This Lent Discover God's Love In A Retreat - St. Augustine Catholic

an Irish missionary to our diocese,
recruited four Irish Mercies in 1960 to
assist in his tiny, new parish.
The convent grew with the area, and
with the parish, and while many Navy
families came and went, the Mercies were
the one stable element of the parish.
Two of the original members of the
community – Sister Mary Ethna Blackwell
and Sister Mary Paul Noonan – remained
in service to Sacred Heart from Msgr.
Danaher’s recruiting days to the day they
died, last year.
Just making the trip over here was
heroic, remembers Sister of St. Joseph
Thomas Joseph McGoldrick, a native of
New York-Irish parentage, who accompanied
Mother Anna Joseph Dignan to
Ireland in 1953 to recruit for the Sisters of
St. Joseph. And when they got here, they
never knew what was waiting for them:
blazing weather and high humidity (full
habits and all!), classrooms of 40 to 60
children, and convents that were hardly life
at the Hilton.
That was really the third wave of Irish
Sisters of St. Joseph. The first wave arrived
on our shores in the late 1800s,
supplanting and eventually replacing the
original French sisters who arrived in 1866.
The second wave came in the 1930s,
when Florida was just beginning to look
like a boom state (and when schools were
opened in Miami, Tampa, Orlando,
Tallahassee, Pensacola, and Jacksonville).
Some sisters from this group are still with
us. In fact, of the eight Sisters of St. Joseph
– 80+ years old – all eight are Irish
missionaries!
Most of our senior Irish pastors come
from the Hurley recruitment era. These
were the days when Archbishop Joseph P.
Hurley, accompanied by Msgr. John P.
Burns, regularly visited the great Irish
seminaries – St. Patrick’s in Carlow, St.
John’s in Waterford, St. Kiernan’s in
Kilkenny, St. Peter’s in Wexford, and All
Hallows in Dublin – urging what was then
an abundance of prospective priests to
come to Florida.
“We got more than golf and sunshine,”
Msgr. John Lenihan remembers. “We got
thrown into responsibilities, quickly.”
Msgr. Lenihan, who was named a
pastor and director of Catholic Charities
within three years of ordination, said, “You
learned by flying by the seat of your pants.
And you just didn’t worry about how
things would turn out. You were too busy
keeping up with your jobs.”
They gave us more than the celebration
of Mass and confessions. And their colleagues
in the convents contributed more
than lesson plans and tests.
Whether it was personally laying the
bricks for a school addition, or making
themselves a high profile part of virtually
every hospital in the diocese by their
frequent visits to the sick; whether it was
teaching our lads the other football or
giving our Catholic school students a break
from Lent on March 17 so the children
could remember that, when all is said and
done, life in God is a life of joy, these
mighty men and women brought so much
of the Isle of Saints and Scholars to our
state and our diocese.
And, in letting some Florida sand settle
in their shoes, they have become beloved
members of our Catholic family.
Father Terrence Morgan, pastor of the Cathedral-
Basilica, St. Augustine, has roots in Ireland, too.
Irish-born Sisters of Mercy serving in the diocese, top row:
Josephine O’Leary, Patricia O’Hea, Mary of Mercy Casey,
Mary Murphy and Carmel O’Callaghan. Front row: Mary
Regina Fahy, Eithne Lowther, Anne Campbell and Bridie
Ryan. Sisters of Mercy not pictured: Ambrose Cruise, Enda
Egan, Therese Horan, Maria Maxwell and Emmanuel
Gilsenan. Sisters of St. Joseph not pictured: Eugenia Crowley,
Hannah Daly, Eileen and Mary Esther Flanagan, Marie
O’Beirne, Louis Angela O’Donovan, Geraldine O’Flynn,
Emmanuel O’Keefe, Mary Camillus O’Mahoney, Ethelburga
O’Shaughnessy and Liguori Pierse. Also not pictured are: Anne
Conlon, CSJP, Nancy O’Reilly, OP and Martha Costello, OP.
Terry Wilmot
ST. AUGUSTINE CATHOLIC • FEBRUARY/MARCH 2001 9