MILES GAFFNEY (1798-1861)

Unassuming disciplinarian and spiritual director who was a collaborator of Catherine

McAuley in the founding of the Sisters of Mercy and later joined the Jesuits

Senior Dean 1834-56

 

 

Miles Gaffney, sometimes styled Myles, and (in some contemporary listings of Maynooth College staff in commercial directories) Millitus, was born in Belfast on June 7th 1798 into the family of James and Marianne Gaffney. Of his family background little is known, except that they had already supplied a priest to the Jesuit order - his grand-uncle, Fr. John Austin S.J. (1717-1784) had been a remarkable figure in the social history of Dublin, campaigning on behalf of the poorest inhabitants of the city’s slums. The birth location of Belfast is unexplained - the family seems to have been established in Dublin, and was certainly living there some fifteen years later when his brother John was born.

     Miles was educated for the priesthood in France, enrolling first at the Irish College, and after it had been riven by factional in-fighting, at Saint Sulpice seminary. He would appear to have been ordained for service in the Archdiocese of Dublin in the mid 1820s, at around the time when Co-adjutor Archbishop Daniel Murray succeeded Archbishop John Thomas Troy. He then went to the seminary at Beauvais, whether for further studies or to join the staff is not clear, but the fact that he stayed there until 1830 would suggest the latter or a combination of the two. It was a time of political disturbance in France, and Fr. Gaffney was also troubled by the situation of his mother, now widowed, and his sister, whom he was helping to discern a vocation to religious life; he had at one time suggested that both might come to France. He also made it clear, in correspondence with colleagues, that he would prefer to have joined the Jesuits but that the poverty of his family, and his responsibility for his mother and sister, prevented it. 

     His friendship with his St. Sulpice and Dublin confrere John Hamilton, later secretary to Archbishop Murray and archdeacon, was of significance in the unfolding of his career.

Archbishop Murray had been a bishop since 1809 and held the position of President of Maynooth for one year in the interegnum between Patrick Everard and Bartholomew Crotty; these involvements gave him more than a passing interest in the affairs of the college until his death in 1852. 

     There were other interesting connections too - Daniel Murray had been a pupil of Fr. Thomas Betagh at the Jesuit Saul's Court academy founded by Fr. John Austin; a fellow pupil was Michael Blake, Vicar General of the archdiocese and later Bishop of Dromore, who in 1828 had become parish priest of St. Andrew's Parish, then centred on the old penal-times chapel in Townsend Street, where Fr. Gaffney was appointed curate on his return from France (a new church in Westland Row was commissioned in 1832, and Fr. Blake, by then consecrated a bishop, presided at its opening in 1834).

     Fr. Blake had a long record of involvement in political and church affairs at the highest level, being an early supporter of Daniel O'Connell in his fight for Catholic Emancipation and having challenged the authorities by building the church of Sts. Michael and John in a prominent position on the Dublin quays. He had also journeyed to Rome with the noted Maynooth College physicist Nicholas Callan to secure the reinstatement of the Irish College there. 

     Fr. Blake was also one of a small group of priests who supported Catherine McAuley in her establishment of a House of Mercy at Baggot Street, and her plans to establish a group of dedicated lay women there to as ministers to, and teachers of, the poor. When that plan changed to involve a conventual element, Fr. Gaffney undertook, at the request of Archbishop Murray, to assist Catherine with the drafting of a constitution for her proposed order of nuns, to be known as the Religious Sisters of Mercy.

     From then, and even after he left Dublin on his appointment to the staff of Maynooth College in 1834, he played a notable role in the development of the Mercy order, acting as a spiritual guide to the small community and participating in its expansion by preaching at receptions, professions, and the dedication of new foundations, of which there were a dozen in the first decade of the order's existence (he travelled to Birmingham and London as late as 1839 and 1841 to assist with the establishment of convents there).

     One of the sad outcomes in the early history of the order was the number of deaths in the Baggot Street community, including that of his sister Bridget, who had entered the order in 1833, but who died in 1835. On Catherine McAuley's death in 1841, he preached the panegyric at her funeral (see document) but the memoir of her published in the Dublin Review in 1847 and attributed to him has been criticised as rhetorical in character and inexact in detail.

     It can be assumed that it was at Archbishop Murray's instigation that Miles Gaffney was appointed dean at Maynooth, at a time when there was major controversy as to the number and responsibilities of this disciplinary office - there were ten deans in the twenty-year period between 1814 and 1834, and three further appointments in the subsequent four years (the normal complement would be three deans at any one time). 

     Fr. Gaffney was not welcomed at the college, since his appointment as Senior Dean upset the usual sequence of progression from a junior position upwards for those holding the position of dean. 

     The senior dean in fact had responsibility for, and lived among, the junior students and also gave spiritual direction, a responsibility memorably experienced by Fr. Matthew Russell S.J., born in the year that Fr. Gaffney was made dean, brother of a future Lord Chief Justice of England, and nephew of Fr. Charles Russell, Maynooth College President from 1857, the year Fr. Matthew entered the Jesuit order (three of his sisters became members of the Mercy order).

     Fr. Matthew, who famously founded the Irish Monthly as a journal of Catholic opinion and literary effort, had attended Maynooth for some time (some references say 'briefly,' but he would ordinarily have entered in 1851 or 1852 so it can be assumed that he may have spent up to five years there before entering the Jesuits). His pen picture of Fr. Gaffney, giving a spiritual talk on 'The Real Presence,' describes him as a 'white-haired, rosy-cheeked little man, with a stoop, who to the youthful students seemed very old, yet after he resigned his office and spent several years more as a Jesuit .... he was only sixty-three years old when he died in 1861, at the end of it all."

     Despite his modest demeanor, Fr. Gaffney would seem to have played an active role in the affairs of the college over his tenure of almost a quarter of a century, when the campus was undergoing its most dramatic expansion in student numbers and later in physical development to the designs of Pugin. The president of the college for most if that time was Fr. Michael Montague, who had lived his entire adult life in the college, as student and professor, and who was appointed to the presidency in the same year as Fr. Gaffney joined the staff. His colleague Laurence Renehan succeeded Montague in 1845 and began the major construction project in the same year, following some discussion with Fr. Gaffney regarding the appropriateness of the Sulpician model of seminary training with its emphasis on a greater sense of space for the individual student. He also promoted the concept of educating priests for service elsewhere in the English-speaking world, a prospect that was realised with the foundation of All Hallows College in 1842.

     In 1856, at the age of fifty eight, Fr. Miles Gaffney sought entry to the Jesuit order, and later returned to France, bringing together two long-established strands of affiliation in his life. He died at Angers on February 5th. 1861.

     His younger brother (by fifteen years) Fr. John, was born in 1813 in Dublin and studied at the Irish College in Rome, being ordained there for the Archdiocese of Dublin in 1840. He served briefly as a curate in Athy before entering the Jesuits in Louvain, Belgium, in 1843 at the age of thirty. He was professed at the age of forty-six in 1860, the year before his older brother died, and served out his pastoral life in Dublin, where he was a major figure in the temperance movement and also associated with several social and cultural initiatives in the city, as well as the founding of schools, until his death in 1898 at the age of eighty-five.

 

Sources: Hamilton Papers, Dublin Diocesan Archive; Irish Jesuit Archives; Ongoing Research by Sr. Anna Nicholls RSM; Bicentenary History of Maynooth College (1995)