By Denise Foley

It’s safe to say that Father John McNamee is the only priest in Philadelphia who’s been to the Sundance Film Festival to watch an actor (in this case, Chestnut Hill’s David Morse) portray him on screen. Or who has published a memoir and three books of poetry. And he may be one of the few whose inner-city parochial school is thriving, even though only 15 of its 215 students are actually Catholic.

Father Mac

McNamee is the pastor of St. Malachy’s, located in a former stalwartly Irish community in North Philadelphia that has been African-American since the 1930s, when a new wave of home-grown immigrants swept up from the south.

His memoir, Diary of a City Priest, is an unvarnished chronicle of a year in his life (his 57th—he’s now 73) in which his inarguably saintly work—ministering to the poor—only bedeviled him. Finding himself resentful of the late-night knock at the rectory door—which meant a handout of two, three, five dollars, or a can of soup from his own pantry—he admitted he was “weighed down by my heavy spirit, my aging body, my distracted self.”

A trip to Ireland for a month gave him some respite, as it always does. A closet contemplative, Father Mac, as he’s called, often uses the time in his father’s homeland to write poetry. His most recent work—released at the end of October 2006 by Dufour Editions, a Chester Springs, Pa., publisher of Irish poetry and literature—is Donegal Suite, a collection of poetry which is nourished by his life on two continents and is an exploration of home, both of place and of heart.

• Read one of John McNamee’s poems, "Homecoming," here.

Two years from retirement, the priest’s thoughts these days ricochet from his work at St. Malachy’s—where finances are always a struggle—to Ireland, where he imagines himself someday, walking the Donegal’s breathtaking coastline, and returning to the hearth to write poetry.

“The year in which you turn 75 you’re required to submit a letter of retirement, and more and more, the Church is acting on that,” he said one morning recently. “I notice that in this other piece of my life, the poems, I only seem to have time for that whenever I’m not here. What I imagine myself doing is finding some place borrowed or owned where I could have more leisure for writing. When you live where you work, the minute you come downstairs in the morning, your workday engages you.”

The new book

And his workday is fraught with the everyday crises of the impoverished. “The poor,” the Bible promises,”you will always have with you.” And they are always with McNamee.

“It’s the school that is the big financial challenge of the parish,” he says. “I try to keep tuition as low as I can. It’s $1,600 per student, and it probably costs $4,500.”

One way he’s been able to keep St. Malachy’s Parish School solvent and independent is with a little help from his friends. Active in the Catholic peace movement, McNamee draws about half his Sunday Mass flock from the activist community and others from far-flung parts of the Delaware Valley who provide financial support to the church which is hurting as much for Catholics as it is for money.

And the fact that McNamee is Irish—his father was from County Tyrone; his mother grew up in Girardville, Pa., birthplace of the Molly Maguires—has helped. He’s always had strong ties to Philadelphia’s Irish community. Part of the school’s operating fund comes from proceeds from an annual concert of Irish music by McNamee’s friend, Mick Moloney, folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and the man credited with fostering the revival of Irish music in Philadelphia in the 1970s.

“As I get closer to retirement, the school is becoming more precious to me and I know it needs to have a system in line that would keep it going without the notoriety that I give it by writing books and poems,” says McNamee.

Still, he longs for Donegal. “I dream about having the leisure in order to write and poetry is the medium I find most attractive,” he says wistfully. “Not that it’s scholarly, but the Greek word for scholar means leisure, and scholarship was the privilege of the leisure class. I would like to have some of whatever value that has. Not that the routine tasks of life aren’t important—doing budgets, organizing Irish concerts, deciding where to put the sign telling people where the restrooms are. But I do have a poem I’m working on and I derive a particular satisfaction from that work, the creativity, I hope, that is special to that kind of medium. “

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