KIMMAGE MANOR, the Irish headquarters of the Holy Ghost missionary society, now known as the Spiritans, is celebrating its centenary this year. Oddly enough the well-known colleges founded by the society, Blackrock, Rockwell and St Mary’s are much older. But it took many years for the Irish Spiritans to secure the desired autonomy from the French mother house in Paris.
The sign of this new status for the Irish province was the purchase in 1911 of Kimmage Manor and 69 acres of good land stretching over Templeogue and Terenure as well as Kimmage. The annual rent was only £147. “That amount of land near Dublin is a regular goldmine,” commented the then Superior of Rockwell. A French priest wrote that the house was “a magnificent chateau in the best state of preservation.” Kimmage Manor is still a striking building dating back to the 18th century and remodelled in the 19th century in Tudor style with high triangular gables and spiral turrets.
The Spiritans were now in a position to start training Irish students to be missionaries especially in Nigeria then a British colony. There is an interesting connection between Kimmage Manor and Nigeria which predates the Spiritans’ arrival. While the house was occupied in the 19th century by Sir Frederick Shaw, Recorder of Dublin, a legal office, his grand-daughter Lady Flora Shaw used to come there for holidays.
She became a journalist and colonial editor of the London Times. It was she who suggested the name Nigeria for what was then called the Royal Niger Company Territories. She later married the first governor general of Nigeria, Sir Frederick Lugard, and went to live there to be followed eventually by hundreds of Irish missionaries from Kimmage. In 1970 there was a reverse movement when many Irish Spiritans were expelled from the break-away Biafra by the federal government.
The history of the historic house up to the present day is now recounted by Fr Patrick Ryan, CS Sp in a new book, Kimmage Manor. 100 Years of Service to Missionpublished by Columba Press. While the numbers of vocations grew steadily until the 1960s, there were occasional tensions with the Paris mother house which believed that the Irish province was more oriented to educating the sons of the Irish middle classes than providing badly needed missionaries in Africa.
Fr Ryan has unearthed sharp exchanges between Paris and Kimmage with the mother house reproaching the Irish province with being over-concerned with educating “the rich and the prosperous” while other mission societies such as the Mill Hill and the Columbans were providing more missionaries without having any secondary schools.
The Irish province had serious accommodation problems and Kimmage Manor was turning out to be inadequate for training the future missionaries. In fact it could only provide a novitiate for new entrants and not the larger quarters for the studies in philosophy and theology. These students had to be farmed out to buildings in Blackrock and St Mary’s and it was not until 1938 that they could return to Kimmage where new quarters had been built following a national fund-raising campaign.
The 1940s and 1950s were such boom years for vocations that a further wing had to be added, making Kimmage the biggest missionary college in Ireland. The criticism that the colleges were only educating the rich and prosperous was no longer justified although quite a sizeable number of the student priests came also from Christian Brother schools.
The glory days when Kimmage sent missionaries to Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and other places were not to last and in the 1960s, Kimmage like other seminaries experienced an alarming drop in vocations. Whether the new climate introduced by the Vatican II ecumenical council contributed to this serious decline is still a subject for debate.
From having not enough space for its students, Kimmage found itself with far too much. Most of the seminary buildings were sold off in the early 1980s to the Department of Post and Telegraphs which used them for training. Other land was sold for upmarket housing developments off Whitehall Road but the Spiritans made sure to retain Kimmage Manor to which they had added a retirement home for the older missionaries and later a nursing home.
A new field for the Spiritans was development education for lay people as well as clerics who would work overseas for non-governmental organisations. The Kimmage Development Studies Centre is still providing degree courses.
However the last Irish Spiritan to be ordained was back in 2001, compared with 36 in 1955. The handsome chapel to accommodate hundreds of students has been handed over as a parish church for the local population. Like other religious societies, the Spiritans face an uncertain future. The missionaries from Africa and Latin America are ageing and gradually coming home to the excellent facilities in Kimmage. The Irish colleges are now run by lay teachers and administration.
There is a note of sadness in Fr Ryan’s Epilogue as he surveys a Kimmage, a shadow of the thriving seminary he experienced over 50 years ago. But as a historian he knows that change is inevitable everywhere and for everything.