Fr John Quill was the parish priest of Milltown from 1825 to 1841. A native of Listowel, he had studied for the priesthood at Maynooth and was ordained to the priesthood in 1819.
He was clearly a very popular cleric amongst his parishioners: one of his successors as parish priest in Milltown, Fr James Carmody, recalled that Fr Quill was known for his ‘courtly manners and most upright life.’[1] In 1830, Fr Quill established two schools, ‘one for the instruction of males, and the other for the instruction of females’ but they were dissolved ‘for want of funds.’[2] He was also closely involved in collecting money for Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association.[3]
In 1841 when it was announced that Fr Quill was to be moved to the parish of Lisselton near Listowel. There is little evidence to explain the decision of the then Bishop of Ardfert and Aghadoe (Kerry), Cornelius Egan, to move Quill to north Kerry.
In this period, parish priests often remained in the same parish from their appointment until their retirement or death. Fr James Carmody suggested that Quill was finding it difficult to maintain a decent stand of living for himself and that his spending habits ‘found him financially not well off.’ Being unable to make ends meet, Carmody suggests, saw Quill transferred to a new parish.
Such was the level of angst and despair at the news of Fr Quill’s transfer that a representative group of Milltown parishioners were sent to Killarney to implore Bishop Egan to reverse his decision. According to the account of Milltown historian, Denis Sugrue, the deputation of parishioners were hopeful that they might have influence with the bishop because of his familial ties with Milltown parish. Egan had been born at Knocknamon near Milltown. The bishop’s parents had been interred at the nearby Abbey of Killaha and the Egan family still resided at Knocknamon. As Sugrue related:
… the prevailing opinion was that he [Bishop Egan] would bow to the wishes of the people and cancel the transfer. There was no reprieve. Fr Quill was due in his new parish the following Saturday.[4]
On the day before he was due in Lisselton, Fr Quill was seen off by his parishioners to much acclaim and a fond farewell. The streets were lined with people and the pupils of the local school were lined up outside their classrooms to bid goodbye.
The people of Lisselton were equally infuriated by the removal of their own parish priest and his replacement by Fr Quill. Such was the anger at the appointment of their new PP that the doors of Lisselton parish church were nailed shut in protest at their new pastor.
Meanwhile, Fr Quill was replaced as parish priest in Milltown by Fr Bartholomew (Batt) O’Connor, also a native of Listowel, and who became a dynamic and popular cleric in his new community, acting with great care and tenderness to his parishioners during the Famine.
Fr Quill’s time in Lisselton was short-lived and within a year of taking up his role in north Kerry, he died at the age of seventy-two on 29 September 1842. According to his obituary in the Kerry Evening Post, the late priest held the regard and esteem of all his parishioners but especially ‘in Milltown, where he was located until last year [1841], he was universally beloved and respected.’[5]
Fr Quill was interred in the Quill family plot in Kishinane burial ground near Lixnaw.
On learning of the passing of their former pastor, the parishioners of Milltown ‘decided that Fr Quill’s remains should be brought back to Milltown’ such was their love for the man. Moreover, it was known that Fr Quill had always expressed a wish to be buried in Milltown when he died.[6] There was only one solution, many in Milltown believed. Denis Sugrue recounted what followed:
Early one morning, a party [from Milltown] set out for North Kerry and arrived at the churchyard there late that evening. Their mission was to dig up the remains and bring them back to Milltown for reburial. This, however, did not go unnoticed by the natives there, who considered this an outrage. The “body snatchers” as they were called, had to run for their lives.
The Milltown parishioners were not deterred by this setback and within a week they were back with their picks and shovels in the graveyard in Kilshinane to exhume Fr Quill’s remains. This time, the ‘body snatchers’ met with no opposition.
A report in the Kerry Examiner put a rather more polite complexion on the digging up of a deceased cleric in the dead of night:
The people of the latter place [Lisseltown and Lixnaw] were as warmly anxious that his bones should rest among themselves in the tomb of his fathers, but at length yielding to the entreaties and remonstrances of their priest, they consented to resign the body to those who, in their love, had travelled far to regain it.[7]
Fr Quill’s coffin, clearly still intact after a year in the clay of Lixnaw, was ‘placed in a common cart’ at two o’clock in the morning and ‘the melancholy contingent’ of gravediggers from Milltown made their way back home via the ‘Short Mountain’ road between Tralee and Castlemaine in the early hours.
The crowds which awaited the funeral cortege was ‘the largest ever assembled in Milltown’ and including members of the Protestant and Catholic communities.[8] On arriving in Milltown, the party placed the coffin in a newly dug grave beside the old church in Milltown (now the site of the Mid-Kerry Veterinary Centre). There, it appeared, Fr Quill would finally be allowed to rest in peace.
The new and present-day Church of the Sacred Heart – which was designed by Daniel O’Connell, a cousin of the Liberator – was constructed and consecrated in 1894. With the abandonment and deconsecration of the former place of worship a short distance away, any of the priests who were interred there were moved to graves at the back of the new Church of the Sacred Heart.
Accordingly, Fr Quill was reburied for the third time.
The opening of the new church coincided with the appointment of Ballymacelligott native, Fr James Carmody as parish priest. In 1913, Fr Carmody decided by pay tribute to his popular and dynamic predecessors, Fr Batt O’Connor and Fr John Quill. He devised and raised funds for an ‘imposing monument’ – a large marble sepulchre featuring Christ carrying the Cross – in front of the Sacred Heart Church. He considered a place of burial behind the church to be inappropriate and insufficient for men of the stature of Fr O’Connor and Fr Quill.
Accordingly, the remains of Fr Quill and his successor were disinterred and moved to their new grave in front of the church in 1913. Fr Carmody ensured that the remains were ‘carefully collected and transferred.’[9] The task of disinterring the coffins and their contents fell to three local men: John Looney O’Connor, Patrick Guerin and the parish clerk, Jim McCarthy.
Fr Quill and Fr O’Connor were laid to rest at midnight on a January night in 1913 under the direction of the Fr Carmody who was ‘vested in surplus, soutane, stole and birette.’[10] Local lore holds that as he praying over the grave, Fr Carmody’s birette was blown into the open grave on top of the coffins. When one of the gravediggers went to retrieve it, the cleric insisted that it be left there ‘with what remained of his two illustrious predecessors.’[11]
It was fourth occasion on which Fr John Quill was buried.
He has not been disturbed since 1913 and remains at eternal rest before the Sacred Heart Church of Milltown, many of those who continue to worship there oblivious of his circuitous and dramatic journey to his final resting place.
For unknown reasons, only Fr O’Connor is mentioned on the monument over the grave in which he and Fr Quill were laid to rest. A tribute to Fr Quill can be found on a simple marble plaque on the boundary wall a short distance from the grave. It reads:
Sacred to the memory of the Rev. John Quill who departed this life on September 29, 1842 aged 72.
This monument was erected by the Protestant and Catholic parishioners of Milltown as an humble tribute to the worth and the excellent & beloved pastor, the Man of God, whose untiring zeal & many virtues exercised among them during a period of 17 years, can never be effaced from their remembrance.
May he rest in peace.
The author is grateful for Donie McCarthy, Milltown, for bringing this episode to his attention. The author has been unable to locate an image of Fr. John Quill
[1] ‘Fr James Carmody’s Notes on Milltown and Listry’ in Thomas Egan (ed.), Milltown Parish: A Centenary Celebration (1994), p. 32.
[2] Kerry Evening Post, 20 August 1831.
[3] Kerry Evening Post, 6 February 1836.
[4] Kerryman, 4 April 1986
[5] Kerry Evening Post, 1 October 1842.
[6] Kerry Examiner, 4 October 1842
[7] Kerry Examiner, 7 October 1842
[8] Ibid.
[9] ‘Fr James Carmody’s Notes,’ p. 34.
[10] Kerryman, 4 April 1986
[11] Ibid.
