A campaign has begun to have Fr Willie Doyle SJ made a saint more than a century after he died in the mud of Flanders during the first World War.
Should the campaign be successful, Fr Doyle will be only the second Irish person in the last 500 years to be canonised since St Oliver Plunkett was made a saint in 1975.
Fr Doyle, a chaplain to the mainly Catholic 16th (Irish) Division, went into a shell-hole to give the last rites to three men from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the Battle of Passchendaele on August 16th, 1917.
He went to the assistance of two officers who were dying, Second Lieut Arthur Green from Co Down and Second Lieut Charles Marlow, a former captain of the King’s Hospital School cricket team.
