In the long annals of the Irish church, and those of Maynooth College as one of its most visible corporate expressions, there has always been evidence of some degree of disaffection and detachment, even at the highest levels. The result has often been a parting of the ways, geographically and spiritually. In the case of Paul Surlis, however, the detachment was purely geographical; he lived out his life in the service of the Church through academic engagement as a faithful priest, but in the Vincentian environment of a suburban New York campus.

Paul Surlis was born on June 7 1936 at Shroofe near Monasteraden in Co Sligo the eleventh child in the family of Terence and Nora Surlis. He was educated at St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen and entered St Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1954 for service in the diocese of Achonry. He graduated from the Recognised College of the National University of Ireland in 1957 and from the Pontifical University at Maynooth in 1960.  He was ordained in 1961 and carried out post-graduate studies in Germany, studying for a time under the noted Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner S.J., who was then involved in controversy with the Vatican regarding his teachings from exile in Austria and subsequently at the universities of Munich and Munster, though Pope John XXIII had made him a peritus to the Second Vatican Council.

Fr. Surlis also served as a peritus, advising Bishop Thomas Drury, a Ballymote-born prelate who had emigrated with his family as a youth, studied for the priesthood in the US and been appointed Bishop of San Angelo in Texas in 1961 (he became Bishop of Corpus Christi in 1965). In his most dramatic contribution to the Council proceedings, Paul drafted an intervention which Bishop Drury submitted dealing with priests who had resigned active ministry and who were neglected, even hindered, by the Vatican as they sought to regularise their marriages and find productive work to sustain themselves, their wives and families. Dr. Surlis presented the demands he made as ones of justice, not charity. The survey "American Participation in the Second Vatican Council" singled out Bishop Drury's address to the Council for special mention and praise.

The American connection would be an important factor in Paul Surlis's future life decisions; after the Council sessions, he worked for some years in both San Angelo and Corpus Christi dioceses. On returning to Ireland in the late 1960s, he was appointed a lecturer in Theology at his alma mater, being confirmed as Professor of Moral and Dogmatic Theology by the hierarchy in October 1969.

In 1972 he returned to the United States, first supervising an adult education programme in two parishes in Saratoga, California, then in the south-eastern portion of the Archdiocese of San Francisco (later to become the Diocese of San Jose), adjacent to what would become known as Silicon Valley.  Many participants in the programme had advanced degrees and well over one thousand persons participated between 1972 and 1975. The course was recognised for a Master's Degree in Pastoral Theology by the University of San Francisco

In 1975 Paul Surlis began teaching at St John’s University in New York, a Vincentian academy of over 20000 students founded in 1870 with the encouragement of a Tyrone-born Bishop of Brooklyn, John Loughlin. By the latter part of the twentieth century, St. John's had three New York City campuses; a graduate centre in Hauppauge, NY; and international locations in Rome, Paris and at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.

At St. John's Dr. Surlis was Professor of Catholic Social Teaching and the Theologies of Liberation in a twenty-member faculty of diverse talents, many of them of Irish ancestral background, including the social activist Fr. Leland White (1940-2001), whose work on the dialectical method of Karl Barth and Bernard Lonergan was widely admired, and who was editor of the international Biblical Theology Bulletin for twenty years (he had been a student at the Pontifical North American College in Rome during the Council sessions).

After retirement Paul lived at Crofton, Maryland, near his brother Aidan, himself a former priest, and family (wife Catherine, three children and ten grandchildren), who provided a supportive community. He was a regular visitor to Ireland, where his extended family included  forty nieces and nephews and over twice that number of grandnieces and grandnephews. He died in Maryland on May 30 2014, just days before his 78th birthday.

The following is an extract from an obituary appeared in the Irish Times on June 21 2014:

Fr Paul Surlis ... was an outstanding example of that generous, outreaching generation of Catholic priests fired by the bright vision of the Second Vatican Council, but who were to witness it being actively obscured in subsequent decades.....

.... From early in his priestly life Paul Surlis was at odds with Rome on various issues, including birth control, mandatory celibacy, women priests, same sex marriage, adoption by gay couples, homosexuality and, in particular, papal power. The arid decades since Vatican II did not silence Fr Paul, however, and his free expression of views did not endear him to some of more orthodox mind, as evidenced in responses to his not infrequent letters to this newspaper ....

.... Two years ago he recalled: “I was present in St Peter’s in Rome in 1965 when the document on the Church in the Modern World was being discussed. On the day when the Bishops should have debated birth control a message was delivered to the Council saying that Pope Paul V1 had reserved the issue to himself and asking that the Bishops move on without dealing with birth control.” This, Fr Surlis felt, “ was a major mistake from which we Catholics are still suffering”. He also noted that the resulting 1968 papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, banning artificial means of contraception, was “not infallible, as the pope himself pointed out” and was “rejected through non-acceptance”.