Time Machine: Father P. J. Flynn

Patrick J. Flynn was born in County Clare, Ireland, on March 8, 1870. He graduated with honors from Carlow College in Ireland and was ordained in 1900.

The new five-story Mercy Hospital at Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street in Cedar Rapids was five years old when Father Flynn arrived in 1908 to become the hospital’s chaplain and to serve at the Sisters of Mercy convent.

He became a prolific columnist for The Cedar Rapids Gazette and its rival, the Cedar Rapids Republican, mostly expounding on the world from a Catholic point of view.

He was 39 in March 1909 when an article in The Gazette described him as “a patriotic and Christian Celt of a desirable kind. Physically and mentally, nature and grace have been generous to him. As a writer, his style is enviable, his rhetoric forceful and his diction choice.”

The item was an adjunct to an essay Flynn had written on Irish history.

Writing about his native land’s political history, Flynn said, “Ireland has had multiplied divisions. In those early days, the country boasted of five kings, all rivals – kings envy kings – kings quarreling about their territory, and in many disputes tarnished very much the reign of religion. These five kings made five divisions of Ireland, which beyond doubt laid the foundation of our national disputes. We are all cousins of a king or the king’s wife. We are a royal race and will not admit that anybody in the world has better blood in his veins than ours. This chronic dissension is not so much in the people as in the soil and to be born in Ireland is to be an agitator."

His writings

Each year, he helped out with the hospital association and auxiliary Fruit Day, an event that collected fresh fruit and canned goods from the business community to feed those who needed help.

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Flynn also reported on the blessing of the bell presented to Immaculate Conception Church in 1908 by Cedar Rapids businessman Charles A. Calder of Calder Van and Storage.

He published several full-page discourses, one that compared Milton and Dante, in which he concluded, “The only poem of modern times which can be compared with ‘Paradise Lost’ is the ‘Divine Comedy.’ ”

Flynn often wrote thank-you notes from the sisters to The Gazette following any campaign for donations to the hospital. Those donations included hens, eggs, butter, fruits, vegetables, subscriptions to magazines and checks and money orders.

He also pointed out in January 1910 that the hospital had been built with more wisdom than anyone knew. “At the present hour,” he wrote, “we have not a single vacant room in the building.”

In his St. Patrick’s Day address in the Benton County city of Van Horne in 1910, Flynn said, “The shamrock verdure (vegetation) never dies, it thrives in sunshine and in storm. Its three leaves and one star are a symbol of the three persons and one nature of the deity; a symbol of that mystery from which all the other Christian mysteries spring, or with which they are intimately connected. It is also a symbol of the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, which are the root, the branch and the flower of justification.”

St. Patrick's Day

The Iowa City Citizen (now the Press-Citizen) in March 1911 quoted Flynn as saying that St. Patrick’s Day was no longer a purely Irish celebration. “It is becoming a national American holiday.”

But Flynn’s focus was also on Ames that year.

He took issue with a celebration in which students abandoned classes to form a parade led by a student costumed as the saint riding a mule around campus. The parade stopped at the mayor’s office where a spirited debate was held to decide if St. Patrick was an “ag” or an “engineer.” The student saint settled the discussion by declaring St. Patrick was an engineer.

In his lengthy response, Flynn said, “To caricature in undignified poses Ireland’s apostle has long been a feature of St. Patrick’s Day observance. Thanks to the courage and speech of some who were not afraid to carry out their convictions, this is less in evidence at present than in the past. Again, the desecration by unbecoming uses of the sacred symbol of the trefoil or shamrock was an offense equally unmeaning and reprehensible. To mimic and make light of any of the national and religious customs of the Irish people and their faith is, in my mind, unusually unAmerican.”

The New York publication Irish World and American Industrial Liberator based a scathing article on The Gazette report.

“Such outrageous insults as these to which Father Flynn calls attention . . . are survivals of the malignant hatred of our enemies, which in times past found expression in the stage Irishman,” the weekly newspaper wrote. "We have driven that hideous caricature from the stage. We must not permit it to revive in any other form. It is for Irish-Americans in Iowa to see to it that never again shall there be re-enacted within the walls of an Iowa state institution such a scene as those to which Father Flynn has called attention.”

To Dubuque

In June 1911, Flynn requested a vacation and left for an extended trip to Europe. He planned to visit his younger sister in London. A university graduate and a King’s Prize winner, she was a member of a Sisters of Mercy order there. His aunt, Mother M. Catherine, was superior at the Convent of Mercy in Tavistock, England. After his return to Iowa, he was sent to West Dubuque in January 1912.

During World War I, Father Flynn served as a chaplain in the French army and as a captain in Verdun. In 1917, he was back stateside, this time in Los Angeles.

He died at age 59 in Paso Robles, Calif., on Jan. 4, 1930. His body was returned to Iowa, where services were held at St. Raphael’s Cathedral in Dubuque. He is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Key West, in Dubuque County.

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