Mountain Monsignor

Over West Virginia back country roads, made muddy by weeks of rain, ploughed a train of automobiles one day last week bearing 49 Catholic priests and Bishop John Joseph Swint of Wheeling. The party drew up before the small churchyard at Sand Fork. Forming in procession, the men of God marched into the church. There Bishop Swint solemnly handed purple robes, a purple biretta and a white lace cotta (surplice) to a wrinkled-faced, white-haired old priest named Thomas Aquinas Quirk whom Pope Pius XI had elected to invest with the title Monsignor.

This honorary officership in the army of the Church Militant was 65 years in coming to Father Quirk. Born in Ireland 91 years ago, he fought in the U. S. Civil War, became a priest in 1870, is supposed to have twice renounced his rights to an earldom. Alert old Father Quirk has ministered for half a century to three mountain parishes 15 miles apart. Devoted to his collie "Shep," his blackened pipe, his comfortable Congress gaiters and his crushed black hat, he refused until last year to accept an automobile from his flock, preferring to ride from parish to parish on a sturdy grey horse. Once, said he, his eye for horseflesh caused him to stop to admire a number of mounts tethered in Huntington. One of the horse-owners asked the way to a bank. That man, said Father Quirk, turned out to be Jesse James. He robbed the bank.

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