A COMMENT FROM A READER ON KIRBY’S BIO
“Pat, the following is all taken from Dawn Eden Goldstein’s articles about Prior Kirby. Despite the Benedictine vow of stability he has been going from place to place. Did Meath diocese not do due diligence checks?
Dawn wrote:
Father Mark Daniel Kirby was born in Connecticut in 1952. He began his experience of religious life at the age of twenty in a traditional Benedictine monastery. At a certain point, however, he forsook that cloister in favor of a small monastic community that had nightly Eucharistic adoration, the Brothers of Jesus Crucified of Providence, Rhode Island.
Eventually the community was absorbed by the Cistercian Abbey of Notre Dame de Nazareth in Rougemont, Québec, and it was for that abbey that Kirby was ordained a priest on November 16, 1986.
At some point after ordination, Kirby suffered health issues as well as what he describes as “burnouts” that led him to modify his monastic observances. He writes, “This led to a prolonged absence from the abbey of my profession and, eventually, to my attachment to the Abbey of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome.”
“These were ‘desert years,’” Kirby adds, “full of uncertainties and trials.”
He taught for a brief time and was permitted to serve as chaplain to the nuns of the Monastery of the Glorious Cross in Branford, Connecticut where he could be close to friends and family.
Beginning a Benedictine Life in Tulsa
Late 2007 also saw Kirby enter into discussion with then-Bishop of Tulsa Edward Slattery, sharing his desire, as he would later put it, “to live my monastic vocation in daily Eucharistic adoration and reparation, while offering spiritual support to my brother priests.” The bishop responded in February 2008 with an invitation to live in the diocese, and in July of that year Kirby received permission from the Holy See to be released from the Cistercian order so as to incardinate into the Diocese of Tulsa and renew his monastic vows under Slattery’s authority.
Kirby’s renewal of his Benedictine vows under Bishop Slattery took place on April 2, 2009, in preparation for what would be, in his words, “the foundation of a monastery of diocesan right, dedicated to Eucharistic adoration and to the spiritual care of the clergy: the Monastery of Our Lady of the Cenacle.”
Although Father Mark Kirby enjoyed the support of Bishop Edward Slattery of the Diocese of Tulsa, the monk was unable to find a suitable property in the diocese for his nascent monastery. A new opportunity opened up in October 2011 when, having located a rent-to-buy property in the Diocese of Meath, Ireland, he received approbation from the local ordinary, Bishop Michael Smith, to found a monastery there.
Silverstream Priory in Stamullen, County Meath, had only one member besides Kirby when it opened in late February 2012, but that would soon change. By June 2014, it was reported that the monastery had “far too many young monks (plus interested young men) for their meager means.” In the meantime, Kirby’s friend and chief fundraiser David Craig worked to raise the funds so that the monks could purchase the property.”
MEATH PRIEST
A Meath priest contacted me yesterday to say, and I quote:
“The name of a certain Ann Corcoran of Dublin 4 in the Mid-Louth Independent article which one of the comments cites as one of four “sod turners” for the new monastic church (which has failed to materialize after nearly three years):
https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/mid-louth-independent/20180227/283162904086664
Mrs Corcoran is ex-wife to the late John Corcoran, founder of Paddy Power.
Maybe it’s puritanical of me, but a monastic church being financed through gambling money, readily taken from poor people and gambling addicts, doesn’t seem entirely appropriate. I could be wrong”.
Apart from the priest’s comments – if the monastery is making a profit of some Euro 600,000 a year why has the church not materialised three years after the laying of the sod?
POPE FRANCIS DOCUMENT – REPRECUSSIONS FOR SILVERSTREAM ???
APOSTOLIC LETTER
ISSUED MOTU PROPRIO
BY THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS
“VOS ESTIS LUX MUNDI”
GENERAL PROVISIONS
Art. 1 – Scope of application
§1. These norms apply to reports regarding clerics or members of Institutes of Consecrated Life or Societies of Apostolic Life and concerning:
a) delicts against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue consisting of:
i. forcing someone, by violence or threat or through abuse of authority, to perform or submit to sexual acts;
PATS SUMMARY
The situation in Silverstream is out of hand and should never haven allowed to get this far.
Bishop Michael Smith has been more than careless in his oversight of this diocesan monastery.
The “founder” Mark Kirby has been a wandering and meandering monk- what canon law might call a “vagus”.
The spirituality of Silverstream seems to be a mixture of Tridentineism, alleged whispers from tabernacles and homoerotic ideation.
A million Euro a year has been going in there and it costs Euro 300,000 to run leaving an annual “profit” of Euro 700,000.
After years of fundraising no church has been built.
Someone mentioned there been thousands of euros in cash being kept in drawers.
It looks as if Charity Legislation has been ignored.
The Gardai are investigating sexual assaults and misappropriation of funds.
Older monks have been kissing younger ones on the head.
Silverstream needs to be dissolved and the monks given a choice of going to another monastery or back to the world.
Ordained monks should be given pastoral work in Meath.
Dom Kirby needs to retire permanently.
Silverstream has been one man’s fantasy.
A very costly fantasy in terms of human suffering and indeed euros.
BISHOP PAT BUCKLEY 