On Friday, July 4th, 2008, the skies above this continent of North America will be illuminated in many places by floral explosions of splendid colors and interrupted with some sonic turbulence. All of this will evoke patriotic human amazement and frenetic canine astonishment. On the following day in the quiet of my native latitude, the air will not be much disturbed by a few words of homily from me at a Mass in Moyne, County Longford, where, former students of the famous “Latin School” (often simply called Moyne) will gather for a weekend of reunion and share Mass on Saturday. Colm Reilly from my parish, who is now Bishop of my home Diocese, will lead the Mass. There will be a sense of joy and gratitude to God in acknowledging all the past pupils of the famous little hedge-hatched school that closed in 1973. Some sadness too in acknowledging the great host who have gone to their rest “in the hope of rising again.” And there will be blessing on the lessening number, who darkened the doorways of “Moyne” long ago and are still brightening up the world with worthwhile lives and service. No one more worthy among “the Moyne men” than Monsignor John V. Sheridan, pastor emeritus of Our Lady of Malibu, California, who has been a light to all peoples since he came to Los Angeles, sixty-five years ago. He was born on December 19, 1914 in my Parish of St. Colmcille and there he was raised on one of the small farms that made up the townland of Corrickmaquirk, (Corrick), where his father Farrell Sheridan and his mother Brigid Kiernan raised their seven children.

As a boy I knew of the Sheridan’s of Corrick as a revered family in my locality. Somehow, I always had the feeling that the men of Corrick were sharp fellows at a fair, with that twinkle in the eyes and fun in the words. Our postman, Eugene “Stevie” Reilly was from Corrick and he lit up every lane he entered and every face he encountered with heart-lifting laughter. His words and his wit never waned. The visit with the bag and the bicycle was often more welcome than the letter or card. It is more than thirty years since the curtain-lids lowered on his dancing eyes.

Then I knew that humor is a name for God
The only touch that gets under the sod
Because the constant laughter in Stevie’s eyes
Said: “If clay can smile, the dead will rise”.

I’m glad that Stevie of Corrick doesn’t have to haul all the mail that comes to the doorstep of Sacred Heart Rectory, in Camden. Dealing with it, reminds me of the first sentence from Caesar’s Gallic Wars: “Gallia est omnis devisa in partes tres,” that we learned in the Latin School of Moyne. “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” I say: all mail is divided into three parts: a) Great – deserves a response c) Useless, deserves the round file on the floor. b) A bugger… not sure what it deserves, so it stacks up uselessly.

Now, the most treasured piece of mail I own, came to Sacred Heart in mid October, 1975. A postcard from Rome from my sister, Anna Mae Doyle, (Sister Mary Concepta, a Mercy nun.) with an amazing number of words on it – small and clear as a coin off the mint. On the other side – a picture of St. Oliver Plunkett, the halo wet on his head because only days before, Paul VI declared him a Saint on Sunday, October 12, 1975. He was the last catholic clergyman to be hauled from Ireland to Tyburn in London to be tried and executed for his faith. The year was 1681. He was 52 years old. In the eyes of the Irish people there was a halo on the Archbishop of Armagh long before the hangman slipped the noose on his neck, or the horses dragged his dead body in the streets harnessed to the hair on his head. In addition, his body, for good measure ( miserable measure) was chopped into pieces in the fiendish hatred of the times. But, his faithful followers eagerly began to seek his intercession before the blood dried on the stones.

Anna Mae Doyle, was sent to the canonization ceremony in Rome as the miracle of the Mercy Order in Ireland. She was cured after ten years of crippling pain from “ tired nerve endings” in her back that once confined her to bed for 18 months in an orthopedic hospital in Navan, County Meath, not far from the spot where Oliver Plunkett was born. Streams of prayers had flowed to him on her behalf and now she was walking and laughing in St. Peter’s Square with 200,000 people.

Her happiness that day was not more than the leaping joy in the heart of Msgr. John V. Sheridan. An amazing heart he has! It raced rapidly in the energy of a bright young fellow in the fields of Corrick, County Longford. It has been beating for 42 years in Malibu and before that, for 22 years in Los Angeles…all of the time in magnificent ministry to the people of California and far beyond. It has energized the wonderfully active mind that brought clear compassionate truth to people of the catholic religion, other religions or no religion. His teaching, by written word in books, newspapers and magazines, his teaching by regular radio word, by lecture word, by homily word, and indeed the engaging welcoming word of his body and being, call to mind what Peter the apostle, said: “ You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” ( 2 Peter 1, 19) He is still a living word… 93 years old on December 19, 2007. A miracle man. God bless him.
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He was 60 years old when Oliver Plunkett was canonized and he remembered well forty years before, when he spent 18 months in the hospital without a break, a month for every year of his young age. “I was 18 months in the hospital” he writes in “From Malibu, With Love” (1993). He became a morphine addict and spent another 18 months convalescing. He had completed his courses in the “Latin School” and a year and a half in St. John’s College in Waterford on the road to the priesthood when he was stricken. Then the prayers started to Oliver Plunkett. To him, “the hospital sisters, my parents and I were praying for a miraculous healing.” His disease was considered terminal.

“My initial disease was diagnosed as Tubercular Peritonitis with several complications including an acute intestinal obstruction. Surgery proved ineffective, but in the process my doctor was able to observe and gauge my actual condition.” He continues in his book, And When It Is Dawn, (a wonderful book from 1980), that deals with death, suffering, response to pain, hope in the face of death, the Hospice movement, the Resurrection as the focus of history, and many other associated ideas. No one could write it better than he. “I recall vividly the anguished face of my father and the padre as they told me that I was to die within three days. Both assured me: ‘try to offer up your young life to God’. I remember my father, a sensitive, sometimes melancholy man, saying: ‘You know, John, you are so much better off meeting God now and escaping, at His call, a lot of life’s hardships. Their faith, sincerity and love literally transformed and disposed me for human life’s most radical decision”. Yet, “I was stunned, I was disbelieving, I was questioning, but I accepted. I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. An old nun, (who died on the Monday before his canonization) began a novena of prayer to Oliver Plunkett for my recovery and through 18 months of the hospital and 3 years with punctured intestine, to the supreme bafflement of many doctors, I recovered.”

John was less than 90 pounds when he returned to his home in Corrick to feel again his mother’s welcome to that house with its open door to all the neighbors and friends.

The thumbs of youth wore her latch
For the hearth and the chair and the chat inside.

The turf fire with its warmth and its circle of companionship has infused the spirit of John Sheridan ever since. He soon set out again on the road to the priesthood, going back to St. John’s where the students were astounded to see him, after they had prayed for a happy death. With his doctor’s guidance and a bishop’s help he was accepted in the archdiocese of Los Angeles and ordained in St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, on April 2, 1943. After all these years, the fire is still in him in every sense of that enlightened word. These lines from Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, which I learned in the Latin School, could have been written for John Sheridan :

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be thou my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophesy!

Shelley’s search was social revolution ; Sheridan’s vision was human transformation.

Who can fathom the mystery of God’s loving design! On November 6th 1975, twenty-five days after the canonization of Oliver Plunkett, Anna Mae Doyle died after being hit by a car as she emerged from a church near Virginia, County Cavan. She was 38. The driver, with only one windshield wiper working, didn’t see her walking in the rain. “Where there is no vision, the people perish “ Her whole life was a heroic yes to God. The car that killed her was a fiat – a word we learned in the Latin School.

Best Wishes to John V. Sheridan of Malibu, to all the pupils of Moyne, to you and to all the world.

Sincerely, Michael J. Doyle.

Father John Meehan, another gentleman and first class teacher, got me interested in English Literature for which I have never lost my taste. He came before Kearney was appointed to a parish. Ed Boylan, the tough kind of Irish teacher, joined Fr. Meehan. Boylan was deliberately rough, rough as the “country lads” he was pledged to “inform” in the Classics, a good teacher and a radical change from poor Kearney who had taught in Brooklyn’s Jr. Seminary for three or four years. John Meehan was a born scholar who both during and on his return from World War (France) read extensively in European literature.

The same “University of Moyne” James Morris of Fyhora and one of our California pioneering Irish Missionary priests, used to insist that Moyne Latin School and its wider Dromard Community was a modern version of the early Irish monastic settlements which included not only the monks, priests, and sometimes, the nuns, but the families in the area of the monastery; they all joined in the Masses, prayers, devotions.

So, Moyne was not just the Latin School but the Community. And the Moyne community was not only a “levitical community” as Bishop McNamee once described it; but an ecclesial community. I talked to John McNamee about this and he seems to agree with it.

Written by John V. Sheridan

Msgr. John V. Sheridan is at Our Lady of Malibu in California (both he and Michael Doyle are Moyne men from the parish of St. Colmcille, County Longford). John Sheridan was born on December 19, 1914 and ordained on April, 1943. Michael Doyle said “He is a great man.”

Not even the marvels of a modern website like this one can capture the memories of the first experience of education beyond National School for hundreds of young people that took them from their native places to an unforgettable school in Moyne, County Longford. Their many-layered memories still live in Ireland or in the new lands to which some have gone in one of the great Diasporas of modern times. It is hoped that this modern technological marvel will help renew the spirits of the young lads who took up the books at any time in “The Latin School”. The school’s official name was St. Mary’s Apostolic School.  It is still called the Latin School even as it wonderfully serves the region as a Community Center.

Among the unforgettable experiences of Moyne’s past pupils, is their first exposures to “The Classics” – sometimes secretly aided by copies of “Kelly’s Key to the Classics” found in secondhand bookshops in Dublin if they were lucky enough to get there. Some past pupils will remember Virgil’s Aeneid (VI, 313): “Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum. Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore”. (“So, they all stood, each praying to be ferried across first; their hands stretched out in longing for the further shore.”) 

Plans for a reunion started when members of the Class of 1958, “stretching out in longing” to renew an unforgettable time and place of their youth, talked about a 50^th anniversary reunion. Soon, contact with other past pupils made it clear that many would like to join in.  So the organizers decided on a General Reunion of all past pupils, embracing and inviting anyone who ever attended the School. A recent news item in the Longford Leader reveals the plans for the reunion. The American based organizers of the Latin School Moyne reunion, Pat Brady, John McNamee and JJ Smyth, class of 1958, have begun the countdown towards the grand reunion that will take place on 4th July to 6th July, 2008 and which will include all those who were ever students in the school. A general “Meet and Greet” is scheduled for Friday night July 4 in the Breffni Arms Hotel, Arva. On Saturday, July 5, the reunion will include afternoon visits to the Old Latin School, individual class reunions and a 5.30 PM Mass in St Mary’s Church, Moyne led by Bishop Colm O’Reilly.  A general meeting and dinner will be held at the Breffni Arms, Arva, on Saturday at 7PM. The dinner will require reservations which are available on a first come, first served basis; spouses and guests are welcome. The dinner cost is 20 euros per person and must be prepaid to the Breffni Arms Hotel. Rooms are also available at the hotel on a first come first served basis. ‘Phone 049 4335127, fax 049 4335799, e-mail breffniarms@hotmail.com. Sunday July 6 will be open ended for individual, group and family plans.

“We are all making history as we live and our own way of living will be a source of interest and curiosity to those who come after us”. These words appear on the dust cover of James P. MacNerney’s From the Well of St. Patrick: Dromard Parish, Co. Longford (2000). In some small way, it is hoped that the 2008 Reunion of Moyne’s past pupils will be a source of interest – and inspiration – to those who once attended it. Accommodating John Locke’s words “The Exile’s Return”, it is hoped that many exiles will return in July to visit “the vale and the cot they were born in” and from their heart of hearts, they will say, at least symbolically, to one another: “I bid you the top of the morning”.

The Class of 1958: There were fourteen who “did the Leaving” in 1958: Gerry Brady, Pat Brady, Kevin Gormley, Eamon Hourican, Matt McGauran (RIP), Seamus McKeon, Frank McLoughlin, John J. McNamee, Tommy McTiernan, Seamus Mulligan, Alphonsus Reilly, Paddy Reilly (RIP), JJ Smyth and Seamus Sorohan,.