The Dictionary of Australasian Biography/Butler, Very Rev. Joseph
Butler, Very Rev. Joseph, D.D., O.C.C., Prior and Commissary-General, Port Melbourne, was born in Limerick, Ireland, in Sept. 1844, and educated at the Catholic University, Dublin. He entered the Carmelite Order in Dublin in 1859, was ordained priest in 1868, and was for many years engaged as a professor in colleges attached to houses of his Order in Ireland. He was president of their seminary in Dublin until Feb. 1881, when he and other fathers of the Order left Ireland, on the invitation of Bishop (now Archbishop) Reynolds, of Adelaide, S.A., to found a house of the Carmelite Order in that diocese. In October of the same year Prior Butler commenced giving missions in Victoria, and was persuaded by the late Archbishop of Melbourne to settle down in the archdiocese, the mission of Port Melbourne being accepted by him on behalf of his Order, of which he was the head in Australasia until his return to Ireland in 1891.