O'Daly, Donagh Cherubim (c.1600–1664), Servite priest in Bohemia and Austria, was born in Co. Cork. Educated on the continent as a young boy, he was sent to Cologne in late 1611 by Peter Lombard (qv), his guardian in Rome, to attend the Irish centre for study established by Francis Nugent (qv). O'Daly was placed in the care of a party travelling to Germany, but was separated from them at Innsbruck. He became acquainted with some Capuchins who brought him to Fra Giuseppe Barachi, confessor to Anna Catherina Gonzaga, widow of Archduke Ferdinand. Accepted into the archducal household, O'Daly resumed his education with Hippolytus Guarinoni, the court physician. Anna Catherina, who took the habit as Sister Anna Juliana, engaged in the revival of the Servite order in the Germanic lands and in 1615 secured three members of a strict spiritual community, the hermits of Monte Senario, for the Servite priory she had established at Innsbruck. O'Daly was among the first postulants. He took the name Friar Cherubim on 8 January 1617 and was vested as one of the first Servite clerical novices in the Germanic lands since the reformation. He professed his vows in February 1618 and was sent to study philosophy at the Jesuit University in Ingolstadt. He returned to Innsbruck in 1620 and was ordained priest on 28 February 1624.
In March of that year he was appointed confessor to Sister Anna Catherina, the daughter of Sister Anna Juliana. After Sister Anna Juliana died in August 1621 there was pressure to ease the austere character of religious life at Innsbruck with a return to the more lenient, conventual way of life. O'Daly defended his patron's legacy, overseeing a fruitless appeal to the Servite general in Rome in May 1624. However, he proved crucial to its survival, securing the intervention of Archduke Leopold, whose efforts resulted in Urban VIII's September 1624 brief ordering the complete restoration of Sister Anna Juliana's rigorous routine. He also supported Sister Anna Catherina's campaign to remain under Servite, rather than canonical jurisdiction, but early in 1628 Archduke Leopold asked O'Daly to leave Innsbruck to defuse the atmosphere of animosity.
He went first to Waldrast, and in mid 1629 was made prior of the new Servite house in Prague. He bought lands there to enlarge the church grounds, and his efforts secured an imperial directive of 16 April 1631 preventing conventual Servites from residing on Hapsburg lands, thereby assuring observant autonomy north of the Alps. Owing to the eruption of unrest, the Servite community fled Prague in November that year, and en route to Vienna, O'Daly witnessed the murder of two Irish Franciscans, Father Patrick Fleming (qv) and Brother Matthew Hoare. The community returned to Prague in June 1632 under a new prior, but O'Daly resumed his post in 1636. In the interim he had successfully agitated at the imperial court on behalf of the Jesuits who wished to establish a school in the city but faced opposition from other religious orders.
O'Daly secured a Servite house in Vienna in February 1638 through his connections at the imperial court. He involved himself in pastoral work in the early 1640s, particularly through the sodality of the seven sorrows. His imposition of the scapular on the imperial children, which was perceived as having miraculously cured them from serious illness, did much to advance the position of the Servites. He published Historia vitae ac rerum gestarum beati P. Phillipi Benitii (1644), a Latin translation of the life of Blessed Philip Benizi, an early Servite Florentine holy man. This work, dedicated to Ferdinand III, helped to establish the cult of Benizi in the Germanic lands, and sections subsequently appeared in the Bollandists’ Acta sanctorum. O'Daly was prior of Luggau in Carinthia (1645–9), and was proposed as provincial of the Tyrolese province in 1647. He prevented a resurgence of the conventuals in the late 1650s, actively opposing Italian conventual attempts to secure control over the Servite German observants. His efforts ensured that the provincial at Innsbruck continued to occupy the post of vicar general of the Observance. He wrote Vita et gesta reverendissimae ac serenissimae Annae Iulianae archiducissae Austriae (1660), a life of Sister Anna Juliana, which appeared posthumously in 1672.
O'Daly died 26 September 1664 at Luggau and was buried in the priory church there. A portrait appears in Augustinus Maria Romer's Servitus Mariana auspiciis Austriacis, in Germaniae, Hungariae, et Boemiae regnis reparata (1667). Copies of The life of Benizi are held in the Gilbert collection, in the Pearse Street library, Dublin, and the Benburb priory library, Co Tyrone.