Irish Examiner view: Hope for healing behind campaign to declare Fr Willie Doyle a saint

The plea to canonise the priest who died in the mud of the Western Front carries with it a hope for reconciliation

Fr Willie Doyle died at the age of 44 alongside the men he ministered to on the Western Front during the first world war. File picture

The campaign for the canonisation of Fr Willie Doyle, more than a century after his death in the mud of the Western Front, carries with it hopes of healing and reconciliation and a shared understanding of the impact of the different forms of Irish nationalism in the first world war.

Fr Doyle, 44, from Dalkey, Co Dublin, died in the third Battles of Ypres in Flanders. It was a bungled and poorly planned attack which cost the predominantly Irish Catholic 16th Division, in which Fr Doyle was a chaplain, and the 36th (Ulster) Division many lives.