John Cyril Hawes was born at Richmond in Surrey on 7 September 1876, into an Anglican family. He trained as an architect, became an Anglican priest, and in 1911, in New York State, was received into the Catholic Church. He was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome in 1915.
That November he arrived at Geraldton in Western Australia, and he stayed twenty-four years. He was his own architect: he left twenty-seven churches and other buildings, among them St. Francis Xavier Cathedral in Geraldton and the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at Mullewa.
In 1939 he left for the Bahamas, where he designed more than twenty buildings and lived as a hermit under the name Fra Jerome, in a small hermitage he built on Mount Alvernia, the highest hill of Cat Island. He died in Miami on 26 June 1956, aged seventy-nine, and was buried in a cave tomb on Mount Alvernia.
In May 2023 Rome approved the opening of his cause, and the Diocese of Geraldton is now building the case. It rests on his life; no miracle has been claimed.