Description

In the cold wet autumn of 1907, Fr. Thomas Curran sat in his office at St. Dunstan’s College and anxiously penned a formal petition to his superior, Bishop James Charles MacDonald. The rector of St. Dunstan’s since 1900, Fr. Curran was a respected educator, an able bureaucrat, and a graduate of Rome’s prestigious Pontifical Urbanian College “de Propaganda Fide.” (The college was the most famous of Rome’s seminaries. In most dioceses around the globe, a degree from that institution was the pathway to ecclesiastical power.) Employing his trademark “bluntness and force of character,” the native of Baldwins Road toiled through the evening and by early morning his draft was complete. The following day, seven of his brotherpriests (Fathers A.E. Burke, Martin Monaghan, John F. Johnston, Peter D. McGuigan, John T. Murphy, Felix L. Connolly and Mathias J. Smith) attached their signatures to the document. The rebellion of the Irish clergy on Prince Edward Island had begun.