Fr. Browne's Jesuit Ireland

The 42,000 photographs taken by Fr. Frank Browne, SJ (1880-1960), of Ireland's people, castles, cottages, and everyday scenes amount to an archive of a country. His name, however, will be forever linked with the ill-fated Titanic. His uncle, a bishop, had bought the young Jesuit a ticket for the ship's preliminary voyage from Southampton in England to Cherbourg, France, and then to Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland. Browne took many photos onboard.

The story goes that an American couple he met on the ship had offered to pay for his voyage from Ireland to New York. Browne telegraphed his Jesuit provincial in Dublin from the Titanic, asking permission to accept the generous offer. A cable came back: "GET OFF THAT SHIP - PROVINCIAL". Browne later described the event as "the only time holy obedience saved a man's life."

Browne is coming to be seen as an important documentary photographer. It is only in the past twenty years that his photos have begun to be seen widely in many books and television shows and at spectacular exhibitions in such venues as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Sony City in Tokyo, and the Maritime Museum in Melbourne.

Fr. E.E. O'Donnell, SJ, at Gonzaga College, Dublin, is the curator of the Browne Collection and the editor of a number of collections of Fr. Browne's photos. (Currach Press, www.currach.ie).

On these pages are some hitherto unpublished pictures of Jesuit life in Ireland, from the cradle of the novitiate (which Frank Browne entered in 1897), through ordination and pastoral work, to the graveyard in Dublin where generations of Irish Jesuits, including Browne, lie buried.

For more information on Fr. Browne, go to www.fatherbrowne.com

Master of novices Fr. Donal O'Sullivan, SJ, addresses his charges at Emo Court, County Laois, in 1954. The neoclassical building, dating from the late eighteenth century, is the work of architect James Gandon, designer of a number of Dublin's landmark buildings. The Jesuits acquired it in 1930.

Novices at work at Emo Court, 1933. The novitiate was formerly the home of the Earls of Portarlington, the third of whom entertained Queen Victoria here in 1869. The Jesuits developed a farm, orchards, and playing fields on the estate.


Fr. Wille Doyle, SJ, and boys at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare, in 1912. Doyle lost his life while serving as an army chaplain alongside Browne during World War I. The Jesuits acquired the castle and grounds in 1814 for this boarding school, which didn't get electricity until 1929.	Jesuits being ordained at Milltown Park, their theology school in Dublin, 1941. Browne was ordained a priest here in 1915 by his uncle Robert Browne, bishop of Cloyne.

A Jesuit brother sweeps the chimneys at St. Stanislaus College, Rahan, County Offaly, 1928. St. Stanislaus served as a school of philosophy from 1880 to 1961 and then as a retreat house for twenty more years.

The arm of Francis Xavier being venerated at the Jesuit novitiate, 1949. The relic was brought to Ireland from Rome for two weeks. The rest of Xavier's body is in Goa, India, where many people travel on pilgrimage.

Browne photographs the photographer of the Crescent College (Limerick) rugby team and their coach, Fr. J.G. Guinane, SJ, in 1952. Guinane, later with the Irish Rugby Football Union, welcomed the South African rugby team to Limerick in 1965. A newspaper photo showed him with the visitors while other Jesuits in the background were waving "Down with Apartheid" signs.

Fr. Tom Scully, SJ, conducts a science class at Crescent College, Limerick, 1952. The school, founded by the Jesuits in 1859 in the ity, moved in 1972 to the suburbs and added carpentry classes, Protestants, and girls, becoming a "comprehensive" school in the process. Older Jesuits objected to the move from their familiar haunts: "Sure, if you're not within five minutes' walk of Roche's café, you might as well be in Cork!"

Browne (lower center) and Frs. Robert Stevenson, William Prendergast, William Hogan, and Richard Maguire, his Jesuit contemporaries on the Retreats and Missions staff, 1937. Browne served there from 1929 to his death in 1960. In his day, nearly every parish had separate week-long missions for women and men.

The Jesuit burial plot at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 1952. Browne himself is buried here, as is the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.