by Mary Purcell

Adapted from The Story of the Vincentians (1973)

All Hallows, in Drumcondra, Dublin, is one of Ireland’s first missionary seminaries. It was founded in 1842, through the vision and determination of Fr. John Hand. Its first graduates ministered to the emigrants who left Ireland during the Potato Famine of 1845-47. Since that time, All Hallows has sent more than 4000 ordained priests to South America, South Africa, India, Canada, Australia, the West Indies, New Zealand, the United States, England, Scotland and Wales. In 1892 it was put under the direction of the Vincentians.

Fr John Hand and the founding of All Hallows

In February 1841 Father John Hand, a Meath-born priest who had been assisting the Fathers in Phibsborough, set out for Rome. He was a man with a dream, a dream of making Ireland once again the land from which missionaries would go forth to bring the Christian message to the ends of the earth.

Ireland had only recently emerged from the shadow of the penal laws; it needed priests, it needed churches, it needed teachers, yet Father Hand, who had been reading the prototype of all later mission magazines, the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, felt impelled to help other lands, other peoples whose needs were even greater than those of his own.

Apart from Dr Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, and the bishop of his native diocese, Dr Cantwell of Meath, he got little encouragement. These two prelates approved when he told them that he thought of establishing a college to train priests for foreign missions; they gave him letters of introduction and recommendation to the European seminaries he intended to visit.

He went first to Paris where he stayed with the Sulpicians, spending long hours copying by hand their rules and constitutions and details of their system of training priests. He also visited the Vincentians, the Jesuits, the Holy Ghost Fathers, the Missions £trangeres and the Picpus Fathers; some advised him to found a missionary congregation; others suggested that he found a college to supply priests in countries where they were most needed.

In October Father Hand went to Lyons where he visited the African Missions centre before continuing his journey to Rome. Dr Paul Cullen was then Rector of the Irish College and probably helped to present the case for the establishment of a foreign mission college in Ireland. Meanwhile a committee had been formed in Dublin to support the project, Father McCann being one of the members. The archbishop forwarded a copy of the committee's resolutions to Father Hand and urged him to redouble his efforts, but before the letter arrived in Rome papal sanction had been granted. Pope Gregory XVI received the petitioner in private audience, cardinals gave subscriptions and books for the library of the as yet nonexistent college.

By June 1842 the traveller was back in Dublin house-hunting. When someone asked him which of the sights in Rome he liked during his six-month stay there, he was embarrassed and confessed that he had seen next to nothing of the city or its art treasures. There was so much to be done that I could not spare the time to go sight-seeing,'

A home for the college was found in Drumcondra, the green belt beyond the Tolka. Before the Reformation the property had belonged to the Priory of All Hallows, which stood on the site of the present Provost's house, Trinity College, so the old name was chosen for the new college. That autumn Father Hand left Phibsborough and his Vincentian friends for Drumcondra. On All Saints' Day, the patronal feast, the new foundation was formally opened. Among those present was Dr Cullen, then returning to Rome from a holiday in Ireland; with him was his nephew, Patrick Moran, later to become cardinal-archbishop of Sydney. Cardinal Moran was to recall that opening day:

I remember well the memorable day, 1 November 1842, on which All Hallows College entered on its marvellous missionary work, for I was on that very day sailing from Dublin to enter on my ecclesiastical studies in Rome ... On that opening day the first student entered; Mass was celebrated in borrowed vestments; the furniture of the house consisted of a three-legged table and two or three broken chairs; the mansion itself was in the first stage of ruin. Such were the beginnings of the college which, with its vast and stately edifices, now adorns the widespreading meadows of Drumcondra. Within the fifty years that have elapsed since then, fifteen hundred priests have come forth . . . and are to be found bringing the consolations of religion to the scattered exiles of Erin wherever they may have roamed.

The cardinal was speaking at the Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1892. By 1973 the priests educated and ordained in the college during its 130 years numbered almost 4,000. Although John Hand left Maynooth to join the new foundation begun by Dean Dowley and others, and lived for some time at St Peter's, Phibsborough, the Vincentians did not from the start become directors of the college.

The time was not yet ripe. When the time did come [in 1892] and the Holy See sent them into his inheritance, they did not enter into it as men bringing with them a new or strange spirit. They were hewn out of the same rock as he was, and their aim has always been to keep Father Hand's spirit alive and flourishing in All Hallows.

When he founded All Hallows Father Hand was thirty-five. Three years later he could report to Rome that the college had sixty-five students and that others had gone on to their respective dioceses abroad to complet; their studies there. He had received £7,500 from the faithful, expended £5,000 on making the college habitable, and had £2,500 in hand for the refectory, additional dormitories and study-hall he intended building.

The matter-of-fact college reports of the early years are Father Hand's panegyric, but they say nothing of what it had cost him to make them possible. It was he himself who collected practically all the money. We may think he should have organized that side of things better. Perhaps. There were some very great difficulties in the way. 1842 was not 1972; he was a pioneer, and a pioneer who was not supposed to go outside Dublin and Meath . . . The only organization he had was one which conducted a penny-a-week collection in Dublin. Those pennies were the pennies of the poor; the more moneyed people were visited with varying success by Father Hand himself. And when he thought he had Dublin sufficiently combed, he returned to his native Meath. That meant long journeys in all weathers with a pony and trap, and sermons everywhere. Weekends and spells of this exhausting work together with the constant anxiety to establish a proper tradition of ecclesiastical training in the college soon undermined a constitution never robust.

At the end of April 1846 Father Hand returned from one of his forays into Meath completely exhausted and went to bed. Lung haemorrhages followed and tuberculosis was diagnosed. Three weeks later he was dead. He was thirty-eight years of age. His parents, poor people who had been evicted from their little farm in Oldcastle during his boyhood, were his chief mourners. We do not know whether they were present on the lovely May Saturday when their son was buried in the All Hallows cemetery on the rise beyond the Tolka.