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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2014 23:18:37 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 12, 2014 20:38:45 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 29, 2015 19:34:30 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 30, 2015 8:16:05 GMT
Side point regarding the gravestones in Maynooth College cemetery - there haven't been too many recent burials there as in the past twenty years, retired priests moved out of the college to nursing homes where their surviving family are and have been buried there. Also, retired professors have been denied residency in Maynooth too in the same period (it didn't affect retired priests already resident. Father Casey and Mgr Corish are among the last priests to be buried there, and I note mistakes in the Latin in both cases. The bulk of priests buried are given the title "R.D." The r is reverend, but it doesn't relate to the comparison, as it differs from priest to priest. D stands for dominus. Now Mgr Corish should have been R.D., but calling Father Casey "R.D." is incorrect. As a member of a religious order, here the Dominicans, he should have been R.P., p being "pater" or father. Dominus on the otherhand is "Mr", though most of the Maynooth clergy obviously would have been professors and doctors. English is one of the few major languages which doesn't differentiate between secular and regular clergy in this way, but the official Latin designation does.
Oh, as far as I'm aware all the headstones there are in Latin.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 1, 2015 20:49:39 GMT
Responding to the sidepoint: Mgr Corish's burial at Maynooth must have been by his own request, since I know that he moved out of Maynooth to a nursing home sometime before his death. His History of Maynooth closes with a description of visiting the graveyard and seeing the staff of previous years - company men and mavericks - united at last. This is quite remarkably moving. Refusing to allow retired staff-priests to live in the College and doing away with the custom of burying them at Maynooth seems to me to undermine the sense of the college as a cross-generational body which persists over time and in which the living are joined to the dead. (Admittedly, I suspect this has not been strong at times given the number of staff -especially in the later C19 - who went on to be bishops or to hold other positions.) I expected that the headstones would follow the same pattern that is often seen in priests' graves around a church; the older graves are inscribed in Latin, the newer ones in English.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 2, 2015 8:25:47 GMT
The whole question was one of expense - the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul ran the infirmary in Maynooth, but could no longer staff it due to falling vocations. In the 1990s, a business ethic took hold of the college administration and it was decided not to allow retired priests maintain their rooms in the college (it didn't affect those already retired such as Mgr Cremin). Mgr Ó Fiannachta was the first affected, and he took an appointment in the Kerry diocese. Later on retired priests in the college began moving to nursing homes. Unusually, Mgr O'Donnell who was president between Mgr Ledwith and his relative Mgr Farrell, died in office. But he wasn't buried in the college cemetery; Mgr O'Donnell was a native of Maynooth, but as he went to St Mary's in Galway, he was a priest of the Galway diocese. He was buried in the parish cemetery in Maynooth, which is probably unique in the history of the college. But as the older men moved out to nursing homes and got buried elsewhere and the mortality rate among clerical students almost vanished (I am only aware of a few student deaths in the past decade; one was a road casuality; another a heart attack of a late vocation), the cemetery is no longer used and Mgr Corish's burial was the exception.
The deceased clerical students have their ages given in Roman numerals, in addition to Latin inscriptions. Seeing XVIII or XIX so often is tragic.
There are headstones in English in the cemetery though - the nuns and lay staff that worked in the college have headstones in English.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 25, 2015 19:52:00 GMT
Odd example of how conditions change - I had thought of the cemetery as being only for staff but of course in the past (C19 especially) many of the students died during their studies. I know of visiting British cabinet ministers in the mid-Victorian period who compared conditions to Dotheboys Hall (the oppressive school in Dickens' NICHOLAS NICKLEBY) - not blaming the college authorities, but simply noting that the funding for anything better wasn't there. The late Victorian architectural triumphalism which produced the spire and the college chapel was partly a reaction against those recent memories.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 22, 2016 22:16:56 GMT
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