John Magee (bishop)

John Magee SPS (born 24 September 1936) is a Roman Catholic bishop emeritus in Ireland.

He was born in Newry Northern Ireland, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dromore, on 24 September 1936.

His father was a dairy farmer.

He was educated at St Colman's College in Newry and entered the St Patrick's Missionary Society at Kiltegan, County Wicklow, in 1954.

He also attended University College Cork where he obtained a degree in philosophy before going to study theology in Rome, where he was ordained priest on 17 March 1962.

He served as a missionary priest in Nigeria for almost six years before being appointed Procurator General of St Patrick's Society in Rome.

In 1969 he was an official of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples in Rome, when he was chosen by Pope Paul VI to be one of his private secretaries.

On Pope Paul's death he remained in service as a private secretary to his successor, Pope John Paul I and Pope John Paul II.

Magee is the only man to hold the position of private secretary to three Popes in Vatican history.

He also acted as chaplain to the Vatican's Swiss Guard.

The now Saint Paul VI treated Magee kindly and paternally; both joined on the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist to celebrate their name day.

On their last such encounter Paul VI gave Magee an icon of St. John the Baptist that he received from the King of Jordan.

Magee said that he had found Pope John Paul I dead in his bed on the morning of 28 September 1978.

While he was the first to summon assistance, when criticised for saying that it was he who had found the pope dead he explained that the nun who served the pope coffee each morning was the first to discover he was dead, when she realised he had not opened the door to accept his morning beverage.

On 28 April 1981 Magee travelled, without the knowledge or approval of the Vatican's Secretariat of State, to Long Kesh Prison outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, to meet with IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.

Magee sought, unsuccessfully, to convince Sands to end his hunger strike; Sands died the following week.

Magee played a role in the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference where he was featured in the modernisation of the liturgy in Ireland.

His pastoral approach placed heavy emphasis on the promotion of vocations to the priesthood but, after some initial success, the number of vocations in the diocese of Cloyne declined, a trend reflected across the island of Ireland.

He appointed Ireland's first female "faith developer" and entrusted her with the task of transforming an Irish rural diocese into a cosmopolitan pastoral model using techniques borrowed from several urban dioceses in the United States.

Magee involved himself in a dispute with the Friends of St Colman's Cathedral, a local conservationist group in Cobh which organised an effective and professional opposition to the Bishop's plans to re-order the interior of Cobh Cathedral, plans similar to previous re-orderings in Killarney, Cork and Limerick cathedrals.

In an oral hearing conducted by An Bord Pleanála, the Irish Planning Board, it emerged that irregularities had occurred in the planning application that were traced to Cobh Town Council, which accommodated the Bishop's plans to modify the Victorian interior designed by E W Pugin and George Ashlin.

He remained for a time in the same capacity with Pope John Paul II until appointed papal Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations in 1982, and was appointed Bishop of the Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland on 17 February 1987.

He was consecrated bishop on 17 March 1987, St. Patrick's Day, by Pope John Paul II at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

The letter that he produced was a congratulatory message dated 9 December 2003 [no.

158/99/L) to the team of architects who worked on the cathedral project from Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The whole text of this letter was then reproduced in a publication called Conserving Cobh Cathedral: The Case Stated pp. 108–109.

On 2 June 2006, when Bishop Magee was in Lourdes, An Bord Pleanála directed Cobh Town Council to refuse the Bishop's application.

On 25 July 2006, Magee published a pastoral letter stating: "As a result of An Bord Pleanála's decision, the situation concerning the temporary plywood altar still remains unresolved and needs to be addressed. The Diocese will initiate discussions with the planning authorities in an attempt to find a solution, which would be acceptable from both the liturgical and heritage points of view."

A diocesan official explained that the bishop did not wish to institute a judicial review in the Irish High Court because of the financial implications of such an action and because of the bishop's desire to avoid a Church-State clash.

Claims that the decision of An Bord Pleanála infringed the constitutional property rights of religious bodies were dismissed when it was revealed that the cathedral is the property of a secular trust established in Irish law.

It is estimated that Bishop Magee spent over €200,000 in his bid to re-order Cobh Cathedral.

The controversy was reported even outside Ireland, as shown in the external links below.

A February 2006 article by Kieron Wood in The Sunday Business Post claimed that Magee did not have the backing of the Vatican in his proposals for St Colman's. At the oral hearing of An Bord Pleanála he was requested to provide a copy of the letter from the Vatican in which he claimed he had been given approval for the modernising of Cobh Cathedral.

At a meeting of his liturgical advisers and diocesan clergy in November 2006, Bishop Magee spoke of his conversation with the Pope in the course of that ad limina visit at the end of the previous month.

He mentioned that he had been closely questioned on several aspects of his proposals to re-order Cobh Cathedral.

It was obvious, he said, that the Pope had been kept well informed of the entire issue.

Bishop Magee's contribution to the ad limina visit concerned not only his diocese of Cloyne but also ceremonial matters (an area of expertise for him) on behalf of the Conference.

He also facilitated the broadcasting, in coincidence with the visit, of a life of Pope John Paul I prepared some months earlier by Italian state television (RAI).

He was Bishop of Cloyne from 1987 to 2010; following scandal he resigned from that position on 24 March 2010, becoming a bishop emeritus.

Magee is the only person to have been private secretary to three popes.

When Paul VI was beatified in October 2014 Magee travelled to Rome where he led the procession of bishops.