Long-serving Heywood priest dies aged 83

Father Joseph Duggan, seventh Parish Priest of St Joseph's Catholic Church, Heywood, died peacefully this (Tuesday 14 January) morning aged 83.

Father Duggan, who served St Joseph’s from 1979 til 2004, had been a priest for 59 years and would have celebrated his Diamond Jubilee in June this year.

Father Duggan was a native of Cork, in Ireland, and was ordained in 1954 for the Salford Diocese. Before coming to Heywood he was parish priest at Holy Family in Kirkholt.

Parishioners remember him as a gentle, quiet man, assiduous in his visiting of the parish. Father Paul Daly, who is the present parish priest at St Joseph’s, remembers: “Joe could not have been more welcoming when he knew I was to succeed him.

“He had given his all for the parish and its people and, as he later told me, when he drove through the lights at the top of Hind Hill Street on his way to retirement, he felt a great weight lift from his shoulders.

“For twenty-three years he cared devotedly for the people of St Joseph's parish; he ministered to them, loved them, prayed for them and worried about them. He strove to keep the Good Friday Act of Witness outside St Luke's a regular ecumenical activity and in retirement was still glad to know it carried on.

“He was a quiet, ardent but gentle servant of the Gospel, a man of dry wit and self-effacing. Above all, everything he did was rooted in his getting up every morning at 5am to devote the first hours of each day to prayer.”