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 To us F.B.D. (Florida Before Disney) locals, who were here in the Sunshine State during the boom of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the Irish priests and sisters were: steadiness, reliability, great fun, great severity, and the pillars who built the Catholic Church in Florida on solid rock.
To the Irish missionaries, we Floridians were: invigorating, enthusiastic, sponges eager to soak up knowledge of the faith, and pioneers in our own right. But Florida was not just warm sunshine and palm trees swaying in the breezes.
Ask Father Bill Ennis, who arrived at the rectory of Assumption Parish in Jacksonville direct from his flight from Ireland, one rainy night in September, 1964.
Within 15 hours, he was thrust in front of 35 sophomore boys (including your humble reporter) at Bishop Kenny High School. Perching, cool-priest style, on top of the front of an unoccupied student desk, he asked his new charges, “Have you hord (Irish for heard) of the Beatles over here?”
The students had no chance to reply to Father Ennis’ male-bonding overture, as their new teacher was flying head over heels and being unceremoniously dumped on the classroom floor by cruel Florida gravity.
“Can I take that as a Yes?” he asked dusting off his trousers and his pride.
Father Ennis howls with laughter at the still-fresh memory. Thus began the glamour of my missionary adventure, he says. Who could forget a first day like that? It was a wonderful parable of lofty dreams and the Lord’s down-to-earth challenges.
His parishioners in Holy Family Parish in Orlando say he’s never lost that down-to-earth quality, and that sentiment is echoed by the thousands of people Father Ennis has ministered to over the years – in Jacksonville, Sanford, and Deland.
His life these past 36 years has been a reflection of the lives of hundreds of Irish priests and sisters who left familiar surroundings and family for the adventure, and the pain, of growing a church by the sweat of their brows.
One such group is the Irish Mercy Sisters (aka the RSMs) at Sacred Heart Parish, Jacksonville. Msgr. Leo Danaher, 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.
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