DENIS (MOLAISE) MEEHAN (1914-94)

Drawing of Denis Meehan

by Deirdre Cullen

from 'Maynooth Again Remembered'

Denis Meehan was born in Castlebar, Mayo, Republic of Ireland on September 26 1914 to the union of James and Mary Flanagan Meehan. 

He entered Maynooth College in 1932 for service in the Diocese of Elphin and received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the recognised college of the National University of Ireland there. He was was ordained on June 23, 1940.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Father Meehan studied in England, France, Greece and Rome while teaching classical languages and literature at Maynooth, where he had appointed to the Professorship in those subjects in 1943, succeeding Fr. John O'Neill, a Classics scholar from Cork who had received his Ph.D at University of Chicago and who had retired through ill health at the age of forty-one. He was joined in the department in 1951 by Fr. William Meany. 

During his time in Maynooth, he produced two books on the college and its history, environment and personnel under the titles 'Window on Maynooth' (1944) and 'Maynooth Again Remembered' (1949). The latter title was a riff on the first book of its type 'I Remember Maynooth' by the college's Professor of English, Fr. Neil Kevin, published in 1935 (a compendium under the title 'We Remember Maynooth' was published in 2020).

In an unusual move fora Maynooth professor, Denis Meehan went to the United States in 1958 and taught for five years at Los Angeles' Immaculate Heart College. But the move was part of a broader search for a higher degree of spirituality than he felt he could achieve in the secular priesthood, and in May of 1963, he joined the Saint Andrew's Abbey at Valyermo as a Benedictine monk.

Over the next thirty years he continued his interests in the Classics, guest lecturing at Claremont Graduate School, Scripps College, Pomona College, and UCLA and joining the staff of Marymount College in Palo Verde from 1970 to 1973.

He was naturalized in 1968, by which time he had taken the name in religion of Molaise, in homage to St. Molaise of Inishmurray, a founder of a sixth-century island monastic community off the coast of Sligo, whose life he would write in 1989. He also published several religious texts and authored articles for journals in both England and his native Ireland.

He had a particular interest in Gregory of Nazianzus, who was born into an aristocratic Christian family in Cappadocia during the reign of the emperor Constantine. He received a superb education in Athens and entered into the monastic life with his classmate and friend Basil (who would become known as "Basil the Great"). After reluctantly submitting to ordination to the priesthood in 362, he subsequently became the Bishop of Sasima. Upon the accession of Theodosius I to the imperial throne in 379 and the convening of the Council of Constantinople in 381, Gregory was summoned to the eastern imperial capital to serve as bishop of that city and as presider over the council. The unfortunate incidents that occurred in Constantinople at that time impelled Gregory to retire to his boyhood home and to devote himself to writing. The autobiographical poems translated by Denis Meehan, and published by the Catholic University of America Press in 1987, relate the events of Gregory's life through his own unique perspective in three parts - Concerning His Own Affairs; Concerning Himself and the Bishops; Concerning His Own Life.

These diverse interests, his spirituality, and his fascination with the progress of modern man, gave Denis Meehan a vibrant purpose in life. “He was a lover of nature, an avid bicyclist, walker and sun worshiper,” according to the Abbot of Valyermo, Dom Francis Benedict. “Cloudy days were not his cup of tea.”

Father Meehan died of cardiac arrest at Antelope Valley Hospital Medical Center, after a lengthy battle with prostate cancer, on August 6, 1994 at the age of seventy-nine.

He was survived by a brother, Charles Meehan, and a sister, Bridget Bullock, both then living in Ireland.