Fr Vincent Stapleton writes to Fr Maurice McKenraghty

Fr Vincent Stapleton

MOST ILLUSTRIOUS FR. MAURICE MCKENRAGHTY

Dear Fr. Maurice,
I write to you at this time with a strange request. Please know that I hold you in the highest esteem, so don’t take this the wrong way. I am wondering if you could, in some heavenly way, give me an indication of where you happen to be buried.

My confusion began last Friday. I had read the inspiring account of your life in the book released by former president, Mary McAleese, entitled ‘The 17 Irish Martyrs.’ Of course, you are one of the seventeen, beatified in 1992. Born in Kilmallock, into a family that was loyal to the Earls of Desmond, you ended up as chaplain to Gerald Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond – a shady man – whose rebellion against the crown forces ultimately led to your own martyrdom. Politics or fighting wasn’t your thing, Fr. Maurice. You were a pastor at heart who wanted to minister to the people. But politics had infected the religion of that time, as often happens, and you were arrested by the Earl of Ormond’s troops and imprisoned in Clonmel.

Ormond gave orders that you were to be interrogated “by fayr or fowle means” to open “the secretes of your heart.” While you languished in prison, the faithful people came to the grill of your jail cell. They were not allowed to celebrate the sacraments in post- reformation penal Ireland. You heard confession and absolved many from behind the bars.

A merchant named Victor White bribed the jailor in Clonmel to allow you to be brought out one night for Easter, to celebrate Mass in his house so that his family and friends could fulfil their Easter Duty. The jailor betrayed the secret Mass but you were a crafty one – you managed to hide in a stack of hay and kept quiet even when your thigh was pierced with a bayonet.

Unfortunately, other attendees did not fare so well. Victor White now found himself in prison. He was threatened with death unless he revealed the priest’s location but he refused. That was when you, Fr. Maurice, showed your mettle. You came out of hiding and gave yourself up to save your brother.

The authorities did everything in their power to get you to renounce the Mass and the faith. You didn’t budge an inch. You were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered without trial. You made your way to the scaffold amid jeering mobs. From the scaffold you urged the faithful present to remain true to God and to the Catholic Church and to remember you in their prayers.

This brings me at last to Friday. I read in the book that you were buried in the local Franciscan Friary in Clonmel, behind the high altar of the Friary which was then closed by Government decree. Last Friday was the last day that the Friary was opened in Clonmel after over 700 years of Franciscan presence in the town. So, I rushed down in my car to investigate and see if there was any sign of you there. I searched high and low and even asked one of the Friars but there was nothing.

Only outside the Church of St. Peter and Paul in the town is there a stone which bears the names of the three Martyrs who died in Clonmel – Maurice McKenraghty 1585, John Kearney OFM 1653 & William Tirry OSA 1654.

There is one reference from 1907 that states that your body may have been moved to the Franciscan Friary in Askeaton but I haven’t had a chance to follow that up yet.

It seems we have forgotten a huge amount about you and the other martyrs who died in those desperate times out of love for the faith. It reminds me of the George Santayana quote that is displayed in Auschwitz – “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I hope that we can recover our devotion to those who paid such a high price to pass on the pearl of faith.

A native of Borrisoleigh, Fr Vincent Stapleton is curate in Thurles parish and is Rector of St Joseph and St Brigid’s Church, Bóthar na Naomh, Thurles.