Fr Niall Coll: The day everything changed and going from St Johnston to Bishophood

Fr Niall Coll heard the words and momentarily went blank.

On October 27, he sat across a desk from Monsignor Julien Kaboré, Chargé d’Affaires of the Apostolic Nunciature in Ireland on the Navan Road in Dublin.

Four evenings previous, Fr Coll – busy with daily duties in the Tawnawilly parish – received a call to meet Monsignor Kaboré.

The conversation went from the weather to their memories of studying at the Gregorian University in Rome.

The day – and Fr Coll's life – changed when Monsignor Kaboré leaned forward and opened a file.

The words spun his mind a little at first: “Pope Francis has appointed you Bishop of Ossory.”

“It took me a while to percolate what it meant,” the 59-year-old Bishop-elect says now ahead of his Episcopal Ordination on Sunday at the Cathedral of Saint Mary in Kilkenny,

“You don't apply – you're appointed. You don't know about it yourself or even know that you're being considered.

“I was conscious of the uprooting from the Parish of Tawnawilly.

“I felt as if I was just getting to know the people and had set up some projects. All of a sudden, I was leaving all of this behind.

“In a parish, you get to know people- the old, the sick, the housebound and the ordinary people - and I found people very welcoming. I was there through sickness, deaths, marriages; you get to know people during the good and the bad.”

Newly appointed Bishop-elect Niall Coll of the Diocese of Ossory greets parishioners outside of Saint Mary’s Cathedral

A son of Willie and Kathleen Coll from the Hillhead Brae in St Johnston, he was very aware of his faith from a young age.

He was an altar server at St Baithin's Church for 'Doctor Cunnea' (V Rev Daniel G Cunnea, the then PP of St Johnston) and had a maternal uncle, Fr Sammy Holmes, who was a priest.

Niall was in sixth class and serving at Mass at a time when another St Johnston native, Oliver McCrossan, was ordained and soon moved to the Philippines with the St Columban Missionary.

“I was excited about the fact that he was going to the Philippines,” Fr Coll says. “It seemed so far away and exotic.”

Fr Coll and Fr McCrossan, who has since returned to Donegal again, were back at the altar of St Baithin's last Sunday morning alongside Monsignor Dan Carr.

His father, Willie, was a signalman at St Johnston Railway Station and was a postman in the area while his mother, Kathleen, worked in the meat factory in Carrigans. His parents and siblings – Gerard, Anne Marie and Catriona – will watch on with pride on Sunday.

St Johnston – home - has never been far from either his heart or his mind.

“I have a great love of a sense of east Donegal,” he says.

“It will be very important for me to keep my links with Donegal and especially St Johnston. The St Johnston people have been very supportive.

“St Johnston was a very tightly-knit community when I was growing up. We knew our neighbours.

“I often think that, when I was growing up in the height of the Troubles, people were very afraid just in the road in Derry. St Johnston was a mixed area but I remember it being very close and very respectful. It must have been difficult for people, fearing that bombing and shooting would spill over.”

In July 1988, after seven years studying in Maynooth, he was one of five candidates for the Sacrament of Holy Orders at St Eunan's Cathedral.

Fr Joseph O'Donnell, who grew up only a couple of hundred yards away on St Johnston's Main Street, was ordained on the same day.

Sadly, Fr Joseph passed away following an illness in 2019 (Fr Coll succeeded his townsman as parish priest of Drumholm in 2019 after 18 years teaching at St Mary's University in Belfast).

The two, along with Fr Joseph Gillespie – another from the Main Street in St Johnston, now based in Rhode Island after many years in Mexico – attended St Eunan's College at the same time.

The others ordained by Bishop Seamus Hegarty on that July Sunday in '88 were: Fr Denis Quinn from Glenties, now the PP in Glencolmcille; Letterkenny's Fr Paddy Dunne, the current PP in Kilmacrennan; and Fr Pat Ward, the Arranmore native who is now PP in Kincasslagh and Burtonport.

It is a changed and changing world and Church now, the landscape much altered over the last 34-and-a-half years.

“When I entered the seminary, it wasn't something unknown,” the Bishop-elect says. “We were conscious at the time of a changing society that was becoming more secular. That has very much intensified.

“The roots of faith are very deep, but the context of how people live the faith has changed.

“An allegiance to a faith in St Johnston was sort of intense – you were 'one or the other' – but in the modern world, people set our own personal convictions.

“It is personal now, not tribal. The task for me now will be to help people make the choice of faith and to grow in the discipleship of Christ.

“People are better educated now, whereas in the past the priest was the best educated in the parish. In the long term, that will invite a deep personal connection.

“We live in a time of secular upheaval and in the wake of the abuse crisis in the Church, all of this is a call for the Church to renew itself.

“In the future, parish communities will need to do much more to help with religious education of not just children, but adults too.

“A very many people received sacraments, but only got a nominal rearing in faith so it may be hard for them to go to Mass. I often think that we need to do something different for people in their 20s and 30s to explore their faith – and that isn't something a priest will do alone.

“The dream is that every parish can come alive with people running adult education groups and bible groups.”

He won't arrive in his new surroundings as a complete stranger.

Fr Coll recalled Sr Canice (Maura Drea), who was principal of Loreto Convent School in Letterkenny when he was a student at St Eunan’s College.

Fr Tom Norris and Fr Willie Dalton, priests of the Ossory diocese, who he describes as ‘passionate and insightful lecturers’, taught him theology and canon law during his time at Maynooth College and he spent three years teaching at Carlow College in the 1990s.

“I realised when studying with people from Kilkenny that it's the centre of hurling – a big change from the cricket in St Johnston,” he laughs.

“I am under no illusions about the challenges, but also I am intensely grateful for the opportunity I have to continue my priestly ministry and build God's kingdom.

“I am so lucky that my parents are hale and hearty and I am so happy that they can join me.”