Father Jeremiah O'Donovan's flight from Loughrea Cathedral in Galway in 1904 was to literature and love. The decoration of the cathedral, which began in 1902, gave some indication of his distaste for convention. Lily Yeats's silk banners, John Hughes's smiling marble Mother and Child and the T·r Gloine stained-glass windows make the interior of St Brendan's Cathedral at Loughrea, Co Galway, a museum of the Celtic Revival. It displayed a total departure from conventional ecclesiastical decoration, thanks to Edward Martyn, a local and literary landlord, and Father Jeremiah O'Donovan, who, respectively, formed the corpus of the building committee.
Speaking to the Maynooth Union in 1900 before the construction of the cathedral, Father Jeremiah told a baffled audience to "go into your churches and you will find the more pretentious of the statues come from Italy and Munich. If you say that you do not like the work, the good priest looks you all over with a smile of a superior pity and reduces you to your proper level by the clinching remark: 'Why, this statue was made at Carrara.' "
This courageous stand against extravagant church building led Loughrea into the Zeitgeist of the Celtic Revival. But Loughrea also stands as a memorial to the novelist, Gerald O'Donovan, as the parish priest Jeremiah was to become after he left Loughrea.
Jeremiah O'Donovan entered Maynooth in 1889 and was ordained in 1895. His second curacy was at Loughrea, a town of "squalor, poverty and chronic wretchedness", according to Bishop Healy of the diocese of Clonfert. He was involved in the co-operative movement, the Gaelic League, the St Brendan's Total Abstinence Society (which he founded) and the Irish Literary Theatre.
The Church saw in him an autocratic and deviant man negligent of his pastoral duties in the poor parish of Loughrea. He preferred to keep the company of Lady Gregory and friends. The new bishop, Dr O'Dea, more ferocious than his predecessor, was a catalyst in Father Jeremiah's decision to leave the diocese in 1904, the same year Joyce sent himself into exile. O'Donovan was no longer able to put up with a bishop who had "no knowledge of life whatever". O'Dea gave the priest an ultimatum to reduce his lecturing and travel commitments and concentrate on his parish duties, but O'Donovan refused, and left.
But the laity did not frown so much on O'Donovan's departure, as the Western News report on his departure reveals:
"The scene at the Railway Station when Father O'Donovan was about to depart was a remarkable one. Long before the train started, the platform and the road leading from the town were crammed with young and old, anxious to get his blessing before he left, and several knelt on the ground to receive it, and as the train steamed from the station cheer after cheer was raised for the good Soggarth . . ."
By 1908, he was penniless and living in London. On a visit to Donegal that year, he fell in love with Beryl Verschoyle, daughter of a Fermanagh colonel, and married her in 1910. Their first child, Bridget, later became secretary to T.S. Eliot in Faber & Faber in the 1930s. Bewitched by Eliot, she wrote to him The Lovesong of Bridget J. O'Donovan, and was ignored.
Bridget had always believed her father had one brother who had drowned at sea, but later found that he was from a family of six. His exile had been a curt and painful one, banished for the unspeakable shame that he had caused them. When a brother of O'Donovan read a review of his autobiographical first novel, Father Ralph, he asked his father: "Is that a relation of ours?" "Give me that!" shouted their father, grabbing the Catholic Times it was in, and hurled it into the burning grate.
Father Ralph was published by Macmillan in 1913. It dealt with rebellion and exile from family, church and country three years before Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. A review in the Times Literary Supplement praised it as evidence of a rebellion by a minority of educated lay people against the bulwark of the Catholic Church. The Church of Ireland Gazette saw it as a great Irish novel which powerfully depicted the Irish clergy and congregation. The Freeman's Journal deemed it a mocking libel on the Irish clergy and people.
It was his long-term affair with the Bloomsbury novelist, Rose Macaulay, that inspired the last of his six novels, The Holy Tree, which a contemporary writer, Frank Harris, celebrated as a book of love: "Boni and Liveright (of New York), the publishers, tell me all they know about Gerald O'Donovan is that he was an Irish priest who had a various and adventurous life and later worked for Lord Northcliffe in London . . . "
O'Donovan never became a Bloomsbury writer, despite his closeness to Macaulay. It is said that Virginia Woolf raised a Bloomsbury eyebrow at him and condemned him as a novelist of the "second rate".
When O'Donovan died in 1942, his wife, Beryl, wrote in her diary: "Gerard left me in the morning"; but Rose Macaulay's anonymous tribute to him in the Times read "To know him was to love him" at the end. Sean O'Faolain was disappointed when Macauley refused to write about Gerard in The Bell. He saw in O'Donovan "a romantic sport - out of the boglands defying Rome, writing so well".
The coloured windows and banners of Loughrea still glimmer with the boldness of his stand against the church.
Father Ralph was reprinted by Brandon Press in 1998. Loughrea Cathedral is still open to the public.