Mourning over death of Fr Nicholas Madden
Dolla native served priesthood around the world
The local community is mourning the loss of Fr Nicholas Madden, who died last week in his 96th year.
Dolla native Fr Nicholas was ordained a Carmelite priest in 1957. He served his Order all over Ireland and in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. He worked as a missionary in Papua New Guinea, Samoa and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early '80s.
Fr Nicholas obtained a doctorate in theology at the University of Durham, contributed to several journals on the subject of early theology, and became a founding member of the Maynooth Patristic Symposium.
Though he saw out his years at Clarendon St in Dublin, Fr Nicholas never lost touch with his homeland, which he wrote about in the third volume of Silvermines Historical Society's ‘Mining the Past’ (2014).
Nicholas was born in Nenagh hospital. His parents were the well-known James Madden of ‘Binn na Sgeach’ - or Bollingbrook - Dolla, and Elizabeth McGrath of Burgess. He had two sisters.
The Madden family lived at several locations around the country, James working as a school teacher, one of his postings being the CBS in Nenagh. He also joined the gardaí and was promoted to the rank of superintendent.
The family were living in Killaloe when the young Nicholas became interested in the priesthood. He decided to join the Carmelites after meeting a Donegal priest, Fr Joseph McIlhenny – whom he knew through Fr Rory Kennedy of Dolla – who was looking for young people to join the Order.
‘ESCAPE FROM THE SADNESS OF DEATH’
Fr Nicholas' mother was dying at the time. “My mother died that summer then, so it was a kind of escape from the sadness of death,” he reflected on his decision to join the priesthood in an interview with the Guardian in 2014. He studied at the Carmelite College in Castlemartyr, Co Cork, where he added Gaelic football to his love of hurling.
He became used to spending long periods of time away from home but throughout his life, the Dolla native thought deeply about the place where he had so many happy memories of growing up, and of holidaying with his widely-spread relatives in the Nenagh area. His contribution to ‘Mining the Past’ was a poem in which Fr Nicholas lamented the changes that have taken place in Dolla over the generations.
The poem references ‘Binn na Sgeach’, where his father was born. “That would probably have been barren moorland,” Fr Nicholas told this newspaper on the eve of his 85th birthday. “Those people would have been driven up there by the Cromwell soldiers, who took over the fine land all around there. Those people were left trying to survive.
“The poem was inspired by the fact that this had happened, the kind of people they were, a sort of pride in having their blood in my veins, and then the sadness of the fact that that population has dwindled and is almost empty now.”
Fr Nicholas' passing on Friday last, March 21, is deeply mourned by his Carmelite family and by his wide circle of cousins and friends. Funeral Mass took place in St Teresa's Church, Clarendon St, on Tuesday, followed by burial in Glasnevin cemetery.