page_title: Patrick Augustine Sheehan
section_title: Maynooth years
hierarchical_section_title: Patrick Augustine Sheehan / Maynooth years
caption_attribution_description: English: Patrick Augustine Sheehan, at the time of his ordination
context_page_description: Patrick Augustine Sheehan was an Irish Catholic priest, author and political activist. He was usually known as Canon Sheehan after his 1903 appointment as a canon of the diocese of Cloyne, or more fully as Canon Sheehan of Doneraile, after the town of Doneraile where he wrote almost all of his major works and served as parish priest.
context_section_description: After St Colman's, he passed through "the sphinx-guarded gates", as he called them, of St. Patrick's College Maynooth College in County Kildare on 25 August 1869, to prepared for the priesthood. Although he never shone in the spartan Maynooth regime, he was a brilliant student who, despite recurring illness, succeeded in completing his studies a year before he was old enough to be ordained. Transferred by his guardian, Bishop John McCarthy of Cloyne, to the seminary of the Vincentian Fathers in Sundayswell in Cork, he was ordained to the priesthood in the Cathedral of St. Mary and St. Anne at Cork, on Sunday, 18 April 1875 by Bishop William Delany. It is believed that he celebrated his first Mass in the chapel of the Convent of Mercy in Mallow.
  In his essay "The Irish Priesthood and Politics" Sheehan gives a succinct description of his time in Maynooth: "I remember well that the impression made upon me by Maynooth College then, and afterwards, when I saw its long, stone corridors, its immense bare stony halls, the huge massive tables etc., was one of rude Cyclopean strength, without one single aspect or feature of refinement. So too with its studies. Rentless logic, with its formidable chevaux-de-frise of syllogisms, propositions, scholia; Metaphysics, sublime, but hardened into slabs of theories, congealed in medieval Latin; Physics, embracing a course that would have appalled a young Newton or Kepler; and then the vast shadow of four years' Divinity towering above and over-shadowing all!". The Maynooth literature course was hardly any better:  "The Graces were nowhere! Even in the English literature or Belles-Lettres class, as it was called, the course seemed to be limited to hard grinding Grammar, and nothing more.  During the first semestre, a few lectures were given on literature. All I can ever remember of that period were the words 'Lake Poets', which the good professor was forever repeating".
  In January 1870, Fr. O'Rourke, the Professor of French and English, whom Sheehan describes as a "very gentle, polished man", was obliged to leave the College and go abroad for health reasons.  He was replaced by Fr. James J. Murphy (1841-1875), a young priest of the archdiocese of Dublin, who was then just finishing his postgraduate research on the Dunboyne Establishment.  Sheehan regarded him as "one of the most remarkable, if not one of the most distinguished, students that ever passed through Maynooth".  To the "young hero-worshippers, sick and tired of logic-chopping, and the awful dullness of the morning classes, he came as a herald of light and leading".
  Swiftly, he opened to their "wondering eyes the vast treasures of European and, particularly, of English literature".  It was at his feet that Sheehan first heard the names of Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning.
caption: Sheehan, at the time of his ordination, 1875
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