from school would be greeted with my mother's announcement; "Dr. Donaghey came today". We liked this news; because he would go for berry-picking and nut gathering expeditions with his grown-up cousins while we children tagged on; and sometimes we got rides in the same "side" car when he went to the nearest village.(Another childhood memory is a coloured picture postcard sent by him from Munich, Germany to my mother).

In our eyes he was a great man and a likeable one, but not until I grew to maturity did I realise he had another distinction.  The distinction I have mentioned is the fact that he was a personal friend of, and pupil of the discoverer of x-ray — William Conrad Roentgen (Discovery of the x-ray led to acquisition of knowledge of the atom and the ultimate release of atomic energy).

Dr. Donaghey studied for his Doctorate in Philosophy in Munich University under Roentgen. He taught in St. Eunan's College, Letterkenny prior to 1912, and in Maynooth from 1912 until . 1921. Mr. de Valera was a lecturer there at the same time. Past pupils of Dr. Donaghey included Rev. P. McLaughlin (his "chair" successor), Rev. Dr. Browne, Rev. Dr. Fergus and Rev. Dr. Keogh.

In Munich he did three years research under Roentgen. Roentgen invited Dr. Donaghey to see the original instruments which he had used in making his discovery (before he presented them to Munich museum). Dr. Donaghey attended Roentgen's funeral in 1923. "Although he was not a Catholic, Roenigen was a good Christian," Dr. Donaghey later said of him. "He frequently demonstrated how nature showed the power of God" was another of his remarks re Roentgen. He was very kind to his' priest pupil and told him he was the only clergyman to receive the Doctorate of Philosophy under his tuition.

Yours, M. M. F Stirling (Scotland)