Fr. Paul Kevin Meagher, OP

Paul Kevin Meagher was born May 14, 1907 in Clarion, Pennsylvania and baptized in the same town.  The family moved to Oregon when he was a small child.  He attended a public elementary school in Portland, and three of his four years of high school at Columbia University High School in that city.  His junior year was spent with the Paulists at St. Paul's College in Washington, D.C.  He received the habit and spent his novitiate at St. Rose's in Kentucky and did his first year of philosophy at River Forest, Illinois.  However, this was preceded by one year as a postulant in Kentfield, California and was followed by two years of philosophy in Benicia, California.  His first year of theology was taken at the Angelicum in Rome, but the final three years were at Blackfriars, Oxford.

He was ordained to the priesthood May 10, 1931 at Axford by Alban Goodier, S.J.  He returned to the province with a passionate love for studies, a well-trained critical intelligence, and a careful command of and respect for both English and Latin.   Almost immediately he was farmed out as an assistant pastor to St. Helena in the Napa Valley.  By November 1933 and under pressure from the Master General he was assigned to St. Albert's Priory in Oakland where he taught philosophy and theology for three years.   After this he spent a year as a Newman Center chaplain at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In the spring of 1940 he succeeded Fr. Benedict M. Blank as lector primarius at St. Albert's.  When St. Albert's became a stadium generale, Fr. Meagher was the first regent and was reappointed in 1955.  The dedication to study inaugurated by Fr. Blank with the founding of St. Albert's College was carried on with equal seriousness but a gentler manner by Fr. Meagher.  He not only recruited the priests who staffed St. Albert's but also the men who taught philosophy and theology at the college level.  During these years he also held a faculty position at Dominican College in San Rafael and did supply work most weekends in order to help support St. Albert's.  During those years the priests on the faculty were the only means of financial support for the Priory.  Fr. Meagher was also socius to the provincial for twelve years under Fr. Blank and eight years under Fr. Fulton.

It is a tribute to his wisdom and eminent common sense that he enjoyed the confidence not only of the major superior but also of most of the men in the province.  These are the years of his life for which he is best known and most fondly remembered in the province.  And it was for this kind of service to the Order that Pope Pius XII made him a master of sacred theology in October 1946.  At the time it seemed an honor added to a man in a small and struggling province; in retrospect the man added luster to the title.

After finishing his second term as regent he requested permission to spend a year studying at Blackfriars in Cambridge.  Soon after his arrival in England, Fr. Michael Browne, Master General of the Order, assigned him to the house, and thus began a new phase in his life.  His old friend and mentor, Fr. Thomas Gilby, O.P., was the superior at Blackfriars and the two men started editing and publishing the New English translation of the Summa Theologiae.

Recruiting volunteers to edit single volumes brought him back to the United States and he in turn was recruited to teach moral theology at Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and later to serve as area editor for moral theology for the New Catholic Encyclopedia.  When the work on the encyclopedia was completed. World Publishing Company hired the theological section of the editorial staff for a new publishing venture in theological resource books called Corpus Instrumentorum.  Fr. Meagher began organizing a series of dictionaries. When World Publishers terminated their financial support, the Sisters of Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia took over the dictionary venture.  Fr. Meagher remained with the project as an advisor.  During these years he also served as an assistant pastor at St. Mary's Church in Oneonta, New York and in St. Luke's Church in Hyattsville, Maryland.  It was during this period that the American Theological Society of America nominated him as the 1966 recipient of the Cardinal Spellman Award for outstanding work in the area of theological education.

St. Albert's College had planned to honor him with an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity on the feast day of its patron in 1976.  Fr. Meagher had cordially acquiesced, but illness and finally death intervened.  His death was due to internal bleeding on the last day of the year, and he is buried at St. Dominic's Cemetery in Benicia along with the Brethren.

Photo: "Souvenir" of his first mass

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