Tipperary Stories: Just who was Archbishop Patrick Leahy?

For many people who visit the Cathedral of the Assumption in Thurles, the statue of Archbishop Patrick Leahy was something that has always just been there.

But not too many understood the significance of it. And it was not until that fateful day in 2019 when the statue of the former Archbishop of Cashel and Emly was vandalised and the head removed that people actually took serious notice of it.

Thankfully, the statue has now been restored, the coverings removed, and Archbishop Leahy is now to be seen again by everyone who comes in the gates of the Cathedral Church he committed to building for the Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly.

Family

But just who was Archbishop Patrick Leahy, and why should his statue occupy so significant a location in the Cathedral of the Assumption?

He is also buried in the Cathedral, having passed away on January 26, 1875 at the age of 69.
Patrick Leahy was born on May 31, 1806 in the townland of Fennor, and was baptised in the parish of Gortnahoe. He was the eldest among four sons of Patrick Leahy, surveyor, and his wife Margaret (née Cormack), who was from Gortnahoe.

There were five daughters in the family also and one of those girls unfortunately died young.

In 1834 Patrick’s father was appointed first county surveyor of the East Riding of Cork and of Cork City.

With his younger son Edmund Leahy (1813?–1888), Patrick Leahy built up an important private practice, but was involved with generally unsuccessful schemes, projecting several railway lines in Munster.

In 1846, father and son were dismissed from their official positions on grounds of negligence and fraud, and Patrick senior died in 1850 at the Cape of Good Hope.

Edmund and two younger brothers, Denis and Matthew Leahy, went on to have chequered careers as public works superintendents, railway projectors, and surveyors in England, Turkey, Africa, and the Caribbean. Edmund, curiously, ended his career as manager of Finsbury Turkish baths, in London, and died in an accident on a railway line.

A man of faith

By contrast, the future Archbishop seemed to have always been intended for the priesthood.
He was educated at a classical day school in Thurles and at the Free School in Clonmel before entering St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in August 1826. Ordained a priest for the Diocese of Cashel in June 1833 at Maynooth College, he was posted as curate to Knocklong and then Thurles (1833–7).

He was appointed Professor of Theology in St Patrick's College, Thurles, when it opened in September 1837, and by late 1838 also held the office of college President.

Fr Leahy was also secretary to Archbishop Michael Slattery and was very well got within the church hierarchy.
The boarding and day college at St Patrick’s, Thurles expanded in the early 1840s but suffered as the number of applicants fell during the later famine years.

Consequently, Fr Leahy’s principal administrative aims from 1848 to 1857 were to raise sufficient funds to keep doors open and to restore student numbers. In May 1849, he negotiated terms for college affiliation with the University of London.

Hosting the Synod of Thurles in August 1850 represented a coup for the college and diocese. Fr Leahy acted as Honorary Secretary to the Synod and won the approval of Archbishop Paul Cullen for his great work.

This led, in early 1851, to his induction on to the organising committee of the proposed Catholic University of Ireland.

He took the position of Professor of Theology and Vice-Rector of the university under the future Cardinal John Henry Newman when it was established in May 1854.

While resident in Dublin (1854–7), he continued to be Archbishop Slattery's confidant, supporting the archbishop, for example, in his efforts to preserve the custom of the Stations of the Cross in Munster parishes.

Fr Leahy deplored the way Archbishop Cullen went about diocesan changes as ‘checking and checkmating ... the bishops ... by secret, unseen, underhand means’ (Kerr, 205).

It says much for Fr Leahy's tact that despite his privately expressed views on Archbishop Cullen, it transpired that he was to be his choice for the archbishopric on the death of Archbishop Slattery in February 1857.

A rocky start

Fr Leahy had been made eligible for the office in January that year when he had been promoted Parish Priest of Cashel.

Taking most of the votes at the electoral meeting of clergy in Thurles (March 27, 1857), he was commended to Propaganda by the assembly of bishops some weeks later and elected Archbishop of Cashel on 27 April and consecrated on June 29.

That month, he was plunged into an archiepiscopal conflict over plans to reform the administration of the Irish College in Paris.

At first trying to mediate between Archbishop Cullen and the recalcitrant Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, he was not afraid to scold Archbishop Cullen for attempts to settle the Paris dispute behind the backs of the other bishops.

During his early years in the episcopacy Archbishop Leahy took a pragmatic view of the system of national education, successfully neutralising the impact on church policy of the rejectionist views of Archbishop MacHale and the bishops of the Tuam province, arguing that it was wisest to ‘use [national education] as best we can, for want of better, for fear of worse’ (Norman, 55).

One of his first acts at diocesan level was to introduce an ordinance requiring the Sunday closure of public houses.

Despite the ridicule of many of his lower clergy, he persisted over the next decade in attempting to get up a local temperance campaign and working to have a Sunday closing act passed in parliament.

Though supported by local magistrates the results of his campaign were not spectacular.

By 1868, he had recognised that the chance of getting legislation to his liking through parliament was remote.

The election of a coadjutor for Daniel Vaughan, Bishop of Killaloe 1851–9, was carried through its initial stages by Archbishop Leahy in early 1858, under Vatican instruction, in the teeth of protests by diocesan clergy that the agreed procedures of consultation were being set aside.

Though he permitted an informal ballot of clergy as a gesture towards maintaining the traditional Irish way of selecting clergy, Archbishop Leahy’s influence brought about the appointment of Fr Michael Flannery, who had received only enough votes to be in fourth place on the clergy’s list.

Process

During the rest of his archbishopric, Archbishop Leahy accepted the form of the Irish tradition of the clerical terna (ratified by a Vatican decree of 1829), though he sometimes betrayed the spirit of the process.

In late 1860 Propaganda queried the fairness of a Cashel episcopal report on candidates for Coadjutor Bishop of Limerick, though Archbishop Leahy’s choice of the Rev. George Butler (1815–86) was eventually confirmed.

Speaking at the opening meeting of the National Association in late December 1864 in Dublin, Archbishop Leahy welcomed the new organisation and advanced a relatively uncontentious plan of tenurial reform to be recommended to parliament, arguing that it was periodically necessary for the higher clergy to take part in politics ‘to ask for justice for a long-suffering people’ (quoted in Larkin, 1860–70, 305).

By far the most regular attender at committee meetings during the 1860s, he continued to advocate the cause of the National Association at all Tipperary elections through to its demise in 1873.

Despite the appeals of William J O’Neill, a friend and correspondent, he withheld his support from the Home Government Association, assuming that it was made up largely of Protestant radicals unsympathetic to the interests of the Catholic Church.

He was capable, however, of carrying on discussion with the evangelical Liberation Society of London during the mid 1860s in the search for allies in the campaign against the Church of Ireland’s established status.

Politics

Archbishop Leahy held somewhat more nationalist views than most of his colleagues in the mid-Victorian Irish Catholic hierarchy, but even so he was interested in a strictly limited nationalism, with its aims confined largely to the achievement of what he saw as the just demands of the Catholic Church, particularly in the matter of education.

While he might express sympathy for Fenian prisoners during the amnesty movement of 1868–72, he moved ruthlessly to quieten ‘Fenian’ clerics in his jurisdiction.

By the later 1860s his hopes for the realisation of a fully fledged Catholic university were vested in Gladstone’s liberal party.

As one of two nominees representing the Irish bishops between 1866 and 1868, during protracted negotiations with the Tory Party on the content of university legislation, he was humiliated by the Tory volte-face in 1869.

His main concern in the early 1870s was to prevent lay Catholic initiatives on the university question from getting a serious hearing in parliament, lest the wishes of the Irish hierarchy be brushed aside.

In 1869, the caucus of Irish bishops nominated Archbishop Leahy to the committee of the Deputatio de Fide on the first Vatican Council, and he was in Rome from December 1869 to July 1870. A devotee of papal infallibility, he was among those promoting an early vote on the doctrine, fearing that opposition might gather force with time.

Initially, averse to defining infallibility, he changed his mind by May 1870 when he delivered, unscripted, ‘one of the most clear, solid and luminous speeches’ of the Council (Larkin, 1870–74, 15). Archbishop Cullen felt that he and Archbishop Leahy had overthrown the arguments of Archbishop MacHale at every point, greatly enhancing the prestige of the Irish contribution to the proceedings.

More objective observers judged that Archbishop Leahy's speech had outdone any of Archbishop Cullen's pronouncements.

Cathedral

By 1874, the new Lombardo-Romanesque Cathedral at Thurles, regarded by critics at the time of its inception in late 1865 as an archiepiscopal vanity project, was more or less completed.

By means of astute and energetic fund-raising campaigns, in Munster and abroad, Archbishop Leahy ensured that the

Cathedral, which cost £45,000, was virtually paid for by the time it was ready for use.

Criticism in the diocese was thus effectively silenced. By the 1870s, Archbishop Cullen’s early anxiety that Archbishop Leahy

might prove indolent in office had been dispelled.

During the course of his archbishopric, Archbishop Leahy acted as a buffer between a dictatorial Archbishop Cullen and a wary episcopate, and retained the respect of both sides.

Death

He died January 26, 1875 at his palace in Thurles and is buried in the Cathedral of the Assumption.

The statue to Archbishop Leahy was erected in the grounds of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Thurles in 1911, and it stood as a welcome to all who entered the gates of the magnificent place of worship.

However, in June 2019, much to the horror of the people of Thurles, the current Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, Kieran O’Reilly, the local clergy and all who visited the Cathedral, in an act of vandalism, the head of the statue of Archbishop Leahy was removed.

A lengthy Garda investigation was initiated, but the head of the statue was never recovered, and those responsible were never brought to justice.

But, the story has had a happy ending, and there was great joy just before Christmas when Archbishop Kieran had the honour of blessing the restored statue following the annual parish Carol Service.

While the whole episode of the vandalism and subsequent Garda investigation caused a lot of upset, on a positive note, it did highlight the role of Archbishop Leahy in the building of the Cathedral of the Assumption and helped to introduce him to the people of the Archdiocese many years after he had gone to his Maker.