The Monsignor visited the College recently to address a group of students about his days as a student in St Malachys during the Second World War.  He arrived in the College from Glenshesk only days before the beginning of hostilities and he remembers the whole school being called together on the 3^rd September 1939 to be told that the country was officially at war with Nazi Germany and that bomb shelters were to be built in the quad.   

The Monsignor told of his days as a boarder in the College in these austere times, how boarders had to return on Sunday night and then had a study session in the library.  How some students tried to escape study by pretending to be sick in order to be sent to the matron and how some even went so far as to pretend to faint.  Ironically it was because he was sent home with a sore throat during a feared epidemic of the mumps that the Monsignor missed the most dramatic event of war years when the College was involved in the Belfast Blitz on the 15^th April 1941.  Bombs straddled the College but no serious damage was done to the College structure.  The stained glass windows from the chapel had luckily been removed for safe keeping a wise decision as bombs did land in the Mater hospital area.  Such was the danger of another raid that the monsignor spent 2 years at the safer Violet Hill in Newry