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Monsignor Eugene Maguire October 10th, 1919 - February 17th, 2006 Click here to view the Memorial Funeral Program - February 22nd, 2006 The following pictures reflect the legacy Father Maguire left to the Parish of OLPH. Our thanks go to the Maguire family for allowing us to display them. Note: Please click on the desired picture to enlarge it. To return to this screen, click "back" in the upper left hand corner of your screen.
*See Newspaper Articles at the bottom of this page. The following is an excerpt from material published at the time of Father Maguire’s retirement on June 1st, 1993, much of it in Father’s own words: It was October 10, 1919, late in Ireland’s potato harvest season. In a tiny thatched cottage, in hills and lake-studded Balinamore, County Leitrim, in the Iron Mountain region of northwestern Ireland, a son was born to Mary Ann and Patrick Maguire. He was named Eugene, who tells us nowadays that this naming probably after Pope Eugene I, noted for his gentleness, sanctity and generosity. “Does one suspect a bit of Father Maguire blarney here, as in the pointing out that the name “Balinamore” is Gaelic for “town of the great?”) At the proper time, off young Eugene went to Kilmore National Grade School. His three younger brothers followed along to the same school in later years. (Brothers John and James still mind the family farm in Balinamore; brother Columba and his family, later of New York City, reside in Scottsdale now.) After completing grade school, young Eugene went on to St. Patrick’s High School in County Cavan and then St. Patrick’s Seminary in Carlow. “As a young man I was attracted to the priesthood and I pursued it.” Father says today. It was there that he met four others who would journey with him to Arizona assignments following ordination: Fathers Daniel McCready, Cornelius Moynahan, John F. Burns and Terrence Sheridan. St. Patrick’s ordained priests for missionary assignment anywhere in the English-speaking world, but thanks to the efforts of Father Daniel J. Gercke, later the Bishop of the Tucson Diocese, Arizona perhaps got more that its fair share. (And thus revised Father Maguire’s earlier thoughts of priestly life in the green fields of Glasgow, Scotland, his first choice.) While a missionary in the Philippines, Father Gercke met Father McGinley, who later was to become Bishop of Monterey-Fresno and eventually return to Ireland and suggest to his old friend, then Bishop Gercke, that he write St. Patrick’s Seminary and request missionary priests for his newest assignment, Arizona. Bishop Gercke did, and in 1944 came the first in a long flow of Irish priests—the now-retired pastor of Most Holy Trinity Parish, Phoenix, Monsignor Neil P. McHugh. Father Eugene Maguire was ordained a priest 46 years ago today, June 1, 1947, at St. Patrick’s College, and said his first Mass in the same home parish church in Balinamore where he had been baptized, received First Holy Communion and was confirmed. Then, truly heeding “Go into the whole world and proclaim the good news to all creation” (Mark 16:15), it was off by the Cunard Line’s Mauritania to America and assignment to Bishop Gercke’s Arizona diocese. It was on the Mauritania tha Father Maguire heard his first confession. “The five of us—McCready, Moynahan, Burns, Sheridan and I—came together to go into the unknown. We knew nothing, and wondered what it would be like: an adventure filled with trepidation? But, we had made a commitment,” Father reflected. “We had looked Arizona up in an old seminary directory. We knew that it was hot and big. It was more than 100,000 square miles in size. (Ireland is but )32,500!) There were more than 100,000 Catholics there, so we though, at one per square mile, they would be spread out, one here, one there!” he smiles in remembering. In America, Father Maguire took a hot, seemingly interminable train ride to Tucson and then reported to his across-the-country missionary assignment at Queen of Peace Parish in Mesa, Arizona, thousands of miles from the green, cool clime of Balinamore. He was to be stationed in Mesa for five years. It was six long years though before the young just-out-of-the-seminary priest from Leitrim would be able to return to visit family and friends. Father’s arrival in Mesa, fortunately in the coolness of November, gave him his first culture shock of the new assignment. “Now, the little country parish I came from in Ireland has on priest, and the priest had a great big two-story house. Now then, I arrive in Mesa and there’s this little three-bedroom house and there’s three of us priests to live there. The pastor had to go through my room to get to his room,” Father recalls with a grin, comparing the massively impressive Irish countryside rectory for one priest with his tiny first American rectory. Father’s second culture shock came when, for a strictly meat-potatoes-and-bread Irishman, he was introduced to American’s daily diet. “I’ve never eaten any peppers, and only two hot dogs in my life! I still eat meat, potatoes and bread,” he confirms—something to which a long line of rectory cooks will attest. Priests were still few in Arizona so, while at Queen of Peace, Father was not only responsible for the parish’s 6:15 A.M. Sunday Mass, but then also a nine o’clock Mass in Apache Junction, followed by an 11:00 A.M. Mass out on the Indian reservation at St. Francis Indian Mission Church—where still today he offers Mass every third Sunday of the month. Getting back and forth to the Indian mission today presents no problems, but back then, “My driving through the Indian reservation in summer was on unpaved roads With the heat and dust coming in through the open windows, I contracted Valley Fever,” he said. “There were just two of us most of the time, but sometimes three,” Father recounts, “and we were kept busy on Sundays. And back then you couldn’t take anything before Mass, not even a drink of water. But it was easier then; we were young.” On December 19, 1952, Father Maguire’s pastor, Father Leo Gattes, gave him a letter from the Diocese assigning him immediately to a new job: becoming the second resident pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Scottsdale. OLPH was at First Street and Brown Avenue, on the southern edge of what then was Scottsdale’s “downtown” area, such as it was, and bordering the year-old town’s barrio. “There was no farewell or anything,” Father says. “I just threw my few belongings in a car and drove over here myself. I arrived just before seven o’clock in the evening, just in time to attend the St. Vincent de Paul meeting. I didn’t know a soul, in the meeting or the entire town. There at the meeting were John Kelly, Joe Wagner, Paul Datz, Frank Gornick, Sam Ruiz and Buck Ohms. Today, they’re almost all gone. Only Paul Datz is still around, and Sam Ruiz moved away and we don’t know what’s become of him,” Father reminisces. “Those first years—’53, ’54, ’55—they were great years. I didn’t know how good I had it!" Newspaper Articles Over the years, many wonderful articles have been published about our beloved Father Maguire. Below are just a few collected by a dedicated parishioner and employee, Alison Byland. If you have any articles saved from the past that you would like to share, please bring them to the Parish Center to be scanned and immediately returned to you. May 21st, 1993 Scottsdale Progress May 22nd, 1993 Scottsdale Progress May, 1993 Newspaper Unknown May 30th, 1997 Scottsdale Tribune February 14th, 2002 Newspaper Unknown November 23rd, 2002 Arizona Republic December 23rd, 2002 Arizona Republic February 17th, 2006 Scottsdale Tribune February 19th, 2006 Arizona Republic February 20th, 2006 Diocese of Phoenix Website February 21st, 2006 Arizona Republic February 23rd, 2006 Arizona Republic February 23rd, 2006 Arizona Republic February 23rd, 2006 Arizona Republic February 23rd, 2006 Arizona Republic | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
