Father Fahy: banker, matchmaker, chaplain

Anthony Fahy was Irish chaplain in Buenos Aires from January 1844 until his death in February 1871. The writers who describe him do not agree about much, including the year he was born and the illness that killed him, and the most uncomfortable thing in his record rests on secondary accounts.

From Black Abbey to the brig Plata

Casey's 2021 study has him born in Loughrea, Co. Galway, on 11 January 1805; Juan José Delaney gives 1804. He took the Dominican habit in 1828, studied in Rome and was ordained in 1831. Casey places him in Kentucky and Ohio from 1832 to 1836, where Pat Nally has him spending two years in Ohio. He came home to become prior of Black Abbey, Kilkenny.

Why he went to Argentina has two layers. The immediate cause, in Casey's account, was that the Irish chaplain Fr Patrick O'Gorman was ill by 1842 and community leaders asked for a second priest. The deeper purpose is Patrick McKenna's reading: Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin, worried that the Irish around Chascomús were marrying into local society, asked the Bishop of Ossory to persuade his friend Fahy to go, and Fahy, from his Ohio experience, already shared the view that Irish immigrants should be kept separate and rural.

The British Packet and Argentine News of 20 January 1844 recorded the arrival on 11 January of the brig Plata from Liverpool, with "Rev. Mr Fay" among the passengers, appointed chaplain to Irish Catholics by the Archbishop of Dublin. The community was then put at 3,500. McKenna gives 1842 in one place and 1843 in another, and Edmundo Murray dates the chaplaincy from 1843. Fahy lived for most of his ministry in a house given free by the merchant Thomas Armstrong.

Consul, postmaster, judge

Fahy described himself, Casey records, as consul, postmaster, judge, pastor, interpreter and provider of work for his people. McKenna fills that in. He held immigrants' savings and property in his own name, acting as their banker and agent, and matched land sellers with buyers; Armstrong was in turn Fahy's banker. Delaney calls him the patriarch of the Irish on the pampas: chaplain organiser, social adviser and matchmaker, who urged settlers out to the camp.

In 1847 he formed a famine relief committee, and a letter dated 15 June 1847 went to the Archbishop of Dublin with the money, urging sober, industrious farm workers to come to Argentina. McKenna says over £400 was sent. Through his sister, prioress of the Carmelite convent in Loughrea, he persuaded the Sisters of Mercy to come; María José Roger records seven sisters arriving in 1856 and opening a school for Irish girls on Riobamba Street in 1857.

Rosas and Camila O'Gorman

Fahy's Buenos Aires was Rosas's Buenos Aires. Casey calls him a firm defender of Rosas, with loyalty that looked doubtful during the Anglo-French blockade of 1845 to 1850. McKenna adds that Rosas protected Irish people and property.

Then there is Camila O'Gorman. The Dictionary of Irish Latin American Biography describes her as the granddaughter of Thomas O'Gorman, a merchant related to Dr Michael O'Gorman of Ennis. In December 1847 she eloped with the priest Ladislao Gutiérrez; an Irish priest is said to have recognised the couple in Corrientes. On 18 August 1848, at Santos Lugares, on Rosas's orders, she was shot with Gutiérrez, aged about 20 and eight months pregnant. Murray, citing Julianello's The Scarlet Trinity, writes that Fahy and the jurist Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield demanded exemplary punishment. Casey goes further: Rosas consulted Fahy, who agreed the case justified exemplary punishment because it had stained the Church and given the Irish community a bad name, and who approved the execution. No primary source for any of this was opened, and Ussher's 1951 biography, the standard one, was not consulted. The honest statement is that, according to the historians Murray and Casey, Fahy backed the sentence.

A community kept apart

Murray writes that Fahy kept the community separate and English-speaking, and Brad Lange describes a policy of isolation and non-assimilation. McKenna shows how it worked: new Irish priests were assigned to camp districts, first Chascomús and Dolores, then Mercedes, San Antonio de Areco and Chivilcoy, with the aim of an English-language education for every Irish child. Irish-only marriage, in McKenna's account, lasted until the 1940s. Helen Kelly, as reviewed in the Irish Times, reportedly says Fahy required priests from Ireland to speak Spanish.

Yellow fever, 1871

Canal 26 tells the end this way: on 16 February 1871, during the yellow-fever epidemic, Fahy gave the last rites to a dying Italian against advice, fell ill, and died on 20 February. Chronicles blamed yellow fever, but doctors noted a long-standing heart condition. Casey confirms the date and the burial two days later in the clergy pantheon at Recoleta, and says the cause remains disputed between the fever and the heart disease on his death certificate. He lies today, Canal 26 says, in a later tomb of Irish marble topped by a Celtic cross, facing Brown's. Patrick Joseph Dillon succeeded him as chaplain in 1871.

His name outlasted him. In 1891 the Ladies of St Joseph's Society founded the Fahy Institute for orphan boys. And in 1889 the agents who filled the City of Dresden promised emigrants financing from "Fr Fahy's bank", nearly twenty years after the banker was dead.