26 July 2018, The Tablet

Frontline priests during the First World War

by K.V. Turley

Frontline priests during the First World War

Fr Willie Doyle: one of 41 Catholic chaplains to die in the First World War

 

 “The Orangemen will not forget a certain Roman Catholic chaplain … He went forward and back over the battle­field with bullets whining about him, seeking out the dying and kneeling in the mud beside them to give absolution, walking with death with a smile on his face, watched by his men with reverence and a kind of awe until a shell burst near him and he was killed … The ­[soldiers] remember him as a saint – they speak his name with tears.”

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