Healy, Rev Dennis J

REV. DENNIS J. HEALY

February 1, 1920

Personal Info

  • Date of Birth:  23 February 1875
  • Place of Birth in Ireland: Cloghroe, Inniscarra
  • County: Cork
  • Date of Ordination: 17 June 1905
  • Education: St Patrick’s College, Carlow
  • Place of Ordination: Carlow Cathedral, Carlow

Diocesan Appointments:

  • Pastor – Sacred Heart, Eureka – 1906 to 11/16/1910
  • Pastor – St John, Hamilton – 1906 to 11/16/1910
  • Pastor – St Mary, Moline, including the missions of Hamilton, Eureka, Madison and Longton – 1/4/1907 to 1/10/1910
  • Pastor – St Francis Xavier, Seward; St John, Larned, and missions of Stafford and Hanston – 1911
  • Pastor – St Joseph, Wichita and Chaplain of Mount Carmel Academy, 1913-1920

Father Healy was the pastor for St Joseph Parish in Wichita when the cornerstone was laid. According to the Wichita Eagle article published in 1916, “…the new church, which is one of the finest structures of its kind in the state, will cost $20,000. One of the outstanding features of the construction will be that every stone, every brick, every grade of sand, and every bit of labor used in the construction has been purchased or secured in Wichita.”

Father Maurice Reidy, pastor of St Rose of Lima in Great Bend, and lifelong friend of Father Healy and eloquently honored both the faith and charity of Father Healy’s mother in her eulogy as celebrated in the solemn requiem Mass at St Joseph Church in Wichita. One of the hardships that many immigrant priests suffered was being at the bedside of their beloved relatives when death was inevitable. Fr Healy spoke to this hardship when he stated “After upwards of 12 years’ laboring in America it was the one great wish of her son, Fr. D.J. Healy, to return to Ireland and visit his mother, but it was the will of Almighty God, which is inscrutable to us and whose ways are not the ways of the world, that the realization of this fond wish should be denied him.”

Father Healy was hospitalized for six weeks in Wichita’s St Francis Hospital due to lingering effects from the Spanish influenza. The Catholic Advance article, identified Father Healy as being 38 years old at the time of his death.

Rev. Maurice Reidy, a fellow student of Father Healy at St Patrick’s College in Carlow Ireland preached the sermon. Like the eloquent sermon he gave for another young Irish priest with whom he attended the seminary in Carlow (Fr Dennis Cronin), he stated that “…this was not the time to give way to human sorrow or to sound the praises of the dead, for Father Healy did not live for the praises of men but was ordained of God for higher things – ‘a dispenser of the mysteries of God.”

 

Father Reidy, in describing the man, stated: “No priest ever worked with greater solicitude for those whose spiritual welfare it was his duty to foster, and be it said as a tribute to his memory few have had the blessedness of appreciation and love which fell to his lot. He had that magnetism about him which we all admire and strive after, but which so few of us possess. It was in his nature to be kind and good, and as a priest of God he never failed to give expression to this quality.”

  • Date of Death: 1 February 1920
  • Place of Death: St Francis Hospital, Wichita, KS
  • Age of Death: 45
  • Cause of Death: Lingering effects from Spanish influenza which caused his early retirement from active duty as a priest.
  • Funeral Celebrant: Msgr Schmiehausen and Bishop Hennessy performed absolution with Rev. Maurice Reidy preaching the sermon.
  • Burial: Calvary Cemetery, Wichita, Sedgwick County, Kansas

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