The

on Leeson Street 1910~2010

First published in 2010 by Messenger Publications

Messenger Publications, 37 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2www.messenger.ie

Printed in Ireland

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Copyright © Society of Jesus in Ireland

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Foreword ......................................................................... John Dardis SJ, Provincial ........................................ 5The Secret Scriptures of a Community ...................................... Brian Grogan SJ ........................................................ 6A History of the Three Houses ............................................... Fergus O’Donoghue SJ .............................................. 11A Gift for Reinvention .......................................................... Paul Andrews SJ ....................................................... 22Profiles of the Current Community Members ........................................................................................................35Profiles of the Current Staff .............................................................................................................................62Current Apostolates at Leeson Street .................................................................................................................66

AppendicesA. List of Community Members since 1909 ...........................................................................................................85B. Superiors of Leeson Street ...........................................................................................................................87C. The Celebration of the Centenary ...................................................................................................................88

Contents

Acknowledgements

The compilation of this record by the members of the Community has generated many memories and also much wit and humour. Thanks to all ‘friends in the Lord’, both Jesuits and others,

who have encouraged the project

To the contributors, all of whom have given of their time unstintingly

To the Jesuit Communication Centre and Sacred Space for their professional support and for the supplying of photographic material

To the staff of Messenger Publicationsfor their expertise in producing this book

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with the Leeson Street Community go back just twenty years to 1990, when we opened the Jesuit Communication Centre (JCC) there. Noel Barber was Superior and made us welcome as we started this fledgling Apostolate, which was soon to become quite important, not only in Ireland but across Europe and internationally. Since then, the Jesuit house in Leeson Street, formerly called a House of Writers, became also a House of Communications, hosting Studies, The Messenger, Timire, JCC, the Prayer website Sacred Space, and Religious News Network – RNN.

Visiting the community as Provincial over the past six years, it has always struck me how apostolically oriented and focused its members are. They appreciate the work that goes on and everybody is very involved in supporting it. St Ignatius, it has been said, loved the

big cities, and you more often find Jesuits not in the countryside but in urban areas. Leeson Street is a fine example of this kind of Jesuit spirituality. It is a typical Jesuit House, based in the city centre, close to the heart of civic and business life and witnessing to the values of the Gospel in a very busy world. Life outside the House by day can be frantic, while after hours night clubs and pubs provide plenty of social life.

In these times as we pray that many young men will join this Province to share our vision of service to the world, we are grateful for what has been achieved over the past century by the Leeson Street community. May this publication inspire us to imitate their generous service, and may the Lord work powerfully through us all to ensure a greater service of God’s people and the Church. n

ForewordJohn Dardis SJ

My LinkS

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contributions which follow the emphasis is on the external stories of the 148 Jesuits who have lived in Leeson Street over the past century: fragments of their lives have been gathered lest they be lost. But before we put this past century to bed to await the resurrection, there is another dimension which should not pass unnoticed.

In other words, besides the outer history which we have chronicled, there is the inner history of each of the persons who have lived here: the ‘secret scripture’ to borrow a marvellous phrase from Tom Kettle1 (photo p.25).

As the fox said to the Little Prince, the things that are essential are invisible to the eye, while Jesus speaks of God’s awareness and appreciation of what is done in

secret. We are mysteries to one another, and this is all the more so of those who have died and maintain their silence. Jesuits tend to be private persons. Much of our living is ‘in secret’ and we tend not to lay bare our souls. Thus, of many of the brethren who have gone before us we know much less than we would wish. We gather the fragments, but we are left to wonder what was truly important in the life of each. What made this or that person tick, what sustained him over the long years, what gave him joy or tempted him to desolation? We do not know because there are no private diaries that reveal the heart. The most we have are published writings and occasional portraits and incidental remarks that lay bare a heart. We must accept this limitation: Ignatius only reluctantly revealed

The Secret Scriptures of aBrian Grogan SJ

in THE

1. Sebastian Barry borrowed the phrase “secret scripture” for his novel of the same name from a wonderful sonnet of Tom Kettle, written just before he died on the Somme: “Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, / But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed, / And for the secret scripture of the poor.”

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his inner story, and then did so selectively, while the Gospels tell us little of the inner life of Jesus.

Vatican Two, however, affirms that people’s joys and sorrows, griefs and anxieties are the concern of the Church. It is right then to wonder about the inner lives of our brethren. We can be grateful to Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ, who lived down the road in Newman House from 1884 to 1889, teaching Classics in University College, Dublin: he gives us precious glimpses of his own private struggles, and in his sonnet on St Alphonsus Rodriguez he dares to peep into the heart of one of his brethren. He refers to the forty years without exploit or event during which this humble porter Rodriguez watched the door of the Jesuit residence in Majorca. This man’s war was not outside but within, and God crowned his secret struggles with glory.

Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shieldShould tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.On Christ they do and on the martyr may;But be the war within, the brand we wieldUnseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.

Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)Could crowd career with conquest while there wentThose years and years by of world without eventThat in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Community

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In the lives of our brethren also, exploits were few and they were controlled. The war was within. Limits were imposed by an unchanging order of things in the Church and the Society of Jesus prior to 1965. What did the brethren do when community recreation ended after midday dinner and the rule of silence reigned? Each climbed the stairs – the lift was installed only in 1959 – and closed his door. And then what? There were no distractions from TV or phone, computer or internet, films, gyms and cars; there was little pocket money or permission to travel. There was a coal fire to tend, letters to write, a bike to be mended, visits to be made, and these men studied, wrote, prepared lectures, did apostolic work and administered. Judging by the vast library which until recently occupied many rooms, they did far more reading than we do today.

Did time weigh heavily on them? Or did their contemplative dimension flourish more easily than perhaps it does in us? With fewer things to relish, perhaps they appreciated deeply what they had. There were hobbies to enjoy, illnesses to be endured, dreams to be dreamed. Did they pay less attention than we do to the world of inner emotions? ‘Feelings don’t count!’ remained a slogan well into the sixties, and affectivity had

yet to find its place. Relationships, female and male, were more formal and restricted then than now. Psychology was suspect, Freud was frowned on, as were Boyd Barrett’s efforts to promote experimental psychology: born in 1883 and author of Shepherds in the Mist, he felt compelled to leave the Jesuits after twenty years.

In those years which went by ‘of world without event’ when conformity was the norm, how much talent went untapped? Were some men frustrated? Did others feel useless? Moral pressure meant that one could hardly leave, even if unhappy, so what did a misplaced Jesuit do? Was Hopkins the only one who suffered depression? Speaking of the Jesuit dean at University College, Joyce’s Portrait remarks on the priest’s face, ‘…which seemed like an unlit lamp: what lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?’ How valid an observation was this? Were they instead content and at peace within?

And what did our neighbours think of us then? Perhaps we made no more impact on most of them than we do today. There are indeed ‘Angels’ right beside us now, but they inhabit a different world: they are lap-dancers. Our lives may be unintelligible to others, and

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we must let that be so. On TV some time ago a monk was asked to tell in thirty seconds what monastic life was about. His reply: ‘We fall down and we get up. We fall down and we get up. We fall…’ What did he manage to convey to his post-Christian audience? On Leeson Street, ‘distinguished by day, disreputable by night’, what impact do we have?

The hearts of our predecessors were set on God; that was what sustained them in the Jesuit way of life. Did they take for granted what we labour at – the conviction that God is first limitlessly in love with each of us? The Spiritual Exercises, which are at the heart of our life, were presented formally and impersonally until their renewal in the later sixties and seventies: Ernest Mackey SJ used to speak of their ‘inexorable logic’. But despite the

misplaced Jesuit emphasis prior to 1965 on meditation over mysticism, by grace these men fell in love with God and with Jesus Christ, engaged deeply in the struggle between sin and grace, and served generously without counting the cost. They loved the Church and its members, who were not until Vatican Two dignified with the title of ‘the People of God’. But in the wake of Modernism and the fate of George Tyrrell SJ – whose views resulted in his expulsion from the Society of Jesus and his excommunication, and whose centenary we also celebrate this year – our predecessors must have been confused about loving the world. Did they read in secret the writings of the progressive forerunners of Vatican Two who were running foul of Vatican orthodoxy, but if so did this reading leave them hopeful or frustrated?

Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ, 1844 ~ 1889

Alphonsus Rodriguez SJ, 1532 ~ 1617

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There must have been community tensions, hurts and opposing viewpoints on the ‘secular’ and ecclesiastical events of the day. Perhaps in their interactions there was a hint of truth in the quip, ‘You can tell an intellectual but you can’t tell him much!’

What was God making of them all? The French philosopher and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin was writing in the fifties about the two dimensions of our lives: our activities and our passivities, and the divinising of both. More recently the well-known poet and writer on Celtic spirituality, John O’Donohue, remarked that ‘beneath the veneer of our external lives, the eternal is at work.’ We may say then that God was engaged in the task of divinising these ordinary men, and was using the raw materials provided by life in all its obstinate reality to bring about this transformation.

Our brethren did indeed do much, yet the greater part of their lives ‘happened’ to them, as to us. The 1916 Rising would have upset them: they endured two world wars, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, though they were spared much by de Valera’s insistence on Irish neutrality. Their hearts would have lifted with the Eucharistic Congress in 1932 but sunk in face of the intellectual stagnation of the pre-Vatican Two Church. And so forth.

They must have struggled often with God and wondered about the value of their contribution to the scheme of things; but we may believe that they allowed God to take them over, they tried to find God in all things, and so enriched the world. A thought from the contemplative tradition comes to mind: What each one is interiorly, face to face with God, unknown to anyone, is of vital consequence to all; and every act of love, every act of faith and adoration, every mute uplifting of the heart, draws the whole world nearer to God. This is the ‘secret scripture’ that makes their lives worth our attention now and gives us a guiding star.

Life, says the Buddha, is difficult. It is monotonous too, but it is also interwoven with deep joy and occasional fun and hilarity. Through their quiet heroism and endurance our brethren now in glory played their assigned parts well in the great drama of salvation. They are now where God is, and they help us still, as we struggle with the loss of many things cherished: the decline in vocations, the death of many cherished apostolates, the malaises of the Irish Church, the demise of the Celtic Tiger. We owe them much, and are grateful to each and all of them. n

Brian Grogan SJ

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houses on Leeson Street Lower may belong to one religious order, but the personality of each house comes from its distinctive history. The three houses share some fundamental characteristics: built as family homes, in the same decade and following the plan we know as ‘Georgian’. The houses were built in the reign of William IV (King of England, 1830-37), whose wife’s name is recalled in Adelaide Road. They represent a late flowering of Georgian urban housing, with its emphasis on houses giving directly onto the street; Upper Leeson Street shows the first development of front gardens.

Georgian house interiors were not uniform, but our block on Leeson Street follows a particular pattern: each house has a broad entrance hall, giving onto an inner hall, with a staircase to the upper floors. Hall floors were important statements of the relationship of the house to

the public, with the front room as the parlour and the back room as the dining room. The first floor had two drawing rooms, connected by folding doors that could be opened for large functions. There was a convention that the chimneypieces on the hall floor should be of dark marble, whereas those in the drawing room are white marble. Given that there was no other source of heat in the house, chimneypieces were very important, because they surrounded fireplaces that needed constant care. They were bought out of catalogues, hence the close resemblance between our chimneypieces and those in the extension to Ardgillan Castle, in north County Dublin, which was built also in the 1830s. Fireplaces in the bedrooms were usually much simpler, but the sumptuousness of one chimneypiece, on the third floor of Number 35 suggests that others may have been sold

OUR THREE

Fergus O’Donoghue SJ Three Houses in Leeson Street

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off in more straitened times. Coal was delivered through coalholes on the street and kept outside the houses, thereby reducing both dust and the risk of fire. All of the fireplaces follow the Rumford plan, designed by the American traitor Baron von Rumford, which ensured that most heat went outward to the room and not up the chimney.

Coal was the only means of heating, so the air outside our houses was heavy with smoke and smuts during the colder months of the year. The air was also full of the smells and sounds of horses, because a mews was an essential part of any prosperous house, with stabling for the horses, room for the carriages and accommodation for the coachman and his family. The surviving mews of Number 35 has room for two carriages, which would have required six horses. The nearby Grand Canal was the most modern form of transport. Urban public transport, beginning with horse-drawn trams, soon followed by trains, was about to transform urban life and allow a massive expansion of Dublin, but the first occupants of our houses were not to know that, nor that the invention of gas lighting would make the interiors of their houses twenty times brighter than the candles to which they were accustomed. Amazingly, in 85 St. Stephen’s Green, there are still two functioning gas lamps, which would

have been used when it was the first home of what is now the Leeson Street Jesuit community.

Streets were dirty, hence the foot scrapers that survive outside many hall doors. Numbers 35 and 36 originally had two foot scrapers each, beside the hall doors. Streets were wide, but ill lit and, therefore, dangerous. Civil unrest was a constant fear of the propertied classes, as shown in the barred basement windows; the basement and hall floor doors of Number 35, on both street and garden sides, were so thick and had so many bolts that they could have withstood an attack. The basement areas in front of each house served not only for deliveries, and for services in general, but were also intended to keep any malefactors at a distance from the house.

Each house also had a yard, really another ‘area’, at the back, where the servants could work and get fresh air. A doorway and passageway from the hall floor to the garden steps allowed the family direct access to the garden, without having to pass through the servants’ yard. The gardens were long and narrow, with high walls separating them from their neighbours. A wall or garden also separated them from the mews.

So, servants and their employers were seen as living apart, but really lived very interconnected lives. There

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was no shortage of applicants when Dublin had 20,000 women and thousands of men in domestic service. Each house on Leeson Street had four or five servants, carefully graded according to their tasks. Employers who were reluctant to employ Catholics could use the Protestant Servants Employment Office, on this very street, which, if necessary, brought servants from Britain. Servants carried vast amounts of coal up the stairs (perhaps ninety-five steps from basement to top floor), cooked and served the meals, using the service door into the dining room, and cleaned, endlessly, in an era when city air was so polluted and when houses were full of heavy furniture, deep carpets and thick curtains. Commercial laundries made the washing of clothes much easier. The bell pushes, for summoning servants, were normally found on either side of the fireplaces and survive only in Number 37.

The most personal services that both employers and servants took for granted were the carrying of bathing water and the emptying of what were politely known as ‘slops’. In the 1830s, engineers discovered how to pump water upstairs in houses, but this was slow to spread. Water closets came later, but many households, like Number 35, had one or more lavatories in a walled yard at the back of the house. Our houses were about forty years old when people began building upstairs lavatories, usually in an addition accessible by one of the landings. Damp courses in newly built houses became compulsory only in the 1870s.

The second and third floors of the houses were private space, where the plasterwork on the ceilings was less flamboyant and where chimneypieces were plainer. The master bedrooms occupied the second floor; they were

LEFT: Detail of mantlepiece, number 35RiGHT: Entrance lobby, number 35FAR RiGHT: The garden in May

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