Catalpa rescuers and Fenian priest to be honoured

More than 150 years after six imprisoned Irish revolutionaries slipped from the grasp of the British penal system in one of the nineteenth century’s most daring rescues, Ireland is preparing to honour the men who made their freedom possible.

In 1876, the Fenian prisoners escaped aboard the American whaling ship Catalpa, which sailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a secret mission known to only a few. Key to the plot, as history records reflect, was Cavan curate and Loch Gowna native Fr Patrick McCabe.

On September 19, a new memorial plaque commemorating the planners, rescuers and escapees of the Catalpa rescue will be unveiled at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery.

For organisers, the ceremony will give permanent national recognition to a story spanning three continents - from Ireland to the British penal colony of Western Australia and across the Atlantic to the United States.

George Thomas McLaughlin, founder and director of the Fenian Memorial Committee of America, has spent years campaigning to ensure the men are remembered.

He tells the Celt that Fr McCabe played a “heroic” role in the network that helped Irish revolutionaries escape British captivity.

Among those he helped was John Boyle O’Reilly, who had no known Cavan connection but whose life reads like an adventure novel. After reaching freedom in the United States, O’Reilly reinvented himself as an influential Irish-American poet, journalist, author and activist.

As editor of the Boston newspaper The Pilot, through his books and poetry, and on lecture tours across America, he became a prominent voice among Irish Americans.

McCabe’s own journey was equally extraordinary. After his involvement in the Fenian escape network, he eventually travelled from Australia to the United States. With the assistance of Archbishop John Ireland, he settled in Minnesota.

There, far from the political storms of Ireland and Australia, he became parish priest of St Mary’s, serving predominantly Irish immigrant farmers in the countryside outside Waseca. He died there and was buried at St Mary’s.“There were many people involved in the Catalpa story and in the wider Fenian movement who have not been remembered simply because we don’t know about them,” Mr McLaughlin said.

“You can’t remember people when their place in our collective memory has disappeared. That’s why remembering these men is so important.”

Mr McLaughlin credits the committee’s donors and supporters with making the new memorial possible, and pays tribute to the National Graves Association, Dublin, for providing the plot for the memorial cenotaph during its centenary year.

The September ceremony will feature Sean Whelan, chairman of the National Graves Association, Dublin, and Mr McLaughlin. The main oration will be delivered by author John Crawley.

While researching Fr McCabe, Mr McLaughlin travelled to Ireland and began tracing people connected with the priest’s family and parish, including a religious sister who turned out to be a distant relative.

A chance meeting with Sr Maeve Brady opened the door to further research and eventually led to photographs of the old McCabe family homestead and other material documenting the priest’s life.

The story became even more personal.

The Minnesota community where Fr McCabe served was the hometown of the woman Mr McLaughlin would eventually marry.

His wife Anne knew nothing of Fr McCabe’s history - or of the stained-glass window from the original St Mary’s mission church, where the priest had served. The window was preserved after the old church was demolished and later incorporated into a new chapel in Waseca.“She’d been looking at a memorial to Father McCabe all those years attending Mass without knowing the extraordinary story behind it.”

For Mr McLaughlin, the coincidence was impossible to ignore.“I felt almost as if I had been given a responsibility to make sure Father McCabe was properly remembered,” he said.