Mount Melleray Abbey Has A New Leader

The Cistercian Community in Mount Melleray has a new Abbot.

Dom Richard Purcell was recently elected as the community’s leader after he filled the same position at Mount Saint Joseph Abbey in Roscrea in County Tipperary, a position he held from 2009, serving first for six years and then on his reappointment in June 2015.

Dom Richard is a native of Rathgar in Dublin, he received his first abbatial blessing from the them Bishop of Killaloe Most Reverend Willie Walsh.  

The new abbot at Mount Melleray entered Mount St Joseph Abbey in 1997, having completed a degree in music and French at UCD.

Dom Richard previously studied Music, French and Italian at UCD. He completed Philosophy studies at Maynooth and Theology studies in Oxford.

On completion of his studies in Oxford, he returned to Saint Joseph’s where he took up the position of bursar. He was ordained in 2007 and became Prior of the Community while retaining the title of bursar.

The Constitution of the Cistercian Congregation does not allow a monk to become an Abbot until he is thirty five years of age and is seven professed.

When he was first elected as Abbot at Saint Joseph’s he failed to reach the requirements to take up the position. 

However after he was voted as Abbot in the North Tipperary Monastery proceedings were suspended while the necessary dispensations were sought from Rome.

Cardinal Rode the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Like and Societies of Apostolic Life issued the dispensation for Dom Purcell to Dom Eamon Fitzgerald, himself a former Abbot of the Mount Melleray Abbey.

The monastery at Mount Melleray was founded on 30 May 1832 at Scrahan on land owned by Sir Richard Keane in Cappoquin by a colony of Irish and English monks, expelled from the abbey of Melleray after the French Revolution of 1830, and who had come to Ireland under the leadership of Fr. Vincent de Paul Ryan. It was called Mount Melleray in memory of the motherhouse. On the feast of St. Bernard, 1833, the foundation stone of the new monastery was blessed by the Most Rev. William Abraham, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore.