Francis Xavier Corr O.P. (1912-2000)

I first visited Grenada in April 1982 along with another Irish Dominican. We were both stationed in Trinidad & Tobago at the time and took a post-Easter break with the brethren of the English province. Fr Francis Xavier Corr was then living at the Cathedral in St George’s and took care of us with a kindness and generosity that I have never forgotten. Grenada was a Marxist country at the time, governed by Maurice Bishop. People joked that there were three Bishops on the island: the prime minister, the actual Bishop,  Sydney Charles, and a formidable Irish nun whose nickname was ‘the Bishop’!

Fr Francis joined the Order in 1932 and was ordained a priest in 1938. His official obituary records that he suffered a nervous breakdown almost immediately after his ordination and was slowly nursed back to health at a therapeutic community, Templewood, whose regime now seems very enlightened for its time. He went to Newcastle in 1948 and in 1954 was asked by the provincial to go to Grenada.  He was very keen to do this and was to spend the rest of his life in the Caribbean. He served first at the Cathedral (pictured, still ruined after Hurricane Ivan in 2004) and then on Carriacou. This is a beautiful but at the time a very poor island whose main industries were fishing, making rum, and smuggling. Fr Francis preached outside the Adventist chapels in an effort to prevent his flock drifting away from the Church. He was strikingly simple, even austere, in his lifestyle but was always available to the people, traveling immediately to other islands when he heard that there was someone in need of the sacraments.

He moved back to the mainland in 1966 serving in Gouyave and then as prior of the novitiate house at Mount St Ervan’s. He later served other parishes on the island, was at the Cathedral in the early 1980s, but when he became frail moved to the priory in Roxborough where the brethren cared devotedly for him. Fr Francis was a man of great piety and devotion, and was completely dedicated to the care of the people. Many people who knew him regarded him as a saint.  ‘About him’, says his obituary, ‘there was an innate courtesy, a mischievous sense of humour, and a quiet gratitude …’.

I think it may have been that mischievous sense of humour that told us about the three Bishops in Grenada. He drove me and my confrere to various parts of the island and treated us to dinner in the Red Crab Restaurant, the place where not long afterwards a coup against Maurice Bishop was plotted. The unrest that followed this coup led to the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983. One moment of dry humour I remember very well. We were driving up a hill along which had been erected a series of large Socialist-era posters. The first said: ‘Not a year without increased productivity’. The second said: ‘Not a month without the revolution’. The third said: ‘Not a day without the struggle’. Fr Francis commented: ‘well the third one is true’.