Denis M. Long, Pioneer and Early Priests, Archdiocese of Brisbane, Deceased or retired by 1929, 2021, p 65:
Fr Patrick Sheehan

But for the research of Rev Dr Neil Byrne I would know little about Fr Patrick Sheehan. The only record I could access was his name among the priests of the Roman Catholic diocese of Brisbane in the 1865 and 1866 editions of Pugh's Almanac.

Sheehan was just three years ordained and the youngest of the seven rebels who departed from Bishop Quinn and the Brisbane mission in 1867. He was the first of the seven to die, at the age of thirty-five, in 1873.

He was born to Michael and Mary (nee Kiely) Sheehan at Modeligo, County Waterford on 3 March 1838. He was educated at Mt Melleray and then at All Hallows where he was ordained on 26 June 1864.(1) Most likely he arrived in Brisbane in late 1864.

Bishop Quinn had observed him to be a man of commendable detachment from material things despite his obvious lack of means. He noted that Sheehan was uncomplaining but readily influenced by his more experienced All Hallows colleagues.

After Sheehan's arrival in America, a place was found for him under the roof of Father Michael Corrigan, Rector of St Peter's Church. Jersey City. However by 1869, he had retired north to join the other Brisbane exiles in Albany diocese. … Patrick was sent to Oneido County to assist Father John Ludden with the spiritual care of the 347 families who frequented St Mary's in Florence.

In 1869 Sheehan wrote to Bishop Quinn seeking his forgiveness, but as Neil Byrne writes:

Sheehan was to find an opportunity for permanent residence and eventually a parish of his, neither in Brisbane nor in Albany, but eastwards across the Hudson in the new diocese of Springfield. … The bishop sent him to assist at the new and rapidly growing Irish parish of St Joseph's Pittsfield in Massachusetts. … The parish registers testify to Sheehan's pastoral activity in Pittsfield from December 1870 to August 1872, about which time he was appointed to St Patrick's, Hinsdale, a new parish which had been split off from Pittsfield in 1868. A community of Irish farmers had settled there in the 1830s and were now in a position to support a priest of their own. This fifth posting in less than twelve years would be Sheehan's last. He died of gastritis on 13 April 1873.

Neil Byrne sums up:

Patrick Sheehan is one of those too easily forgotten priests of Brisbane's troubled past. It may be kind … to think of Patrick Sheehan as a quiet solitary servant of God who, like Wordsworth's 'Lucy', dwell among the untrodden way. Let us acknowledge him now for in his own life, it seems, 'there were none to praise, and very few to love'.

In my short stories of priests who ministered in the diocese of Brisbane, and who died before 1900, I chose to précis the paper on Fr Sheehan, delivered by Rev Dr Neil Byrne D.Ph. to the Brisbane Catholic Historical Society.(2)

Footnotes
1. Kevin Condon, The Missionary College of All Hallows 1842-1891, student 648, p. 315.
2. Proceedings of the Brisbane Catholic Historical Society, Vol VI, pp. 58-60.

Reproduced by permission of Fr Denis Long.