People Australia

John Creagh, n.d.

John Creagh (1870-1947) Redemptorist priest 

Birth: 19 August 1870 in Thomondgate, Limerick, Ireland, son of John Creagh, manager, and Mary, née Tymons. Unmarried. Death: 24 January 1947 at Wellington, New Zealand. 

• Joined the Redemptorist order in Ireland in 1884. Professed in Liverpool, England, in 1887, and was ordained in September 1895 at Teignmouth, Devon.
• After teaching in Irish schools and at Clonard monastery and a spell in Galway, in 1902 he became director of the Holy Family Confraternity at Limerick, where he preached violent anti-semitism, leading to a notorious boycott of Jewish businesses in Limerick from 1904 to 1906.
• He was transferred to Belfast then sent as a missionary to the Philippines, but suffered a nervous breakdown.
• Following a few years as a missionary in New Zealand, in 1914 he was transferred to Perth, Western Australia then in May 1916 was appointed Vicar Apostolic in the Kimberleys, based in Broome.
• He was parish priest at Bunbury from 1923 to 1925 then at Pennant Hills, New South Wales. While attached to the Redemptorist monastery at Waratah, Newcastle, he suffered a stroke.
• Creagh spent his final years in a monastery in Wellington, New Zealand.
• His brother Thomas (1863-1931), also a priest, was a well-known missionary in England and Scotland and was a founder in October 1912 of the Redemptorists in South Africa.

Sources
article by Ann Dolan, Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009), https://www.dib.ie/biography/creagh-john-a2170