Kevin Whelan: My Grand Uncle Brother Aidan O’Reilly CSC (1877-1948)

Many Americans come back to Ireland to visit the graves of their ancestors. Every time that I visit Notre Dame, I make a reverse trip as my grand-uncle Brother Aidan O’Reilly CSC (1877-1948) is buried in the peaceful Holy Cross cemetery on campus. In the Summer of 2007, with my family members Kathleen and Tom, Frances and Jim, Anne and I had the honour of attending a Mass celebrated in his honour by Fr Timothy Scully CSC in the Log Chapel, and later of laying a wreath on his grave, where one of our gifted students Lauren MacDonough played a lament in his honour. We had a chance to acknowledge this talented and gifted member of our family.  I am proud that our family connection to ND has been re-established since I started working for them in 1998. But I am always aware of Brother Aidan and I never visit the campus without visiting his grave there.

Patrick O'Reilly – a cooper-  and Margaret O’Reilly were the parents of Brother Aidan, whose Christian name was Thomas. Their PP described them as ‘respectable and excellent parents and devout Catholics’. Thomas was born in 1877 and had two brothers Myles, and Patrick (‘Park’) – my grandfather.  Brother Aidan’s father died in 1882 when he was only five years old. His uncle Myles took over the cooperage and responsibility for the family. The boys attended the infant school at the Faithful Companions of Jesus Convent in Bunclody. His mother Margaret died in 1894, following the bite of a dog. She was only 42 years old, and her death orphaned the three teenagers.

In 1899, Thomas met a distant relative Rev. Andrew Morrissey CSC (1860-1921), the seventh President of Notre Dame [1893-1905], later Provincial of the CSC in the USA, and after whom Morrissey Manor is named.  He was born in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, although he presumably had some connection to the well-known Morrissey family of Bunclody. Fr Morrissey was a potent figure in Irish-America: he was a close friend of Eamon De Valera, and he organised his fundraising trips to America: he was involved with the influential Friends of Irish Freedom, and he championed Irish matters at Notre Dame. He was responsible for hiring Desmond FitzGerald, father of the Irish Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Garret FitzGerald, when he could not get a job in Ireland in the 1920s because of his involvement in the 1916 rising. Fr Morrissey recruited Thomas O’Reilly to the CSC congregation.

Thomas left Ireland in Summer 1899 to seek a new world in a new setting in a new century. What courage that required. He travelled by ship to New York and then by train to the American mid-west. He always recalled that he fell in love with Notre Dame at his very first sight of the Golden Dome. There was at least one thing on campus that might have reminded him of home: in 1902, a thirty acre field of reassuringly familiar potatoes occupied the space where the old Post Office and University Club used to stand.

He was inducted into the Congregation of the Holy Cross on 15 August 1899, an appropriate date for an institution devoted to Our Lady. He chose the highly appropriate name of Aidan, Bishop of Ferns, his natal diocese. He took his final religious vows in 1902. In 1906 he was named first director of ND’s new hall of studies for the Christian Brothers - now known as the First College Building. He also wrote two of the first vocations manual for the CSC: The Gateway to the Religious Life and Out of Many Hearts. The Irish writer Seamus MacManus described him in 1917 as ‘Brother Aidan of the beautiful character, noble representative of the noble land to which his warm heart, ever turning, is needle-true’.

His notebooks from his novitiate years survive and reveal wide reading in both spiritual and literary works. One of the people whose lectures he attended was W. B. Yeats in Washington Hall in January 1904.[1] ‘I followed the lecture from start to finish with keen interest’. He noted that Yeats’s ‘gestures are often stiff and ill-timed. On the stage he strikes you as very unassuming and not a bit self-centred’ but he concluded that ‘ Yeats had one of the requisites of a true orator - sincerity- but he hasn’t the gift of the gab’. He developed a lifelong habit of taking notes: Years later in the National Library of Ireland, I found the following quotation that I have never forgotten in one of the books on Wexford history that he later donated to the Library: ‘The faintest of inks is more retentive than the strongest of memories’.

He had taken a vow of poverty and he never sought funds to go back to visit Ireland: he only did so once when he stayed at the Faithful Companions of Jesus Convent where he had been a pupil so many years before, and which I myself was later to attend when they first started admitted boys [It is entirely a different story what it was like to be the only boy in a class of thirty girls- a story for another day].

Brother Aidan was keen to expand Holy Cross education into the American High School system and he undertook further studies to earn the appropriate qualifications. In 1909, the CSC opened their first high school. In 1919, he was appointed President of Holy Cross College in New Orleans, a High School that combined a boarding and day element. He himself taught English and Math. Later he was transferred to teach in high schools in Evansville, Fort Wayne, South Bend and Indianapolis. Then he moved back to campus to teach English at ND and to become the archivist.


He died there on 19 February 1948, and is buried in the serried ranks of his beloved CSC community, close to the grotto. A Wexfordman had come to rest in northern Indiana. A memorial pamphlet was written on his life entitled As a Star for All Eternity. The title pays tribute to those who choose the vocation of teaching:  ‘Those that instruct many to justice shall shine as stars for all eternity’ [Daniel 12:3].

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[1] Scholastic, xxxvii, (1903-04), p. 276