Christmas is the season when we are aware of those for whom ‘there is no room in the inn’. For this section I invited Ireland’s best-known campaigner on Homelessness, Fr. Peter McVerry, to write a letter to his parents.
Letter to My Parents
Life is a lottery; none of chooses where we will be born. I could have been born in Syria with bombs falling all around me, wondering whether I was going to be still alive in the morning. Or in Sub-Saharan Africa, where I might be lucky to get one meal every two days. Or my parents could have had a drug or alcohol addiction, which might have sent me into a spiral of addiction, crime and jail.
But I was lucky to have you as my parents. You, my father, were a doctor in a small town. For many years you did not have a ‘practice’, with assistants or partners to help share the burden at nights or weekends. You were on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even when we went on holidays in those early years, we went to a seaside town six miles away so that you were still available for your patients. I remember the phone ringing during the night and you would get up and go out to see a patient, and I never heard you ever complain. Sometimes, that phone would ring twice in the same night and you would still get up and go out to your patients. You were always there for them. I learned a sense of service from you, that life is about helping others and making the world a happier, healthier place.
And you, my mother, you were a Welsh Protestant, who met my father while working in a hospital in England shortly after he had qualified. In those days, if my father, a Catholic, married a Protestant, the Catholic Church would condemn him to hell for all eternity! To spare my father that fate, you became a Catholic, and like many converts, you became more Catholic than the Catholics themselves. So we were brought to Mass every Sunday without fail. Attendance at the family Rosary every night was compulsory, no excuses accepted. I got a strong sense of faith from you.
I think it was a huge sacrifice for you to become a Catholic – I always suspected that you were ostracised by your own family, as I never heard you talk about them, or visit them or phone them or write to them. Your family was always a mystery to me, an unknown and unknowable part of my history. In those days, the most sinful thing you could do in that strong Welsh Protestant tradition was to become a Catholic.
You shaped my future life for me. When wondering what I would do in life, a sense of service, motivated by faith, seemed to me to be the obvious path I should take. I told you I wanted to join the Jesuits, and you questioned me to make sure that this was really what I wanted to do, and then you supported me all the way.
When I went to work with homeless people in the inner city of Dublin, I think you found that a bit confusing. When people asked you what I did, you wanted to be able to say I was a teacher, or a parish priest or something with a recognisable label. But all you could tell them was that you didn’t know exactly what I did – I worked with robbers or something! I remember you, my father, coming up to my flat in the inner city one day, and there was a young lad sitting on the floor, drawing on a sheet of paper. Trying to make conversation, you asked him, ‘And what does your father do, young fellow?’
‘Me da was murdered,’ he answered.
That was your first and last visit to the inner city! I never told you that, later, that young fellow was also murdered.
I am just so grateful to you both for the life you gave me and the learning I received from living with you.
Peter