GONE TOO SOON

 

Over a ten-year period, three priests, all from the same diocese and all highly-regarded

scientists, died in tragic accidents in Ireland, Germany and Switzerland

 

In the history of Maynooth College, the death of a student was an occasional but accepted and poignant event, often a result of fragile health and limited treatment options. The loss of a promising young life that had been nobly offered to the service of God and the Church added to the sense of sorrow. 

Even more striking in all those contexts was the loss of a young priest, particularly of one marked for distinction in the academic or pastoral spheres.

That is what makes truly extraordinary a sequence of events at either end of a ten-year period between 1963 and 1973, when three priests from the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, all of them distinguished scientists, and ranging in age from just over forty to less than twenty-five, died in tragic accidents in three different countries - Ireland, Germany and Switzerland.

The first of these, Fr. Pat McHugh, was a native of Kilnagross, in the parish of Kiltoghert near Carrick-on-Shannon, where he was born into a farming family in 1921. He entered Maynooth for priestly service in his native diocese in 1949, and graduated in Science under the tutelage of Professor James McConnell in 1952. He was ordained in 1956 and as a result of significant developments in the funding of science education at Maynooth, was able to avail of access to the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, where he carried out post-graduate research. In 1958 he was appointed to the teaching staff of St. Saran’s College in Ferbane, Co. Offaly, which had just been established as a diocesan day school. 

Four years years later, in 1962, he spent Christmas with his widowed mother and his brother and sister at Kilnagross, and at mid-morning on St. Stephen’s Day set off southwards in his car to visit some friends. He did not arrive. Two local men were involved in the discovery and notification of his extensively damaged car, found with its engine running, at Jamestown Bridge, a Famine-era five-arch structure over the River Shannon on the Leitrim-Roscommon border, some five miles south east of Carrick-on-Shannon. Wide-ranging land searches and dragging of the river produced no trace of the priest, and since there were no signs of blood loss, the possibility was raised that he had somehow survived and wandered away in a semi-conscious (or even fully-conscious) state. But on Saturday February 23 1963, eight weeks later, a report by a passerby resulted in the discovery of Fr. McHugh’s body, still in his clerical garb ‘standing upright a short distance from the place where the car crashed,' according to newspaper reports. He was buried in Kiltoghert Cemetery.

Just over eight years later a young Athlone-born graduate in Science at Maynooth was ordained for service in the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise. He was Fr. Dominic Rouse, one of the four children of Elsa and Frank Rouse, who operated a pharmacy in the midlands town.  After his secondary education at St. Mel's Diocesan College, he entered Maynooth in 1964, and in 1970 added the degree of Bachelor of Divinity to the B.Sc. he had acquired in 1967. Less than two months after his ordination, in August 1971, he was walking with two companions in the lower reaches of the Hohner Jochberg mountain near Kochel in Southern Bavaria, where he had been studying German before taking up a teaching position in his home diocese. In a poignant echo of Fr. McHugh's tragedy, that appointment was also to have been at St. Saran's Secondary School in Ferbane. Following his companions along a track away from the main hiking route on their way to join the Munich-Mittenwald highway, he slipped and rolled some 70 feet to the bottom, where his head hit a rock and he was killed instantly.

Fr. Ciaran Ryan was also a native of Athlone, where he was born in 1934, and showed extraordinary academic and sporting prowess in his youth; after graduating in Science at Maynooth, he had a stellar post-graduate career in nuclear physics research that led to a staff position at University College, Dublin (for a fuller profile of Fr. Ryan, click here ). His priestly and academic life ended in tragedy when in 1972 he took sabbatical leave from his position at UCD and went to Geneva to carry out research at the European Nuclear Research Centre there. In January 1973, ten years almost to the day since the discovery of Fr. McHugh's body, Fr. Ryan was declared missing while walking with a colleague in a mountainous area twenty five miles south of Geneva, near the Swiss-French border. After an extensive search, his body was found four days later at the foot of a rock face.

Meanwhile by a further strange co-incidence Ciaran’s brother Michael, also a priest, had joined the staff of St. Saran’s in Ferbane as a science teacher, and would remain there for twenty years, many of them as Principal. Later he would undertake a number of pastoral appointments, first in Fr. McHugh's native Kiltoghert and then as parish priest of Carrick-on-Shannon (the brothers’ uncle, also Fr. Ciaran Ryan, a pioneer of St. Patrick’s Missionary Society in Nigeria, had also ministered in both locations) and Vicar General of the Diocese. He died at the age of fifty-eight in 1994 after a long illness.