Resurrected Reverend – Frank McNally on the Irish priest who 'did a Reggie Perrin'

Irish Times

20 hours ago

Fans of the 1970s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin may recall that it gave a new name to a certain desperate stratagem used by people who need to reinvent themselves.
Despairing of his bland, suburban life, the hero stages an apparent drowning by leaving his clothes on a beach and disappearing. Thereafter, anyone faking suicide in this manner was said to have 'done a Reggie Perrin'.
But the tactic didn't start with Reggie, of course. Almost a century earlier, for example, a Catholic priest from Sligo had resorted to the same thing.
He too later turned up alive and well, in James Joyce's Ulysses among other places; although he had been rediscovered well before that and may have been Ireland's most notorious cleric by the time Joyce mentioned him.
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Born to a farming family in 1856, Thomas Connellan attended a seminary from the age of 13 and later Maynooth, before serving as a curate in the 1880s, first in Sligo, then Athlone.
A spell living in the diocesan palace, however, left him with a severe dislike for the bishop. And while preparing a sermon on transubstantiation one day, he realised he didn't believe the doctrine anymore.
For a time, he wrestled with his conscience, torn between wanting to quit the priesthood and his fear of causing scandal. Then one morning in September 1887, he left his clerical clothes in a boat on the Shannon, swam to the river bank, and changed into the secular outfit he had hidden.
Now dressed as a civilian, he made his way to Moate, caught a train to Dublin, and from there travelled to London, where he found work as a sub-editor on a newspaper. He later recalled: 'The load of suffering and care which I had carried for years remained with my clerical garb in the boat'.
In the meantime, his death had been assumed. 'The Melancholy Drowning of the Rev. T. Connellan, C.C. Athlone,' read one newspaper headline, while the Athlone Boards of Guardians adjourned a meeting in sympathy.
Connellan's reappearance in Sligo two years later caused 'a very great sensation', as the Daily Express put it. Not only was his still alive, he was now a Protestant, almost as dramatic a turn of events then.
Catholic sympathy gave way to outrage. And as the gloves came off on both sides, Connellan recovered from his earlier fear of scandal to become a zealot, more Protestant than many Protestants themselves, and a scourge of his former church.
The Connellan family reacted in different ways. Thomas's siblings also converted and left the area. Other relatives stayed but changed their name to 'Conlon'.
In the propaganda war that followed, Roscommon Herald publisher Jasper Tully led the prosecution, calling Connellan an 'apostate', deriding his 'sham' suicide, and running articles by a local priest who claimed that the conversion was motivated mainly by a desire for women.
Connellan dismissed the 'gutter eloquence' of Tully, which he said: 'glides off me as easily as summer rain off a duck's back'. He also turned the fake drowning to advantage, quoting the obituaries as evidence of his good character.
The ex-priest toured Britain and Ireland on a mission to expose not just the abuses of the Catholic church but also of a 'crypto-Catholic' tendency in Anglicanism. His lectures often caused riots, though he was warmly received in the Ulster bible belt, at least.
A typical letter to the Belfast Newsletter congratulated him on 'spreading the light in darkest Ireland' and compared the campaign against him to the one Martin Luther faced.
But Connellan could do calumny too. From 1891, his base of operations was at No. 51 Dawson Street Dublin, where he published a monthly newspaper called The Catholic, dedicated to ridiculing his former faith, exposing supposed scandals in the church, and evangelising.
This is where Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, fresh from lunch around the corner in Davy Byrne's, ruminates on religious conversion, including his own father's:
'Mr Bloom turned at Gray's confectioner's window of unbought tarts and passed the reverend Thomas Connellan's bookstore.
Why I left the church of Rome? Bird's Nest.
Women run him. They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same bait. Why we left the Church of Rome?'
The Bird's Nest was a Protestant missionary society in Kingstown. In Hans Walter Gabler's version of Ulysses, which corrected many supposed errors in the original, the full stop after its name is eliminated, so that the sentence reads: 'Bird's Nest women run him'. This somewhat changes the meaning, intended or not.
In a related vein, Connellan's anti-Catholic campaign peaked with a 1908 pamphlet
Scenes from Irish clerical life
, a semi-fictionalised account of sexual misbehaviour in the church, which according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, 'was considered prurient even by some supporters'.
Thereafter, his health declined and with it his attendance at public meetings. He continued to edit his newspaper until catching a fatal dose of flu in January 1917. This time, reports of his demise were not exaggerated. Although he had kept a low profile in later years, his death notice stressed he had not reverted to Catholicism.