THOMAS CAHILL  (1812-1894)

As Fr. Paul OCSO, an early example of the Maynooth alumnus

in search of a deeper spiritual experience

 

Student 1837?-1841

 

Although Maynooth College was planned as a seminary to serve the secular home mission, there have been many individual variations from that purpose, with both students and ordained alumni choosing to serve in overseas dioceses or join religious orders. A small number have entered monastic life and here we record the life of one such, perhaps the earliest example.

 

Thomas Cahill was born in Co. Laois in 1812 and was educated at St. Patrick's College, Carlow before entering Maynooth. The details of his family background and early life are scant, and it is not clear if he pursued a secular career before enrolling at the Carlow College, but he was ordained in 1841 at the age of twenty-nine for service in the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin. After serving in at least one curacy in the diocese, he entered Mount Melleray Abbey in 1844 and began his postulancy as a Cistercian. The abbey had only been in existence for a dozen years at this point, having been established from the ancient abbey of Melleray in Brittany by a group of sixty-four monks under a Waterford-born Fr. Vincent Ryan, who became its first abbot in 1835. 

Some of the monks were English, having joined the order in the period between 1794 and 1817, when the Melleray community was supressed in France and its members moved to Lulworth in Dorset on the southern English coast; but most of them were Irish. They had joined the order when it expanded dramatically to almost two hundred monks in a brief twelve-year period after the French foundation was revived from 1817 onward, only to be persecuted again in 1830, particularly regarding its high foreign membership. This persecution occasioned the Irish venture (the French foundation survived the times and would flourish again, establishing new communities overseas including the famous Gethsemani Abbey in the United States).

In 1836, a small group of monks departed from Mount Melleray to set up a foundation in England at what became Mount St. Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire.

Thus the community that Thomas Smith joined was unusually cosmopolitan and mobile, and although Abbot Ryan died in 1845 and his successor, Dom Joseph Ryan three years later, by the time Thomas was professed as Father Paul, the new abbot, Dom Bruno Fitzpatrick was already formulating plans to maintain the expansion both of the Irish foundation and its overseas footprint. 

Meanwhile a small school established by the first Abbot Ryan in 1843 for students advancing beyond the national school system introduced in 1835 was growing and would eventually provide formation for both ecclesiastical and lay students, catering for the latter until its closure in 1974.

In 1849 a group of Mount Melleray monks left for the United States and set up a foundation at Dubuque, Iowa, where their influence was such that their leader Fr. Clement Smyth, quickly became the first bishop of the diocese of Dubuque.

These movements resulted in continuous changes in assignments at the motherhouse. Following his profession as a monk, Fr. Paul had been appointed confessor in the public chapel of the monastery, but in 1850 was appointed Prior in succession to Fr. Francis, who had succeeded Bishop Smyth as superior of the American foundation, and also assumed the duties of Master of Novices. He remained in that position for eight years, after which he was sent to Mount St. Bernard in England on a brief assignment. From 1859 to his death in 1894, he was once more the trusted confessor and spiritual director of the many locals and visitors, some of whom travelled from distant parts of Ireland and overseas to avail of his wisdom and guidance.