Canon James O'Neill

Life

James Kearney O'Neill was a native of Carey House, Ballypatrick, County Antrim, born into a Catholic family in the north of Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. He studied at the Classical School in Downpatrick before entering St Malachy's Diocesan College, Belfast, in February 1872, and from there proceeded to St Patrick's College, Maynooth in September 1875 to pursue his priestly formation.

Ordained for the Diocese of Down and Connor, he ministered in several parishes before being appointed Parish Priest of the Sacred Heart Parish, Oldpark Road, north Belfast, in 1906. A man deeply formed by the social teaching of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, he became convinced that Catholic laymen in Ireland needed an organised fraternal society to defend the Faith, support Catholic businesses and workers, and counter sectarian discrimination then common in northern industrial life.

In 1915, in the midst of the First World War and at a moment of acute political tension in Ireland, Canon O'Neill gathered a small group of Belfast Catholic professional men and founded the Knights of Saint Columbanus, a lay order modelled in part on the Knights of Columbus in North America but distinctively Irish in its patronage and spirituality.

Under his guidance the order spread rapidly across Ireland and became, in the twentieth century, one of the most influential Catholic lay organisations in the country, promoting education, charitable works and Catholic social action.

Canon O'Neill died on 18 March 1922 and was buried at the rear of the church in Ballyvoy, County Antrim. The Knights of Saint Columbanus continue his work today.