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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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DIXON, PATRICK WILLIAM (1846-1928)

DIXON, PATRICK WILLIAM, Catholic parish priest, Newcastle, 1871-1928; b. parish of Dunmore, Co. Galway, Ireland, 8 Dec 1846, s/o William Dixon and Nora Byrnes; ordained 1870; d. Chatham, 3 Dec 1928.

Patrick W. Dixon was educated at St Jarleth's College in Tuam, Ireland, and came to Chatham in 1865 as a teacher of Greek and Latin at St Michael's male academy, while preparing for the priesthood under the tutelage of Bishop James Rogers. He finished his theological training at the Grand Seminary in Montreal in 1870. After a brief assignment in Boston he was appointed priest at Newcastle in 1871, as successor to the parish administrator, Father Joseph-Auguste Babineau. Earlier events during his tenure at Newcastle included the dedication of the first St Mary's Church in 1875 and the construction of the rectory in 1884. He continued as the parish priest of St Mary's for a total of fifty-seven years.

Dixon was a scholarly man whose classical library was "unsurpassed in the province." For many years he acted as supervisor of studies for St Mary's Academy and taught Latin to the high school grades. His learning and certain features of his mind and personality are revealed in letters which he wrote to the Miramichi Advance in 1896, when he was at the center of a political dispute involving the Hon. Lemuel J. Tweedie, Bishop Rogers, and others, and in another lengthy letter which he sent to the Union Advocate in 1911 in reply to an attack made by the Rev. Frederick C. Simpson, the Presbyterian minister at Douglastown, on a Catholic marriage decree. In his response to Simpson he defended Catholic doctrine on marriage but would appear to have been less incensed by the minister's opposition to the decree than by his reference to Canada as "a Protestant country."

Father Benedict J. Murdoch, who was Dixon's curate in 1915-16, described him as "a short, somewhat slight man with a florid face, clear sparkling blue eyes, [and] shining pink bald head, with a fringe of snow-white hair almost encircling it." He was "kind, generous, punctilious, and quick-tempered."

Dixon resigned from his duties as parish priest in June 1928 due to failing health. He died six months later at the Hotel Dieu Hospital, five days before his eighty-second birthday.

Sources

[b/d] Advocate 5 Dec 1928 / Advance 1 Jul 1896ff; Advocate 26 Jul 1911; Hutchison's, 1865-66; MacAllister; Murdoch


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