Madam, – Your recent GAA commemorative supplement observed how in the past the Catholic Church did not approve of the participation of its priests and seminarians as players in football or hurling matches.
The case was cited of Mundy Prendiville, a member of Kerry’s 1924 All-Ireland football final side. He was said to have been a student at Dublin’s All Hallows College at the time, but was expelled as a punishment for his unauthorised Croke Park appearance. Undaunted, however, he was “eventually ordained elsewhere” and in time became Archbishop of Perth, Australia.
Another version of this story suggests that he found it necessary to scale the college’s perimeter wall to get to the big game; that he moved to Australia after his expulsion, completed his theological studies there, and did not again set foot in his homeland until he had become archbishop.
However, Australian accounts of Archbishop Redmond (Mundy) Prendiville’s life and times do not accord with either of these versions. According to his Australian biographers, he did indeed commence his studies at All Hallows (in 1918), but was later ordered to withdraw because he had been found, though only as a onlooker, among a group of students whom the dean had discovered playing cards on the night before a retreat was due to begin. Card games were strictly forbidden, with infringements of the rule punishable by expulsion.
The determined Kerryman is said then to have obtained admission to St Peter’s College, Wexford (in 1921), where he remained until ordination. With the 1924 All-Ireland game approaching, Kerry GAA officials asked the president of St Peter’s to release the then final-year student for the encounter, though he had not been training with the squad. Although such requests did not as a rule receive the desired response in those days, an exception was made on that occasion. Kerry were victorious and Prendiville was acclaimed as “man of the match”.
Ordained in June 1925, he arrived in Perth the following September to begin his priestly ministry under Clare-born Archbishop Patrick Clune. The archbishop was impressed by the young priest’s administrative skills and widespread popularity. When, after a few years, his own health began to deteriorate, he successfully petitioned the pope to appoint him as coadjutor archbishop with right of succession. In 1933, with a mere eight years’ pastoral experience behind him, Prendiville, at 33, became the world’s youngest Catholic archbishop. On Clune’s death in 1935 he assumed sole responsibility, and held office until his death in 1968.
He is said to have designed a pastoral administration of remarkable vision, effectiveness and depth of spiritual insight, and is considered by many to have been Australia’s most significant 20th-century episcopal figure. Two apostolic delegates reported independently of each other that the archdiocese of Perth was, one of the best-organised and administered in the Catholic world. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable in view of the fact that, following two strokes in 1946, he suffered a degree of permanent physical disability and during the remaining years of his life was hospitalised many times. — Yours, etc,