Death Comes for the
Young Curate

A Pilgrim’s Story

THE PHOTO OF the new priest among his people is an old one. Maybe it was Mikey Lynch who sent it home, to let the brother and sister in the old country know that one of their American cousins had been ordained. “First Solemn High Mass,” it reads in white handwriting in the top right corner, “of Rev. Thomas P. Lynch,” and on the next line, “St. John’s Church, Jackson, Mich., June 10, 1934.” It is panoramic, seventeen inches by seven inches, black and white, glossy.

Up on the steps in the middle background at the arching doorway of the church stands the celebrant, flanked by deacon and subdeacon, vested in albs and chasubles, with two cassocked and surpliced men off to the right who must have been the altar servers on the day. They are surrounded by a crescent of family and well-wishers, five dozen or more, the front row seated on folding chairs in the foreground, all posed, looking at the photographer with that same grin folks get on their faces when they are saying, “Cheese!” FedorFoto, printed at the bottom of the picture, suggests that Mr. Fedor is, though nowhere to be seen, nearby squinting through his lenses shouting, “That’s it, hold it now, say, ‘Cheese!’”

The photo has hung here in Moveen for years, underneath the picture of the Sacred Heart promising “Peace in the Family” and “A blessing on the house where the image is exposed and honored” and the little flickering red vigil light that is a fixture still in all the country homes—remnants of a devotional past that may never come ’round again.

It is the second Sunday in June in the middle of the Great Depression between world wars, in the palm of the right hand that is Lower Michigan. The print dresses, white shoes, and elegant swooping hats make the women look fashionable and carefree. My grandmother is wearing what looks like pearls. The men in three-piece suits and ties sport straw hats. The morning light shines on them all.

The Rev. Thomas P. Lynch is two months shy of his thirtieth birthday. Though he survived the Spanish flu in 1918, he’s been sickly and susceptible ever since. His studies slowed by health setbacks, he has been to seminary in Detroit and then, because he is croupy and tubercular, his archbishop sends him to Denver and then Santa Fe to finish his training in those high, dry, western climates. He has come home at long last, fully fledged, anointed, and ordained to say a Solemn High Mass for his people—the family and neighbors of his childhood. Within the week he will be returning to New Mexico and will die in two years of influenza and pneumonia, ten days short of his thirty-second birthday.

In front of him, smack in the middle of this assemblage, seated at the right hand of my grandfather, is my father, the priest’s only nephew. He is ten years old, the only young boy in the frame, dressed in saddle shoes, knee britches, white shirt and tie, looking for all the world like his grandson and namesake, Edward J. Lynch, IV, a few years ago when he was ten.

These are Catholics, Irish Catholics—Higginses, Ryans, Murphys, and Flynns. They are immigrants or the children of immigrants who have brought with them the rubrics of the One True Faith of Holy Mother the Church practiced in the Druid-esque, idolatrous style of the Irish. This is the faith that saved them from England and Know-Nothings and Freemasonry, the church that buried their famine dead, stood firm against soupers and the Crown, educated their children, kept their women pure, their men sober and saved their immortal souls. And one of their own has just been made a lieutenant in the standing army that wages war on sin and evil and the flesh. It is an event worth hiring a photographer for.

FR. LYNCH WILL be stationed in Taos, New Mexico, at Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. He’ll be the assistant to the Rev. C. Balland and work with the five Sisters of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross who oversee the school with one hundred eighty-four pupils. He will marry and bury and baptize and teach young Apache and Hispanic children how to play baseball and avoid the deadly sins. He will do the rounds of the local missions—Arroyo Hondo, San Francisco de Asis, San Geronimo, and Immaculate Conception—before the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe will make them all famous. He will bring forgiveness and communion and extreme unction to the sick and dying. After two years, his health will turn and he’ll be taken to Santa Fe where, after three days in St. Vincent’s Sanatorium, he will die on July 31, 1936. His body will be returned to Taos to be waked and prayed for and then a slow procession will take him down the mountains, along the river, to the cathedral in Santa Fe where the bishop will have another requiem. Then his body will be sent home in a box by train to Jackson, Michigan, where the people in this photo will follow him back into this church for the funeral Mass and out to St. John’s Cemetery, where he’ll be buried next to his father and mother.

When his brother, my grandfather, E. J. Lynch, goes to the funeral home to organize the local obsequies, he takes my father, twelve years old by now, along for the ride. While the men talk, the boy wanders through the old house until he makes it to the basement where he sees his uncle, the dead priest, being dressed in his liturgical vestments by two men in shirtsleeves, black slacks, and gray striped ties. Dead a week in the heat of summer, no doubt the corpse needed tending-to after all its travels. After alb and stole and mandible, they ease the chasuble over the cleric’s head. They lift the priest’s body into a casket, place his biretta in the corner of the casket lid, and turn to find the young boy standing in the doorway, watching.

It is to this moment in the first week of August 1936, standing in the basement of Desnoyer Funeral Home in Jackson, Michigan, that my father will always trace his decision to become a funeral director.

“I knew right away,” he would always recount it, “that’s the thing I was going to do.”

For years I wondered why my father chose, given the scene as he described it, the undertaker’s rather than the churchman’s work. He was a devout boy, an altar boy, a fifth-grader being schooled by nuns. Surely he’d have been told to listen for his “calling.” Why did he not choose to be a priest? It was years before it dawned on me—the priest was dead.

In the next ten years, my father will play right tackle for the St. Francis de Sales High School football team, learn to drive a car, fall in love with the redheaded Rosemary O’Hara, a girl he’s known since the fifth grade, enlist in the Marine Corps, and spend four years in the South Pacific shooting a light machine gun at Japanese foot soldiers. He will return, a skinny and malarial hero, to Detroit, wed Rosemary, enroll in Mortuary School at Wayne State University, and go to work for William Vasu, a Romanian American who gives him, as part of his compensation, the rent-free use of a small apartment over the funeral parlor on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park. He promises his new bride that someday, just wait and see, they’ll have a funeral home of their own, a house in the suburbs, “and maybe a couple of junior partners!” Within two months of their nuptials, she is pregnant with the first of their nine children.

Two generations later, grandsons and granddaughters of Rosemary and Edward Lynch are graduating from Mortuary School and joining the family firm of funeral directors that operates six mortuaries in the suburbs of Detroit, serving now more than a thousand families a year. They trace their calling to their parents who do this work. Their parents trace their calling to their father who traced his calling to the priest in this photo who died young and was sent home to Michigan and prepared for burial. Such are the oddities of chance and happenstance. Or such are the workings of the Hand of God.

“All things work together for good,” is what Saint Paul has to say about such things. “God works in strange ways,” my mother said.

WHEN I WAS seven, my mother sent me to see the priest.

I’d been fighting with my older brother, Dan, in the backyard. He was on top of me, holding my hands down, knees on my shoulders, bouncing on my belly, saying, “D’ya give?” I gave. He let me up. “God damn you, Danny,” is what I said as soon as I had the breath back in me. Danny knew I had sinned grievously. “Damn it,” was a venial sin. “Damn you,” was worse but still not a deal breaker. But to implicate God in it was more evil by leagues. To ask God to send your brother into eternal damnation and the fires of hell forever and ever was, well, incomprehensibly depraved—a mortal sin.

We knew these things because we’d read Fr. Murphy’s Baltimore Catechism, first published in 1885, its truths undimmed in the 1950s. Danny ran inside and told my mother, who came out roaring that I must go at once to see Fr. Kenny and make a good confession. I should be especially careful not to get hit by a car or killed in any way en route as it was certain that I’d be lost for good if I didn’t get this good confession made before I died. Only an act of “perfect contrition” assembled from my dying breaths might save me in such a case and get me maybe a few thousand years in purgatory instead of the eternal damnation that mortal sins had coming to them. Perfect contrition was a true remorse, not motivated by a fear of punishment, plenty of which I had rightly coming to me, but by a genuine sorrow for giving offense to God. It was, I believe, beyond my ethical range at the time, to be so “perfect” in my regrets. I was afraid. I prayed for safe passage to the rectory.

The particulars of my confession and Fr. Kenny’s absolution were not memorable. I only remember coming home with a clean slate, free of the worry over hellfire, saintly for the time being, looking for a way to get even with Dan.

Fr. Thomas Kenny came from Ireland. Born in Galway in the early 1900s, he came to Michigan to study for the priesthood at Sacred Heart Seminary, where he was a classmate of the dead priest I was named for. He looked like Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby and Pat O’Brien and always wore a cassock and collar and biretta around St. Columban Church, newly built in a northern suburb of Detroit. The summer of 1956, when I was seven, he was probably just gone fifty. He had white hair, a red face, and a rich brogue. He spoke in beautifully constructed utterances with the precision I associate with nunnish training in Church Latin and diagramming sentences.

Perhaps because he knew the priest I’d been named for, and figured it was the Will of God that I finish that sickly classmate’s foreshortened ministry, he made it his aim, in cahoots with my mother, to guide me toward a priestly vocation. Every parish priest knew that a constant flow of new recruits was required to keep the standing army of God at the ready and every Catholic mother knew that one of her sons should be a priest. Thus I’d been named and preordained, my foul temper and wicked tongue and often brutish ways notwithstanding. These were blamed with other tolerable imperfections on “being Irish.”

And so I was sent in the summer of my seventh year on Tuesday afternoons at four o’clock to Fr. Kenny, who taught me how to say the Latin things that altar boys must say in response to the things the priest says at Mass. Fr. Kenny’s housekeeper, a plump woman with chin whiskers, showed me into the priest’s office off the entrance hall. A plate of cookies and a glass of milk were waiting on the table. The priest, in cassock and collar, sat behind his desk and began my tutorial immediately. I was to wear black shoes and dark pants and a white or light blue shirt, and a tie. “This is the house of God you’re working in.” I was to show up in the sacristy twenty minutes before Mass began. I was given a short course in pronunciation and a folded card with the priest’s part in red and mine in black and told to come back next week with half of it memorized. I did. The foreign syllables in my mouth were delicious—Et coom speery to too awh, Keer ee Ay Ay Lay E Sone. My romance with words was just beginning. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The cadence and rhyme and alliterative beauty of that phrase made its deeper meaning meaningless. Its rich acoustics were enough for me. I would confess to anything that sounded so good. Confiteor Deo, omnipotenti.

I was a very holy boy and served daily Mass for Fr. Kenny or his assistant priests two weeks out of most months for the next several years, walking in all weathers with my brother Dan, who worked the holy business with me because we were the holy elder sons of a devout Catholic woman and the local funeral director. It was good for our souls and good for business. My father was in the Knights of Columbus. My mother was in the Women’s Sodality. We said the family rosary more nights than not. “The family that prays together stays together.” We were all going to heaven with the help of God.

For six-twenty Mass we had to leave the house by 5:40 A.M. to appear at the church by six o’clock, get our cassocks and surplices on, light the Mass candles and put the patens, cruets, bowl, and towel out, and then assist Fr. Kenny with his vesture. We were not allowed to touch the chalice in those days because it had held the body and blood of Christ. We rang the bell as we processed into the sanctuary. Fr. Kenny would switch off the sacristy lights.

We’d genuflect in unison. The Mass would begin.

The attendees, pious women mostly, or pious men on the way to work, were there but did not participate. Fr. Kenny would say the red parts, Dan and I would give out the black parts, bowing low and striking our chests at the Confiteor, ringing the bells through the consecration and elevation, closing it out with a “Deo gratias,” and everything went seamlessly from open to shut, without variation day after day. Fr. Kenny would pause at the same time during the Credo or Gloria, he’d fold the little hand towel at the Offertory, saying, “Lavabo,” and give it back to me with the same indifference. He would turn the pages of the huge daily lectionary with the same affected contempt. At the appointed time, the shadows in the back of the church would shuffle forward for communion. I’d hold the paten under their chins, lest any of the sacred species fall to the floor, and look at their upturned faces, eyes closed, tongues out, waiting for the body and blood of Christ. Everyone was on their way by seven o’clock except for the widows huddled at the back in their private devotions, praying their dead husbands out of purgatory and into heaven. Fr. Kenny insisted we altar boys stay an extra fifteen minutes in the back of church, saying thanksgiving prayers for having received communion.

Sometimes I’d serve with one of the Duffy brothers, or Mulherns or Mullanys. There was no shortage, apparently, of devout boys with devout mothers. There were four Masses on Sundays, regular novenas, Lent with its Stations of the Cross, and Holy Days of Obligation. I was especially fond of Solemn High Masses, the Feast of St. Blaise with those crossed-candle yokes applied to the throats of the faithful against laryngeal scourges, and Good Friday, when we held the crucifix at the altar rail for parishioners to kiss the plaster feet of Jesus. It was our job to wipe the feet with a tiny white towel after every kiss, in a show of blessed hygiene. The blissful look on the faces of women as they bent to kiss the tiny tortured holy feet of Christ quickened in me a sense of the transcendent while the mugs of their husbands, unenthused but dutiful supplicants, restored to me a sense of the ordinary universe. Ash Wednesday, with its deep-purple penitential tones and the cruciform thumbprint of ashes on our foreheads, marked us as mortals and Catholics among the Methodist and Presbyterian neighbors who could only be pitied for not belonging to the One True Church. Best were the weddings and the requiems at which we servers were always tipped—no less than a dollar, sometimes five apiece—by the boozy groomsmen or the funeral director who, in the latter case, more often than not was our father. He’d sometimes wink at Dan and me at the back of the church where Fr. Kenny, draped in black chasuble and appropriately grim, would intone, “In Paradisum” over the black-palled casket and ritual tears of the immediate kin.

Fr. Kenny was in all ways precise, impeccably priestly, able to dispense guilt and shame, grace and goodness in regular doses as the situation demanded. He opened every homily with “My dear friends in Christ,” and twice yearly gave his dear friends a good tongue-lashing from the pulpit for not supporting their priest or their church sufficiently. As my mother’s confessor, he counseled her on her calling as a Catholic wife and mother. Long before the age of therapy, she would have taken to her parish priest her concerns—innocent and intimate—for moral and practical guidance. Her children’s discipline and education, her husband’s drinking, the pressures of a growing family and financial worries—whether or not his advice was informed by the latest psychology made little difference. He had moral authority and he was unafraid to use it. The Church was clear on right and wrong even when it was not user-friendly. Probably he kept her in the marriage those times when she wanted out. “Pray, Rosemary, for the strength to bear your crosses gladly.” Surely she had more children than she might have wanted because the Church was unyielding on birth control: “The Good Lord never gives us more than we can handle.” Probably she gave more money to the parish and the foreign missions and the archbishop than might have been sensible: “Be stingy with the Lord and the Lord’ll be stingy with you.” I don’t know. But I know that on her deathbed she saw Fr. Kenny, dead himself for fifteen years, coming to take her by the hand into heaven. She saw him plainly, called him by his name, and smiled beatifically when she told us all about it, the day before she died. My father harbored a wary ambivalence toward the Church and its agents. He loved though mildly mistrusted the priest as a meddler and a friend. However jealous he might have been of the cleric’s long involvement in his wife’s spiritual life, he knew Fr. Kenny was a good man and was grateful for the comfort and the years of counsel, and grateful that the old dead priest came out to meet his Rosie at the end.

As for me, I was advised to keep an ear tuned to “the call.” Fr. Kenny was certain I would have a “vocation.” I’d know it when I heard it—there in my heart of hearts—the voice of God saying, “Come, follow me,” or words to that effect. “Many are called but few are chosen,” is a thing he said not infrequently and often pointed to a picture on the wall of Jesus knocking on a door to which he would add a narrative caution, “and when our Blessed Savior knocks at the door of your heart, Tom, you’d better answer.”

The knock or the voice, such as it was, would sound like the voice the nuns were always telling me that I should listen to—my conscience—that would tell me right from wrong. After our morning offices at St. Columban, Dan and I would walk to Holy Name School a mile and a half away. Fr. Kenny had not yet been able to raise what it would take to build a school for St. Columban, though he managed to do so before he left. At Holy Name, Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in their black and blue habits schooled us in the sacred and social wisdoms. They taught us to read and write and to avoid the near occasion of sin. We memorized the multiplication tables and the Ten Commandments, square roots and corporal works of mercy, cardinal sins, contrary virtues, the rules of punctuation and common spelling.

And everything was going well enough. I was learning how the pope was infallible and the Protestants were off the track and ours was the One True Faith and I was giving to the missions, making my First Fridays, serving early Mass, and every now and then I’d ransom a pagan baby or make a novena or a good confession and was listening for the “call,” which I suspected would be coming any day. I was on the fast track to ordination until one weekday in 1959 or 1960 when I saw Sr. Jean Therese’s breasts—well, not her breasts exactly, but that she had them, unambiguously. She was turning to the blackboard to underline some point she’d made there, perhaps about run-on sentences or past participles or dangling modifiers. She kind of swiveled, like, with one arm up to tap the chalk on the board beside the point she was trying to make and the other hand on her hip and there they were, denting the dull habit the good sisters wore—breasts. How had I not noticed them before? They were lovely, round, and soft, beckoning to me in wordless ways and now that I noticed, they were everywhere. Patsy Doherty had them unmistakably and Suzanne O’Connor to a lesser, less amplified degree but all the same, there they were, and the dark-haired girl in the front row with the great round brown eyes to go with them, oh! How had I never seen them before? Everything was, to borrow Yeats’s phrase, changed, changed utterly. No longer did I see the world in black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, Catholic and everybody else. There were only those people with breasts and those who wanted to touch them in ways I could only imagine, of which latter denomination I was a willing and eager if ignorant catechist.

By the time of my matriculation from grammar school to secondary education, I was no longer listening for the call. I had quit confessing what the nuns called “self-abuse,” as it was clear I had no intention of quitting what felt like a gift. I was biding time waiting for an opportunity to get my hands on someone’s breasts. Perhaps sensing that I was in need of further disciplines, my parents sent me and the brothers off to the newly opened Brother Rice High School, operated by the Christian Brothers of Ireland. Sons of the immigrant Irish from the Bronx mostly, sons of cops and cabbies and civil servants, Brothers Murphy and Hallinan, Burke and O’Hare, McGowan, Kelly, and Kieley were given the job of turning us all into good Catholic men, fit for college and eventual careers.

These were tough years on Fr. Kenny, who had expected me to enter Sacred Heart Seminary after grade school and to be ordained ten or twelve years later. Equally off-putting was the opening, in October 1962, of the Second Vatican Council in Rome. Called by Pope John XXIII, the council generated sixteen new documents on such subjects as divine revelation, the priestly life, the missions, the liturgy, and social issues. The altar was turned around, lay people were encouraged to participate, funerals became “celebrations” with white vestments and triumphant tunes, and everything was Englished.

Comfortable with the former things, meatless Fridays and ancient saints, and old enough to be set in his ways, Fr. Kenny had no interest at all in hootenanny Masses, parish councils, ecumenism, or vernacular. The world, he was certain, was coming to an end. In November 1963, Kennedy was shot. The war in Vietnam escalated. Civil rights and feminism were storming the old forts. The Beatles had landed. “Where was God?” the poor man wondered.

Whether it was my fall from grace or the Church’s or the country’s at large, by 1966 Fr. Kenny had had enough. He took his retirement from the archdiocese, packed his bags, and returned to Ireland with his Social Security and savings. He moved in with his sister in the family manse on Threadneedle Road in Salthill overlooking a golf course and Galway Bay and settled into his final years. He would never set foot in America again.

He found the Irish Church much as he’d left it years before—much as I found it in 1970—established, in charge, completely enmeshed with the life of the nation and its people. They’d retooled their liturgies and sanctuaries, changed some songs, even done away with Latin, all in compliance with Vatican II. But the social dynamic of the parish had not changed. The priest was and remained in charge. And his power extended well past the pulpit. He was connected to the culture by virtue of his collar and had easy access to any secular office. Chieftains of commerce, local or national politicians, all deferred to Holy Mother Church and to her favored sons.

WHEN I FIRST landed in Ireland, not only was the Church firmly rooted in the landscape but the landscape bore witness to its local holy men, celebrity hermits, and famous anchorites. In the firmament of saints in which the fifth-century Patrick (who banished the snakes) was the sun, and the sixth-century Brigid (who once turned her bathwater into beer to quench the thirst of a visiting bishop) was the moon, Senan (AD 488–544), who banished a sea monster and women from Scattery Island, was the saint of the West Clare Peninsula. Indeed, the River Shannon, in whose estuary the holy island sits a mile offshore of Kilrush, is believed to have been named after the ancient saint. The wells and churches named for him and ancient monastic sites and modern miracles assigned to him are numerous, the tales of his misogyny still well known.

Once, it is hereabouts storied, a certain young woman named Connara from the other side of Poulnasherry Bay, half a dozen miles downriver, came ashore and made “advances” on your (holy) man, known for his discipline and austerity; said advances were “repulsed.” Her grave, at the low-tide mark on the west end of the island, remains as a testament to Senan’s chastity and, one would guess, his sexual vexations.

AND THERE WAS Bishop’s Island, which stood a hundred yards off the coast road in Moveen—a ten-acre rock on which the remnants of two stone huts held forth two hundred feet above the tide. Nora told me that two holy men went out there “centuries ago,” when it was still connected to the mainland, and prayed to have the ground removed that bound them to the land. Their prayers were answered. They remained out there, alone in their privations on their rock, drinking rainwater, feeding on seabirds they fished from the sky with hooks and lines on kites they made, praying for God knows what to God knows whom. When the first of them died, the other buried him, then died himself, of loneliness, some few years after that. His bones, of course, were blown into the sea.

“So mustn’t there be something to it after all?” Nora posed the rhetorical.

“Why is it called Bishop’s Island?” I wondered.

“That was later, Tom . . . ,” she told me. “Some bishop came by and heard the story and made them saints and declared the holy island his. They’re prime boys, the bishops, that’s for sure.”

In more recent times, and but a few miles westward in the River Shannon’s mouth, the true history of “The Little Ark” at Kilbaha serves as witness to the fierce faith of the people. “Westerns,” Nora called them—those who lived out on the narrowing strip of land between Moveen and Loop Head. It was in Famine times, decades after Catholic Emancipation (c. 1828), that the landlord, Westby, and his local agent, Marcus Keane, who had married the landlord’s daughter, conspired to make Protestants out of the starving Catholics.

The present parishes of Kilballyowen and Moyarta were one in 1849, and were called Carrigaholt after the central village. They embraced a stretch of the land which was almost twenty miles in length and three miles or less in breadth, reaching from Loop Head to the boundaries of the parishes of Kilkee and Kilrush. To-day, as then, the district looks bare and, in the winter, poor; scarcely a tree breaks its monotony. On one side it is caressed or lashed by the Atlantic; on the other it is bounded by the Shannon, itself almost a sea as far inland as Carrigaholt.

The central church was at Carrigaholt; there was another at Doonaha; and a third (built in 1806) at Cross, which replaced a mud-walled building. These churches, as we could expect, were but poorly equipped. There was no church to the west of Cross, and Cross is eight miles from Loop Head.

—The Little Ark, V. Rev. G. Clune, C.C., D.Ph.

It seems the agent, Marcus Keane, established free schools run by Protestants for the Catholic children to attend. But the priest, Fr. Michael Meehan, was welcome to come and instruct the children in the tenets of their faith, though out of doors.

But almost immediately it became evident that there was something strange and sinister about the new education. The children began to bring home religious information that was new to the people of the Peninsula—that Confession was mere superstition, that the blessed Eucharist involved idolatry, that devotion to the Blessed Virgin was blasphemy.

It was now clear, to the consternation of the priests of the parish, that these schools were provided to proselytize the children, to wean them from their parents’ faith.

Protestant clergy appeared, Bible-readers, a new Protestant church was built, and Marcus Keane, knowing the poverty of the local people and controlling who might be evicted, gave free soup and clothes to those who abandoned “their superstitions” and registered in the new Protestant “society.”

Keane, remembered years later as “a local little despot who lived near Ennis” and the “guiding spirit” behind the “souper” campaign—feeding soup to starving Catholics who would then renounce their faith—had earned his reputation as “The Exterminator General of Clare,” so called by the Limerick and Clare Examiner, for the thousands of people he put out of their homes and off the land, many to an all-but-certain death, during the Famine years. His summer residence at Doondahlin, overlooking the estuarial harbor of Kilbaha, stands in ruin to this day. After he died in 1883, the vault containing his corpse was robbed by night, the remains removed, not to be found for eight more years.

Fr. Meehan in the meantime was prevented from saying Mass or giving religion instructions anywhere in the western district. The landlord would not give a site for the construction of a church. If the priest used a home, the residents might be evicted. When Fr. Meehan bought a deserted house, Marcus Keane burned it down. Losing souls to the “soupers” and lost for a place to say Mass, Fr. Meehan wondered what to do. One morning in 1852, traveling from Kilrush to Kilkee in Moore’s omnibus, it came to him that something like the omnibus—“strong and covered in on all sides” and set on wheels—might be rolled out on the beach at Kilbaha between tides, in “no-man’s land,” and he could say Mass in it. He hired the carpenter Owen Collins in Carrigaholt, ancestor to the local undertaker there, who built it in the road in front of his shop.

The removal of this omnibus [from Collins’s shop in Carrigaholt to the strand in Kilbaha] was a triumphal procession. A large crowd from Carrigaholt accompanied it, and as it passed, the people came out to greet it and join the procession, for now they felt that at long last they could hear Mass without molestation from landlord or agent or superintendent. They would place it on the strand, between low and high water marks, a no-man’s land, and from that position there could be no eviction according to law.

From 1852 to 1857, the priest said Mass in all weather on the strand. More remarkable than the structure was the fact that people came by the hundreds to watch and pray around the thing, with its tiny table and candles and makeshift tabernacle.

NORA TOOK ME to see The Little Ark in the old church at Moneen. She knelt at the place in the church where Fr. Meehan was buried, in front of the altar rail, in January 1878.

“The westerns,” she told me, “were very holy. They’d rather’ve starved than take the sup of soup and change their religion.”

So the west of Ireland that Fr. Kenny returned to and the one I first encountered in 1970 seemed to me a place still steeped in the comforting rubrics of my upbringing. None of the newly fashionable talk of ecumenism and “community.” None of the post–Vatican II fashion blunders of the trendy, newly liberated clergy in America. West Clare still clung to the old ways of hermits and chastitutes and crazed spiritualists. It sounded like the language I’d been raised with—mysterious, miraculous, inexplicable, and old; and the tide of my apostasy, rising steadily since I’d discovered sex, subsided in Moveen, where Tommy would kneel on the stones and recite the rosary and Nora would shake holy water on me before I left for town and the Angelus sounded on the radio at noon and six o’clock and everyone blessed themselves a hundred times a day passing parish churches, graveyards, or local shrines; and the Infant of Prague, long framed in the low room where I slept, looked down upon my slumber.

WHAT LITTLE MONEY I’d brought to Moveen was going quickly. Nora had given me the use of a bicycle, an old Raleigh with a headlamp and chain guard, and three speeds, and I’d peddle off to Kilkee, three miles east. The Victorian resort town sat snug to the edges of the great horseshoe of Moore Bay, which can be spotted on the map on the northern edge of the southwestern peninsula. In the 1830s it was a fishing village growing slowly into a resort. The testimony of Mary John Knott, a Quaker woman from County Cork, first appeared in her little book, Two Months at Kilkee, in 1836:

At present there are upwards of one hundred comfortable houses and lodges for the accommodation of visitors, independent of the cottages in which the natives reside; since that period the town has been gradually rising into importance, and it is probable will ere long, from the safety of its strand, and other peculiar circumstances, be one of the most desirable watering-places on the coast.

The town, which commands a fine view of the bay, is built close to the sea, and assumes a semi-circular form from the shape of the strand, which presents a smooth, white sandy surface of above half a mile in length, where the invalid can, without fatigue or interruption, enjoy the exhilarating sea-breeze and surrounding scenery. The principal street runs nearly from one end of the village to the other, occasionally intersected by smaller ones; these extend to the strand, and at every few steps afford a view of the Atlantic wave dashing into foam against the cliffs which circumscribe its power, and the rocks of Duggana, which run nearly across the bay. Some of the houses at the “west end” of the town, as well as a few in the village, are modern, with sufficient accommodation (including stabling and coach-houses) for the family of a nobleman or gentleman of fortune, and every gradation can be had down to a cottage with a parlour, two small bedrooms, and kitchen, the rent varying according to the accommodation and demand. A few of the largest, fully furnished, pay from £15 to £20 per month; but the average for comfortable, good lodges is from £6 to £8, and the smallest from £3 to £4, including a plentiful supply of milk, potatoes, and turf, according to the custom of the place.

To which might be added the report of Margaret Frances Dickson, in her “Letters from the Coast of Clare,” which appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1841 and described Kilkee in a way that survives a century and two-thirds later:

The air here is so light, so fresh, so briney, so inspiring, that it produces an indescribably charming effect on the feelings. One could almost imagine oneself to have emerged into some purer region leaving behind comparatively dull and heavy atmosphere, and shaking off the vexations, cares, pomps, vanities, etiquettes of life.

The place I most liked to shake off the vexations and etiquettes of life, such as they were that late winter of 1970, was in Egan’s Marble Bar in O’Curry Street. I’d belly up to a Carlings Black Label, which was an imported beer—these were the days before drink had been entirely globalized and an Irish pub was a pub in Ireland—and wait for the eventual conversation to strike up.

As it happened, David Lean was making his film Ryan’s Daughter at the time, and the storm scenes, important to the story line and cinematography, were being filmed off the cliffs of Moveen. The film crew was hanging about Kilkee to take advantage of the agreeably violent weather. When a storm hit, they’d race out the Moveen road to the small bay at Goleen to film the scene where German guns come ashore during World War I. The scene is set in 1916 and England’s enemies are Ireland’s friends. On calm days, the film crew could be found in Egan’s Marble Bar playing poker with the locals, one of whom, Danny Gorman, was a neighbor of Tommy and Nora’s. His house sat high on Moveen Hill looking down on the townland. Danny’s invite got me into the game and many was the afternoon I’d be late back to Moveen full of drink and out of money. No doubt Nora could see the life of dissipation and disaster before me and she’d warn me off the evils of drink and games of chance, warnings that I manfully ignored. So when my savings ran out and the cards and letters from family quit coming with ten- and twenty-dollar bills in them, the prospect of gainful employment reared its face before me.

The appointments page at the back of the paper promised work for skilled or experienced workers. I had neither skill nor experience. I’d worked in an asylum and a funeral home. I could write.

I wrote to the Irish Times thinking they might be in need of a reporter, and to several of the companies enjoying the Shannon tax-free zone around the airport—mostly German and Dutch firms. This was before the Common Market.

But Ireland couldn’t employ enough of its own, who were leaving for America and England every day, much less offer work to a visiting Yank. Those who wrote back were courteous but uniform in their refusals. I took the fifty dollars that came in a card from my grandmother O’Hara and made for Dublin by thumb, thinking surely something would happen there, and besides I wanted to see the city that Joyce made famous. I checked into the Ormond Hotel in d’Olier Street near the Irish Times. I was lonely and tired and worried about my future. I applied at Eason Booksellers in O’Connell Street and Massey’s Undertakers, who asked me if I could embalm. I couldn’t yet. I rummaged the want ads without success. I didn’t have enough money to stay and I didn’t have enough money to leave. Lost for answers, I called Fr. Kenny in Galway.

After listening to the sad facts of the matter, Fr. Kenny told me to call him at the same time tomorrow, and when I did he gave me the address of an office in Dublin and the name of a man I should go and see there. I followed the priest’s instructions, wore my suit, and came out of that meeting with a job as a night porter at the Great Southern Hotel in Killarney in County Kerry. I’d be working six days a week in ten-hour shifts, from 10 P.M. till 8 A.M., and be given my room and breakfast and thirty pounds a week, some tips, and free travel on the trains and buses I would take to get there.

We wore black pants, white shirts, and gold jackets provided by the Great Southern—an elegant nineteenth-century hotel attached to twenty acres of private gardens, framed by mountains, next to the train station in Killarney. Willie Clancy was my overseer, and it was our job to “Hoover” the downstairs lobby, dust the tabletops, empty ashtrays, keep the turf fire in the lobby going all night, and take drinks to guests who in Irish hotels could drink all night if they pleased. On the hour we were to turn keys throughout the building that said we were checking the place for fire safety, and we had to shine any shoes left outside guest-room doors. We would go to the larder early in the shift and make ourselves a meal from the evening’s table fare. In the morning we would assist departing guests with their luggage to train or car. I have a memory of a fleet of purple Mercedes Benzes parked in front of the hotel, reputed to be part of Lean’s entourage who were still shooting parts of Ryan’s Daughter in Kerry. I never saw Sarah Miles and more’s the pity. The film won an Oscar for cinematography but was generally a failure at the box office, though I saw it several times, for the scenes of Murray’s Island and Dunlicky shot during fierce storms, which seemed plentiful in 1970. Once the day staff came in, we would eat breakfast and make for bed.

For most of a month I held this job, through the middle of February until the middle of March, and was thinking that working all night and sleeping all but a few hours of the day were not exactly what I’d had in mind and maybe I’d be better off working for American wages at my father’s funeral home than Irish wages at the Great Southern, when I was called into the day manager’s office for a chat.

Was I well, he wanted to know, and happy, and comfy in my quarters? I was, of course, and told him so. Had I been able, he further queried, to put aside some money from my month of labor? I had, of course, and thanked him sincerely. And had I noticed, he wondered, how most of the guests at the Great Southern Hotel were countrymen and -women of mine? I had, indeed, and more than once remarked on it. And might I imagine, his interrogation went on, how these neighbors of mine, from places like Miami Beach and Boston and San Francisco, might be in the leastways disappointed, having traveled so far across the Atlantic Ocean for a perfectly Irish, Blarney, and Belleek experience, how they might be ever so slightly let down to have their bags portered out to their hired cars by a fine young fellow from Detroit what with his midwestern patois and Michigan manners? I could, of course, though it pained me to say so. And mightn’t I, therefore, comprehend, he carried on, the terrible dimensions of the dilemma this placed him in—to wit, here I was, a sound man entirely, wanting in no way in the requirements of a night porter, steady on the job, scrupulous in its performance, tidy in every habit and circumstance, and yet, through no fault of my own, nevertheless by virtue of the tongue in my mouth and the talk that came off of it, unsuitable for the very job for which he’d hired me, in every good faith, at the direction of his superiors above in Dublin, who themselves would never have contemplated such a contingency as the one he was after outlining for me? The man’s genuine discomfort was manifest. He was folding and refolding a piece of paper on the desk, looking like a man trapped between the rock and the hard place. So I said, yes, yes, of course, whereas I never once considered it before now, it did make, after all, perfect sense, now that he explained it. So would I, he wondered, in observance of this unforeseen and regrettable circumstance, ever be able to find it in my heart to forgive his having to make me redundant? Well, yes, yes, I told him, I suppose, with profound regrets, I could. He produced at that moment an envelope that contained a brief letter of recommendation on the hotel stationery addressed, “To Whom It May Concern,” and a severance package of one month’s pay. This doubled my income for the past four weeks, and when I questioned the generosity, he simply said he had instructions from Dublin. I did not press the matter but packed my bag, said my goodbyes, boarded the train for Limerick, and returned by thumb and shank’s mare to Moveen.

It was not until nearly twenty years later, at my mother’s funeral, that one of Fr. Kenny’s former curates, Fr. Joe Killeen, dear to my people in the way Fr. Kenny was, filled me in on the entire story. It turns out that when I called the old priest from Dublin, out of money and on the ropes, Fr. Kenny called my mother back in Michigan. A retired priest, in a country and time where priests still ruled, could have placed me in any number of jobs. It would take a phone call, little more. My mother told him she did not want me to have to come home a failure. This was several years before the “self-esteem” craze in schools and parenting, but she trusted her instincts on the matter. Neither did she want me to have sufficient success to “go native” in Ireland as she called it. So she and the priest had conspired to get me enough work to say I’d “gotten on,” but insufficient work to allow me to stay. Not a word of this was ever whispered by either of them. I never saw their plotting, from Galway to Michigan, in these happenings in Dublin and Killarney and County Clare. They went to their graves content in their conspiracies, certain that not only had they meant well, with only my best interests in mind, but that good came from their machinations; certain, too, that their wills were, by dint of faith and prayer and the tenets of the One True Church, aligned near as could be with the will of God.

The plot they hatched had worked exactly as they’d planned. I stayed on in Ireland with Tommy and Nora in Moveen, day-tripping up the west coast, until the money ran out in the middle of April. Then I flew back to Detroit on money my parents lent me for a ticket.

There was an American wake in Moveen for my leaving, the cottage filled with neighbors—Denny Tubrity playing the tin whistle, Johnny Hickey on the fiddle while sets were danced and songs sung and pints drunk and sherry sipped in the kitchen and teas and cakes and sweets served in the bedroom long into the wee hours of the morning. And when Flan Carey came to take me to Shannon, there was a crowd at the gate at 6 A.M. to keen a little and wave goodbye and shake holy water on the car and its occupants. Tommy and Nora saw me to the Departures Hall at Shannon and wept real tears at my going, as was the form and habit of their country and their time.

Within four months I’d paid my parents back, saved enough for another tour, and came by way of Italy and Greece, in a car with my Italian-American friend Dualco De Dona for another visit to Moveen. My mother’s plans and Fr. Kenny’s kept me from going native, but kept me, just as certainly, coming and going ever since.

I got the truth of it from Fr. Killeen when he came to do my mother’s funeral, and not only did it explain the generous severance packet, it made me love and miss both of the blessed schemers all the more. Irish priests and Irish-American mothers were more willing collaborators years ago, and each more powerful in their separate realms.

In her excellent book Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, journalist Mary Kenny charts the currents of this change and notes the dynamics of the former culture that awarded moral authority in the home to the mother and in the larger society to the priest.

This culture of Holy Fathers and Blessed Mothers waging the battle against temptation and the world was transported by immigrants largely undisturbed to the Irish Catholic communities across America. A photo of a new priest’s first Solemn High Mass and the circle of family and friends in communion with him served as a template for those images of priests and the faithful in “Angels with Dirty Faces,” “Boys Town,” “Going My Way,” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” where the comfortable Catholic ghettos of home and church and school maintained safety and order in an often-hostile world and trained generation after generation in the doctrines and rubrics of the Church.

THE PICTURE ON the front page of the Clare Champion for the Ides of March 2002 seems a throwback to the former age—a plump bishop in his crimson and black regalia and pectoral cross—a common image here a few years ago when the clergy appeared for every newsworthy event.

But the headline this week reads, “Clare Bishop in U.S. Sex Scandal.”

The Clare born bishop at the center of the latest sex scandal to rock the Catholic Church in the United States is this week in seclusion, having submitted his resignation to Pope John Paul II. It is understood that sixty-three year old Bishop Anthony O’Connell will travel to Rome in the near future to meet senior figures in the Vatican.

A native of Lisheen, Ballynacally, the Bishop of Palm Beach, Florida, last week admitted to having “an inappropriate relationship” with a fifteen year old seminarian as well as his possible involvement, in similar circumstances, with another person around the same time, twenty-five years ago.

The admission by the bishop has devastated family members and friends in the closely knit community of Ballynacally to which he returned on a regular basis. According to a family spokesman: “Shock, hurt and disbelief has been the reaction.”

Bishop O’Connell contacted his immediate family in advance of his press conference on Friday last, at which he admitted to allegations made by Christopher Dixon, his former student at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal, Missouri, that the two had touched inappropriately in bed after the teenager sought out the then college rector for counseling.

“He expressed contrition, pain and anguish over what he has done and asked them for their prayers and support in this difficult time,” said the spokesman. “They are inclined to believe Bishop O’Connell in his explanation of acting ‘foolishly, stupidly and naively’ at the time.”

It is understood that Bishop O’Connell will not face criminal prosecution arising from the incident as the statute of limitations has run out.

In point of fact, His Eminence in Seclusion has confessed to nothing but a kind of ignorance and claims that his primary interest in Mr. Dixon was to provide good counsel. The Champion quotes him, thus:

“Foolishly and stupidly and naively, I attempted to work with him, to help him deal with his problem. . . . But I’ve always been a do-gooder. I’ve always been one who thought you could change things.”

“There was nothing in the relationship that was anything other than touches. There was nothing beyond that. So in the ordinary understanding of sexual activity—no, there wasn’t—and I certainly want to make sure my people know that.”

There is something vaguely Clintonesque about the bishop’s pronouncements. That these counseling sessions—what Bishop O’Connell calls his “experimental approach to therapy”—occurred while both were naked in the cleric’s bed is apparently the “naivete” for which the bishop agreed to pay his former counselee $125,000 in 1996.

Lent in 2002 was all penitence and reparations, on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, Fr. John J. Geoghan, Jr., of the Boston Archdiocese, accused of molesting more than a hundred children over thirty years, was sentenced in February to nine to ten years in prison for fondling a ten-year-old boy. Cardinal Bernard F. Law, archbishop of Boston, was under pressure to resign for having shifted Fr. Geoghan from one parish to another, fully aware of the complaints against him, thereby placing the young in peril of a predatory sex offender. He turned over to local prosecutors the names of eighty priests in his archdiocese—one in seven of the total—accused of sexual abuse over the years. The cost of settling all the cases of priestly abuse in Boston could reach $100 million, and across the country’s one hundred ninety-four dioceses, possibly a billion dollars.

Bishops across the country have all been vetting their local roster of priests formerly treated or accused.

In New York, Cardinal Edward Michael Egan was defending his record on handling abusive priests in a Palm Sunday letter to the faithful:

Let me be clear. I regard any accusation of sexual abuse with the utmost seriousness. Should the Archdiocese be approached with an allegation, we will make the appropriate report to the proper authorities if there is cause to suspect abuse and the victim does not oppose the reporting. I would strongly encourage, however, anyone with an allegation of sexual abuse to bring it to the proper civil authorities directly and immediately. —New York Times, March 23, 2002

Cardinal Egan was responding to a St. Patrick’s Day article in the Hartford Courant that accused His Grace of a failure to act when he was bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut. His letter addressed the matter directly:

First, in every case discussed in the article, the alleged abuse occurred prior to my appointment as Bishop.

Second, the policy and practice that I established for the Diocese and followed in every instance required anyone accused of sexual misconduct with a minor was, after preliminary diocesan investigation, to be sent immediately to one of the most prominent psychiatric institutions in the nation for evaluation. If the conclusions were favorable, he would be returned to ministry, in some cases with restrictions, so as to be doubly careful. If they were not favorable, he was not allowed to function as a priest.

It seems what Cardinal Egan didn’t “get” in Bridgeport is that in addition to what he calls “an abomination,” the sexual abuse of children is a crime and whilst abominations are left to bishops, crimes are turned over to the civil, not the episcopal, authorities. What Cardinal Egan didn’t “get” is that the days when criminal misconduct could be handled “in house” are long since over in America and long since over in Ireland, too.

THE PARALLEL SOCIETY of Catholicism that, of necessity, unified and identified the colonized faithful in Ireland and the ghettoized faithful in America through the eighteenth and nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could not survive the rapid secularization of the last half-century. The separate schools, separate banks, separate graveyards, separate media, separate moral laws and leaders that once protected them from the manifestly unfriendly larger culture—mostly Anglo, mostly Protestant—have become redundant. In a world that sees humanity as consumers of “common market” goods and services and globalized info-tainments, access is more important than ethnicity, bottom lines more compelling than belief systems. What was parental and protective and refining in earlier times is seen, in latter days, as patriarchal and authoritarian and intrusive. The Father Flanagans and O’Malleys, on both sides of the ocean, known for their rough-and-tumble manliness, have been replaced by a sensitized bunch of Fr. Pats and Fr. Mikes and Fr. Teds, and have been made clowns, fops, and sexual suspects by a culture, within and without the Church, that has traded moral authority for therapeutic models. Confessors become counselors, sin becomes sickness or dysfunction, repentance becomes recovery. A confessor has the sacramental magic to forgive and cleanse. A priest worked by the will of God. A counselor works by training and wit—some better than others, all human, all flawed, all with feet of clay.

In Ireland, the scandals that have only lately racked the Catholic Church in the United States have been going on uninterrupted since the remarkable case of Bishop Casey broke in May 1992, beginning a process that has, in the space of a decade, disestablished a church that had rooted for centuries. While the Church had certainly been losing the skirmishes with modernity since the early 1960s, the all-but-fatal blows were largely self-inflicted. No social or political initiative could have done what the coincidence of clerical misconduct and the opening forums of television and radio did loosen the Church’s hold on Holy Ireland.

In point of fact, the exile of Eamonn Casey was more about clerical embarrassment than public mistrust. Like so much in Ireland, it had a transatlantic connection. A young Irish-American woman had come to stay with him twenty years before. The predictable element of Mighty Nature took its course. His Grace was the father of her nineteen-year-old son. What is more, the bishop had been buying her silence and supporting his son on money that belonged to the archdiocese. All of this came out and Annie Murphy made a very public tour of Ireland, speaking to anyone and everyone about her fifteen moments of fame. Like St. Columcille centuries earlier, the hugely popular bishop of Galway vanished; he has not been seen in Ireland since the spring of 1992 except for a rumored visit to Limerick, in 2002, for a class reunion. He spent some years in Ecuador and now lives in England.

A bishop who behaves like a man in Ireland would be readily forgiven, especially by Irish men; no less a man who behaves like a cad. People understand a scoundrel anywhere and while folks thought the bishop behaved badly toward his son, and unleashed the dogs of public comment, they could certainly understand how a middle-aged cleric could be seduced by a young American beauty and were willing to blame it on the media or the Church’s requirement of celibacy or the wiles of the temptress, or to forgive him outright. In Irish pubs and country kitchens, Bishop Casey’s sin was “only natural.”

The Casey affair, however, showed the Dublin media how deep the ambivalence really was toward the institution of the Church that claimed more than ninety percent of the citizenry. Beneath the religious conformity was a current of popular contempt, growing stronger for two decades, that had not been previously exposed. Apart from the soap opera of the Bishop and the American Divorcee, there was the clear lesson that such matters could be taken up in the press, on the radio and TV news, and not only would the sky not fall but papers would sell and ratings would soar. There were, apparently, deep reserves of anger and resentment toward a clergy that had “lorded it over” the people for far too long.

If the Irish could tolerate Bishop Casey’s affair, what they would not tolerate was the litany of physical and sexual abuses that followed. Reports of Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy acting anything but Christian or merciful to the children in their care filled the broadcasts through the 1990s. The low-grade hum of clergy misconduct that has always attended the priesthood became in the 1990s an amplified plainchant out of every quarter.

Mary Kenny gives a condensed sampler in Goodbye to Catholic Ireland:

August 1993: ‘Two Catholic priests have been jailed this year after being found guilty of child sexual abuse. A third priest, who has admitted charges involving thirty incidents of indecent assault on an eleven-year-old boy, is currently awaiting trial.’ November 1994: ‘A priest has been given a fifteen-month suspended sentence by Dublin Circuit Criminal Court for sexually assaulting a male hitchhiker.’ The priest had claimed that the teenage boy had consented to what had taken place, but the claim was rejected by the court. November 1994: ‘Dublin priest dies in gay sauna. Liam Cosgrave, a native of Co. Cork, who was in his sixties, collapsed and died in the Incognito Sauna Club in Bowe Lane, off Dublin’s Aungier Street, shortly after 6 p.m. The club owner, Mr. Liam Ledwidge, said two other priests gave him the last rites. He said that priests made up a significant number of the club’s membership, after barristers and solicitors.’ Father Cosgrave had been a regular visitor to the gay club for several years.

November 1994: ‘Fr. Daniel Curran jailed for seven years for abusing children. RUC says it wants to interview thirty Catholic priests and brothers in relation to child abuse. Nearly a dozen are in jail or under investigation.’ November 1994: ‘Church silent on alleged assault by priest. The Archdiocese of Dublin has refused to say whether it gave Gardai [Irish police] information on the past activities of a priest who has been the subject of a Garda investigation into an alleged sexual assault against a boy earlier this year. Gardai have prepared a file for the Director of Public Prosecutions on the assault against the thirteen-year-old boy, which is alleged to have occurred in a hotel following a funeral.’

7 December 1994: ‘Sex abuse victims sue Archbishop Connell. The Archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell, and a priest who was convicted of indecently assaulting young children in the North Dublin parish of Ayrfield, are being sued by two of the priest’s victims. Because the priest had a history of sexual abuse of children prior and subsequent to his tenure in Ayrfield, the victims claim that the Church has a responsibility to face.’ April 1995: ‘Church’s new sex scandal. £27,000 paid to man abused by priest. Former Altar Boy tells of Ordeal.’ June 1995: ‘Fifteen sex charges against priest. A priest appeared in court yesterday on fifteen charges of indecently assaulting a youth.’ The forty-year-old curate was making a remand appearance at Tuam Court. Initially he had been charged with one count of attempted buggery of a youth, more than six years ago.

November 1995: ‘Alan O’Sullivan, now a thirty-three-year-old architectural draughtsman, told the newspaper that Father Patrick Hughes had raped, buggered and taken pornographic photographs of him between the ages of nine and eleven.’ Patrick Hughes, aged sixty-eight, made an out-of-court settlement of fifty thousand pounds to his former pupil. The abuse had come to the attention of the Archdiocese and Hughes had been sent to a psychiatrist. He was allowed to continue in his ministry.

THAT FR. HUGHES was allowed to continue in his ministry is the part that makes the Church seem to more than a few parents nowadays like a security risk for their children. Sexual misconduct occurs across the culture, and people of faith have learned to separate the sin from the sinner. But they also want the sinner separated from those sinned against as a safeguard for the young and powerless and have had to look to the civil authorities to do what the Church authorities wouldn’t do. What bishops in Ireland and in America have in common is their effort to stonewall, silence, buy off, or ignore reports of priestly misconduct in an effort to “not give scandal.”

It is argued by the Church that “scandal” will shake the faith. But the secrecy that has surrounded these cases has allowed criminal behavior to proliferate and victims of crime to be bullied by bishops into silence and intimidated by Church attorneys into “settlements” that require them to say nothing. Such misconduct does not shake the faith, it kills it.

In Boston one in every seven priests has been investigated for the abuse of teenagers or children. One chance in seven is more of a risk than even the most devout of parents can be expected to manage.

In Ireland the case of Fr. Sean Fortune, a serial abuser, is associated with five suicides, four of his victims and his own. Bishop Brendan Comiskey, his superior, was criticized for attending Fr. Fortune’s funeral in May of 1999 and for ignoring the credible evidence of the priest’s crimes for years. The faithful have pressed for the bishop’s resignation.

Holy Week in Ireland and America in 2002 was full of reports of settlements between do-nothing archdioceses and the victims of abusive priests. The Irish Independent headline read, “Abuse victim settles for ‘six figure’ payout from diocese,” and, as evidence that the clergy still didn’t grasp the magnitude of the problem, immediately below this article another headline read, “Materialism killing vocations to priesthood, says bishop,” in which the bishop of Cork laments that if trends continue, his diocese, which now has one hundred thirty-three priests, will only have forty-three by 2015 and many parishes will be without a priest.

In Ireland—a country with fourteen hundred parishes—only fourteen priests will be ordained this year. Many more will die or resign or retire. The country that once sent young priests out to England, Australia, Africa, and the Americas, now faces the prospect of importing priests from Nigeria and Uganda and South Korea just to manage the sacramental workload of the nation. As in America, nothing in the immediate future will reverse the trend toward fewer and fewer men “hearing the call,” or leastways, fewer and fewer answering.

In his book The Changing Face of the Priesthood, Donald B. Cozzens estimates that between thirty and fifty percent of the priesthood, and those studying for it, are gay. There are, of course, many gay priests who are living sexless lives in service of the faithful. And one would assume that sexual abuse should, sadly, achieve gender neutrality—as to both victim and abuser. But since nearly ninety percent of the reports of priestly misconduct involve abuse of teenage boys, it would appear that fewer and fewer heterosexual men have been drawn to the priestly life. And as reports proliferate, it is feared, even fewer will.

The math of the decades since Vatican II is finite. The number of Catholics increases as the number of vocations falls. Of course for many Catholics a shortage of priests is no bad thing, increasing as it does the role of the laity in the Church’s mission. Still, the questions are genuine.

Must one have a bishop to have a God? Can faith thrive without the clergy? Is hierarchy an impediment to holiness? Are priests—distanced by celibacy, social and sexual suspicions from the ordinary lives of parishioners—more trouble than they are worth? Might the Church achieve a postclerical stage in its development? Could Christians do church without churchmen?

For John O’Donohue, a neighbor in Connemara, the answers to these questions would be nuanced not only by organizational studies but also by theology. A poet and writer and holy man, he has, it would seem, evolved past his own parish priesthood into a Christian mystic with a good dose of the Druid, and Hegel, and environmentalism, at odds with the commercial and ecclesiastical milieu of his time, at one with the stone desert of his home place in Caherbeanna, near Black Head in the Burren, about which it has been written famously in Lloyd’s Tour of Clare: “There is not Water enough to drown a Man, Wood enough to hang him, nor Earth enough to bury him.” His books on Celtic spirituality are best sellers in Ireland and America and he has connected with Catholics and non-Catholics alike who are religiously distanced from their orthodoxies but spiritually alive and well.

Years ago, we read together on a Friday night in Ennis Bookshop. He was kind enough to share the venue and provide for the turnout of locals, among whom he is famous and loved. He invited me to return with him to Galway, stay the night at the rectory, and read poems from the pulpit of his church the following day. I was glad to return the favor. But I could see that his priesthood wouldn’t last. He was alive in ways the Church would only encumber and the range of his curiosities went beyond the pale of approved concerns of the Irish parish priest. He wrote and published poems. He studied the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. His scholarship, contemplative habits, and compassion for the flawed fellow humans that brought their fears to him in the confessional augured against the pat answers and corporate policies of the Church. And women found him—though I doubt he knew it—relentlessly attractive. When Anam Cara—Spiritual Wisdom from a Celtic World was published in 1997, it made him famous and well heeled, neither of which much humored his bishop, who stopped paying him his monthly pittance. When we met for coffee in a Galway café in the spring of 1997, he seemed to me the happiest of pilgrims, grounded in his faith and constantly searching for the God in things. More books followed, tapes and videos, and when I saw him some years later at a conference in New York, he seemed like the circuit-riding homilists who brought the good word to the frontiers of America years ago or a latter-day incarnation of Columcille, that vexed and blessed monk, self-exiled and the better for it. On the “longing to belong,” our search for meaning and intimacy, he has much to say:

Here in the west of Ireland I was born in a valley, so there were always horizons around us. As a child I often dreamed of climbing to the line of the horizon, and I imagined that I would be able to see the whole world from there, when I was big enough. And finally the day came when my uncle was going with sheep over the mountain and he needed help, so he brought me with him. We climbed up alongside the valley, and I was in great anticipation about the line of the horizon. But of course when we got up to where the line of the horizon should be, the line had disappeared and there was a whole host of other horizons waiting for me. I came back home that night disappointed that I hadn’t seen what I had anticipated, but kind of excited and fascinated that there was so much more to be traveled. It echoes this lovely remark by a German philosopher, who said, “There’s a horizon towards which we travel, but it also travels along with us.” I think that’s the nature of human identity—that we are constantly on this pilgrimage, from experience to experience, and from territory to territory within us.

Those times when I’ve met John O’Donohue since, for dinner and talk in Galway or Connemara, it is clear that his pilgrimage has brought him to a place where he seems most alive and well, a concelebrant of all those elemental gifts of creation that link us in one “great belonging” to memory and vision, the present moment and the earth.

For many of my neighbors in Moveen and in Milford, the “great belonging” is to the Church. For others it is to Family. For others it is to Nature. For others it is to the Nation. For others it is to the species.

An increasing number of Catholics in Ireland and America believe in the core teachings of a Church they can no longer belong to. Perhaps the pastoral model of John O’Donohue and men and women like him is a harbinger of an evolving Church and priesthood, a return to the traditions of exile and contemplative life within a community made global by technology—men and women for whom the quiet and the distant and the darkness allow for visions they might otherwise never have had, who are nonetheless “connected” to the wider world of faith by broadband and modem and common quest.

GOOD FRIDAY IS the anniversary of the agreement in The North that was brokered by George Mitchell on behalf of the Clinton White House in 1998 and established a framework for governing that province where more than thirty-six hundred people have died in the past thirty years. Their names are read in Dublin at the Unitarian Church in Stephen’s Green. The reading takes longer than the three hours Catholics believe Christ hung on the cross.

There is little doubt that the disestablishment of the Catholic Church in the Irish Republic has made the peace process easier in Northern Ireland, where among the things that had to be decommissioned were the border patrols of religious identity that have divided these people for hundreds of years.

As certainly as faith unites, religion just as certainly divides, and a united Ireland, if there is ever to be one, will only thrive in a postdenominational context.

IN ST. SENAN’S Church, uptown from the gorgeous bay in Kilkee, Holy Week starts with Palm Sunday Mass on Saturday night. About a third of the church, built in 1963, is filled. It has pews to seat more than eleven hundred. Men stand, as they have always stood, at the back, near the doors. In Penal Days, guards were always posted. The old custom gives the latter-day sentries an early dispensation, breaking for the public house at communion. Beads hang from the hands of the women. All of the statues and crosses are covered in deep purple satin. The Passion According to St. Matthew is read in a dramatic reading by the priest, who takes the part of Christ, and two lay lectors from the parish. It is a story of betrayal, suffering, and death. All kneel when Jesus “gives up the ghost.” Coins ring in the collection baskets. Bells ring for the elevation of the host. Some go to communion. More remain in their pews. The evergreens that are distributed will go home to be hung around holy pictures and crucifixes, as a yearlong reminder of the Easter season. What is evident to the blow-in observer, standing in the back with the other men, is that an entire generation is missing here. The old and the young are here in numbers, the over-fifties and under-fifteens, the stalwart mothers on their own. But the others—courting couples, newlyweds, young parents, middle-aging householders—are gone missing. For the Irish of the Common Market generation, the first to grow up with surfeit rather than shortfall, television rather than the bush telegraph, a country of commuters rather than migrants, to be Irish no longer means to be Catholic. To be Catholic no longer means to be here.

ON EASTER MONDAY, Fr. Culligan says the Mass I arrange for every year to commemorate Nora Lynch’s death. It is the first of April in Carrigaholt, the fishing village on the Shannon that is our parish seat—jackdaws cawing in the breezy air. Only a few of the faithful are here: Rose Green, one of the eucharistic ministers, Mrs. Lyons from the local wholesale seafood shop, Mrs. Morrissey from the pub, Maureen and Eithne McGrath who own the lands on which the ancient castle sits at the end of the pier that angles into the little harbor here, and Mary Sullivan, Fr. Culligan’s housekeeper, who kneels in the front pew and will kneel here again tomorrow, please God. It is women who keep the church doors open, at least this Monday in Carrigaholt.

The Gospel is the one about the empty tomb.

Like my mother and sisters, the women here in West Clare have been taught that their devotions will help save their husbands’ and children’s souls. Keeping the faith will keep their families together, maintain peace in the home, and provide their daily bread. But more and more women are feeling betrayed by a church that refuses them access to full liturgical participation, doctrinal decisions, and administrative roles. Holy Mother the Church, it turns out, is a men’s and boys’ club that mostly approves of women who are virgins, martyrs, or repentant sinners. And though up and down the episcopal ladder, from pope to bishop to parish priest and curate, few of these men or boys has supposedly had a mature, adult relationship with a woman, these very men presume to hold forth upon the intimate lives of women—their spiritual, sexual, and reproductive lives. More and more Irish women are asking, “What exactly is wrong with this picture?”

“What is wrong with this picture?” is the question that has vexed Patricia Burke Brogan all of her life. A devout child of devout parents, raised with a social conscience and Catholic ideals and a brother who would become a priest, she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy in Galway in the late 1950s. She was sent, at the instructions of her Mother Superior, to one of the order’s local “branch houses” to assist the Mother Superior there. She remembers the long hallway and the rattle of keys that hung from the belt of the nun’s habit and the huge door opening into a room, ill lit and shadowy, full of girls and women and machines.

“It was as if the ground opened under me,” she says now. “And their eyes, their eyes—there was such hatred for me in them, because they saw me as their white-veiled jailor.”

For the young novice, “high on idealism” and good purpose, it was a loss of innocence, to be let into this “secret place where women, girls like me, were imprisoned. I was only there a week and all I could do—I couldn’t be ‘over’ them—was work along with them.” She was never the same.

Three years later, she left the convent, torn from her calling by a tortured conscience. Thirty years later, Patricia Burke Brogan’s play, Eclipsed, opened on Valentine’s Day in 1992 at the Punchbag Theatre in Galway. It dealt with “what was wrong with that picture” that shattered countless innocent, idealized youths—her own included. Later that year—the year the Bishop Casey imbroglio hit the news—Eclipsed won first place in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been staged now fifty-seven times around the world, including New York, San Francisco, and London.

In 1993, when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold their property holdings in North Dublin to a developer, they had to apply to the Health Board for permission to disinter one hundred thirty-three bodies buried in unmarked graves on the convent grounds. When the firm of Dublin undertakers hired to do the job began, they found, alas, one hundred fifty-five sets of remains. Further research showed that fewer than half of these deaths had ever been recorded with a death certificate. No names, no dates, no records kept—only the bones of the anonymous dead buried on the North Dublin convent grounds. The good sisters amended their application to reflect the new count of corpses; permits were quietly granted and the bodies were just as quietly cremated and buried in a common grave at Glasnevin Cemetery at dawn one morning in boxes marked with names like, “Magdalene Number 354,” or “Magdalene of St. Jude,” or “Unknown Magdalene.”

These were among the first layers unearthed in the sad story of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland—an institutional witness to the Church’s culture of shame and control over the unpredictable powers of female sexuality and the systemic misogyny of Irish society.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the last one closed in 1996, various religious orders in Ireland—Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, and others—ran asylums in which young orphaned girls, unwed mothers, and girls too pretty or precocious could be sent to work as penitents, washing away their sins by doing the dirty laundry that was brought to them from hotels and prisons and churches and schools. These “Magdalenes” were named for Mary Magdalene in the scriptures who repents of her sins and washes Jesus’s feet with her hair. She was a witness to Christ’s Crucifixion and the first witness to his Resurrection. But before all that, she was purported to be a sexual sinner. The “Maggies” of Ireland, if not outright sinners—about forty percent were pregnant on admission—they were, because of their beauty perhaps, or their simplemindedness, likely to tempt some man into sin. In any case, it was generally figured better to put them away than let them go astray, or worse still lead some man astray with their charms and wiles.

In October 1994, Joni Mitchell released her Turbulent Indigo CD, which included her song “The Magdalene Laundries.”

I was an unmarried girl

I’d just turned twenty-seven

When they sent me to the sisters

For the way men looked at me.

Branded as a jezebel,

I knew I was not bound for Heaven

I’d be cast in shame

Into the Magdalene laundries.

The story of Mary Norris, reported in the Irish Times (October 5, 2002) by Patsy McGarry, is not untypical:

Mary Norris was born Mary Cronin in Sneem, Co Kerry in 1933. The eldest of eight children, all was normal with her young life until her father died. He left behind a young wife with two boys and six girls, aged between six months and 12 years.

Life was difficult, but the family coped. A man began visiting their house, occasionally staying overnight. The children noticed their mother was “a little bit happy” again.

One morning, a car drove up to their farmhouse, with a garda and a “Mr Armstrong” from the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children inside. “The Cruelty Man” is how Mary refers to him without a trace of irony.

He announced they were taking the children, as they considered Mrs Cronin an unfit mother. Everyone was screaming. They were even going to take the baby, but realised she was being breastfed, so left her. (She too was taken, when she was weaned.) The other seven children were brought to Sneem courthouse and committed to “a place of safety” by a judge.

Mary was taken to the orphanage in Killarney where, as she cried hysterically, she was given the routine disinfectant bath on arrival and ushered to a dormitory under the supervision of Sister Laurence.

“I don’t know what you are crying for. Your mother’s a tramp, an evil woman, and I hope you don’t turn out like her,” said the nun. To her undying shame, Mary responded: “Yes, sister.”

She began to wet the bed and was made to carry the mattress on her head to the drying room every day. At bathtime every Friday Sister Laurence would beat her around the lower back (where the weals would not be visible) with a belt, as the wettings continued. There was no education, except for Christian Doctrine, and they were kept apart from the town children at the school there.

At 16, Mary got a job as a servant to a retired schoolteacher in Tralee, a sister of one of the Killarney nuns. There she did all the cleaning for her employer and her employer’s two nephews, and blind sister, for 2s 6d a week. She was allowed out once a week.

The film My Wild Irish Rose arrived in town midweek and she wanted to see it. She was told No, but sneaked out to see it. The next day “the very same Cruelty Man” came to take her away. She was told she had been “a very bold girl” and was brought back to Killarney.

“I knew you were a tramp. I knew you’d turn out like this,” said Sister Laurence, and dispatched Mary to see a local doctor. He examined her intimately, painfully, and told the woman sent along to supervise the visit: “I don’t know what’s wrong with the nuns. This young woman is intact.” No one explained to Mary what he meant.

The nuns dispatched her to “the Good Shepherd” Magdalene laundry in Cork. In the orphanage in Killarney, “the Good Shepherd” had always been the ultimate threat. Mother of Our Lady O’Mahony greeted her there. “We can’t call you that here”, she responded when Mary gave her name. Instead she was called “Myra”.

An older resident stripped Mary. Her bra was replaced with a piece of buttoned-down calico which flattened her breasts. Her long dark hair was cut short. She was given a grey dress, boots and a white cap, and brought to the sewing room where she sat “among these old women, crying and making scapulars”.

At supper she saw “all these young pretty girls” coming from the laundry, and heard them refer to her as “the new sheep”. No talking was allowed, and even during recreation time discussion to do with life outside was forbidden. Just the rosary over and over again; sometimes hymns, and prayers were read to them by a nun at mealtimes.

They got up at 6 a.m., went to Mass, had breakfast, began working in the laundry at 8 a.m., broke for lunch at 12.30 p.m., resumed at 1 p.m., and finished at 6 p.m. They had an hour’s recreation until 7 p.m. when, in theory, they could talk, but there was not much to talk about. Not least as “particular friendships” were forbidden. Few of the approximately 130 women there were unmarried mothers. Most were from orphanages.

Mary was told she couldn’t write to her mother. Only to Sister Laurence. She did so, begging to be taken out of the laundry. There was no reply. After one petty misdemeanor, Mary was punished after prayers in the dormitory one night, when she was made lie on the ground between the two lines of praying girls and made repeat “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” again and again until the nun conducting the prayers finally announced, “You are forgiven” and she was allowed resume her place among her praying colleagues. She faked a toothache once in a half-baked plan to run away. The dentist removed the perfectly good tooth. She was so desperate she considered suicide.

She discovered later an aunt of hers in the US had been inquiring in letters—money enclosed—of Sister Laurence why Mary was not getting in contact. She was told Mary had a job in Tralee, had left it, and no one knew where she was.

Sister Laurence got Mary a job in a laundry in Newcastle, Co Limerick around this time. Soon Mary was back in Sneem, where she worked for two years before heading off to England. She remained there until 1993 before returning to Co Kerry with her husband, Victor.

Her mother had married the man who had been visiting, but it was not a happy affair. She too had gone to London and lived on the same street as Mary for eight years, dying in 1989 surrounded by many of her children.

Another layer was unearthed by the British documentary filmmaker Steve Humphries, whose program, Sex in a Cold Climate, aired on British television in March 1998. (RTE in Ireland twice refused to run it.) It told, in their own words, the stories of four women who’d been inmates of these places. Phyllis Valentine spent eight years in the Galway Magdalene asylum because she was “pretty as a picture” and the nuns were afraid she might tempt some man into sin. Her hair was shorn upon arrival. Christina Mulcahy gave birth to a boy after a wartime romance. When he was ten months old, her son was taken from her and she was placed in the Cork asylum. It was fifty-five years before she saw him again. Martha Cooney was raped by a cousin and considered “tainted” by her family, who banished her to the good sisters. Brighid Young, brought up in an orphanage attached to the Magdalene laundry in Limerick, was beaten by the nun who caught her speaking to one of the Magdalenes. Forced to look at her swollen face in the mirror, she was told by the nun, “You’re not so pretty now.”

It was watching Sex in a Cold Climate in his Glasgow home that led Scots actor and filmmaker Peter Mullan to write and direct the feature film The Magdalene Sisters, which won the 2002 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion Award for Best Picture. The Vatican called it “an angry and rancorous provocation.” Before its release in America in August 2003, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops rated the movie “O” for “morally offensive” for its “exaggerated theme of abusive nuns, brutal beatings, sexual violence including rape and forced oral sex with a priest, an extended scene of dehumanizing full female nudity, an attempted suicide, sporadic rough language and brief profanity.” Indeed, the film is an unflinching indictment of the patriarchies, domestic and ecclesiastical, that gave parish priests (in league with embarrassed fathers) control over the sexual conduct of girls and young women.

THE POWER OF femaleness—to attract, seduce, pleasure, and reproduce; to mother, mold, inspire, and educate—has always posed a threat to the Church. From the earliest centuries, Church fathers have sought to silence or sideline the voices of women. Indeed, the particulars of Mary Magdalene’s discipleship—her relationship to Jesus, her supposed sexual sins, her teaching and writing and ministry—are still the subject of much debate. Evidence in the Gnostic Gospels suggests that Mary was more intimately attached to Jesus than any of the twelve apostles. That she ministered and preached and wrote and spread the “good news” in the early years of the emerging Christian Church seems incontrovertible. That one way of silencing her teachings and diminishing her standing among Christ’s disciples was to taint her memory with sexual sin—a thing accomplished by a third-century churchman who first suggested she was the prostitute described in Luke 7: 36–50—seems likewise incontrovertible.

In Ireland, the Church has long sought to keep women “in place”: tucked safely into marriages, tethered to large families, tied to land owned by their husbands and then inherited by sons. The willing emigration of single women for centuries from Ireland to England, the Americas, and elsewhere has been not only to escape famine or poverty but also to get free of a system that disallowed their full participation in the established Church and the established order while indenturing them to home and child care. If nuns were the wardens of the Magdalene asylums, it was priests and bishops and popes who made the rules by which women in the Church are divided into good ones and bad ones, virgins and whores. Women have had to fight in Ireland for education and careers, contraceptives, property rights, political parity, and divorce. Every year, more than two thousand young women travel to England for abortions, which are not allowed in the Irish Republic. The sense of betrayal by the Church is palpable. And yet it is women in Ireland who remain the most faithful, as they are this morning in Carrigaholt.

ST. MARY’S CHURCH is gray and vaguely Gothic, overlooking the Shannon, sheltered by a stand of ancient trees and surrounded by the graves of long-dead churchmen. The interior is freshly painted. The sanctuary is post–Vatican II, though the accessories—votive lamps and tabernacle, candles and communion rail—are nineteenth century. Sunbeams angle through the tall stained-glass windows on the eastern wall of the old church, which is built in the shape of a cross and has the high-vaulted acoustics of a mausoleum. Altar servers, a boy and a girl, put out the water and wine and lectionary.

Fr. Culligan processes out from the sacristy, quenching the light. The faithful stand. The Gospel is taken from the 27th and 28th chapters of Matthew, detailing the burial and Resurrection of Christ. Joseph of Arimathea, the patron saint of funeral directors and grave diggers, petitions Pilate for the body of Christ. Most often the executed were denied burial. But Pilate agrees. Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” are there with Joseph when he “rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.” Pilate orders the tomb “sealed” and guarded after the chief priests and Pharisees caution him about Jesus’s disciples coming to steal the body and claim a miracle. Two mornings later, the Marys return. They have come to anoint the dead body of Christ in keeping with the customs of the Jews. There is an earthquake, a lightning bolt. An angel appears. The soldiers are dumbstruck with fear. He shows the women the empty tomb and tells them Christ has been raised from the dead. They hasten back to tell the rest. On the way, Jesus appears to them and they fall to worship at his feet.

The soldiers guarding the tomb tell the authorities about the missing corpse. They are told, according to St. Matthew’s version, to say the body was stolen by the dead man’s disciples while they slept. They are paid to tell this version of it. “And that is still the story that is told down to the present among the Jews,” concludes Fr. Culligan.

“The Gospel of Our Lord,” says Fr. Culligan.

“Thanks be to God,” the handful of women reply.

“Thanks be to God,” I say with them.

That seems the simple crux of the matter—the version of the story that separates Catholics from Muslims, Hindus, and Jews and all the people of other faiths—grave robbers or the Son of God? Trickery or miracle? And of course there are other narratives that separate Catholics from all the other Christians—faith or works, king or pope, scripture or liturgy, how Easter is reckoned in the calendar; and others that separate Irish Catholics from all the other Catholics—Byzantine, Polish, Italian, African and Asian and South and North American.

Why has this never much mattered to me—this central tenet of the church where I am kneeling on Easter Monday in West Clare because here is where I’ve come to commemorate Nora Lynch? Am I missing something?

The great entanglements of the Church in Ireland, over the past thirty years, have not involved the private faith of the people but the public policy that involves their private lives—whom they might marry and sleep with, how they might manage their fertility, what’s to be done when vows cannot be kept. Divorce and abortion and contraception would seem, I am not the first to say, odd topics for manly celibates to get so embroiled in.

IN NOVEMBER 1991, I went to the holy island of Iona in the Hebrides. I had four days off between readings I was doing in England and felt drawn to the place associated with the great sixth-century saint Columba, or Colum-cille. He was a native of Donegal, in Ulster, born of royalty and raised by a priest who taught him to read the psalms. There were the usual signs of sanctity. He cursed a man to death once and once turned spring water into wine. It was certain he would have an important future. Later he studied with St. Finnian at Moyville whose psalter he copied and was going to keep until Finnian found out and objected. Columba insisted that he had made the copy. The book was Finnian’s, the copy his. The two saints could not come to agreeable terms. The case came before the Irish high king Diarmud, who ruled famously: “To every cow her calf, to every book its copy.” Columba, a bard and prince and bookish man, and apparently not much of a sport, returned the psalter but went to war with Diarmud and defeated him in a battle in which hundreds died. In penance for the bloodletting, Columba exiled himself from his beloved Ireland and vowed to convert as many pagans as men who died in the battle. The Picts of Scotland seemed handiest, so with a boatload of twelve kinsmen and brother monks he sailed off the north coast of Ireland in ad 563. He went from island to island among the Inner Hebrides until he could no longer see his beloved Ulster coast, so that his exile would be truly penitential. He came ashore in a small bay on the west side of Iona and, looking back into the fog, saw nothing and so decided to stay.

I’d always wanted to see this place.

The long train ride from London to Glasgow, thence northwest on a far less elegant train to Oban, felt to me like a pilgrimage. I went without a plan or reservation, drawn to it by an aching to be there that I could articulate but not explain. I felt I had to go. Arriving in Oban late at night, I took a room in a hotel overlooking the esplanade and in the morning made the first boat to the Isle of Mull, thence by bus to Fionnphort on the far side of Mull, and finally by smaller ferry across the mile-wide Iona Sound to the tiny treeless island where the saint had founded his community and from which he launched his evangelistic missions among the Scots and northern Anglo-Saxons. It was noonish in a place where the light would only last until four o’clock so late in the year. The hotels were closed for the season. I was directed to a woman who operated a guesthouse near the pier who was happy to take me in but, since the power was out, could offer a bed but neither heat nor light beyond candles and a bit of turf. I paid her and went out to make what I could of the remaining daylight.

I walked out the road a mile or two to the small bay where the saint had first landed. I met no one on the road and saw no one in the fields, only the cattle with their abundant horns. When I got to the sea’s edge, I sat among the large rocks that littered the deserted strand, looking south and west the way the saint was said to have looked. I was alone in the off-season on an island in the sea, ready and willing and eager for God, such as I had come to understand Him or Her to be, to speak to my innermost self and soul. The tide surged, gulls circled overhead, the gray light of the sun behind the clouds was cold. I was ready.

Presently in my vigil I saw a small dot growing larger down the beach and as the figure of a man approached, I assumed he would, as must be the international custom among spiritual tourists, walk his own path, leaving me to mine and to my soul’s own reveries. In this I was, alas, mistaken. On spying me, the man—for he had the surly, determined, duty-bound walk of a man—adjusted the angle of his ambulations so as to arrive in no time in the space I occupied, holding forth a hand and a hearty, “Hello there,” in an accent I took to be East Anglian. The voice of God, I told myself, might not be heard today.

In short order and without solicitation, I was possessed of the man’s particulars: He was thirty, he told me, the son of Irish parents who’d emigrated to England; he was a priest, on leave from parish work in a suburb of Glasgow where he’d been the curate for a year, sent here by his bishop for a little rest, “you know, to recharge the batteries, you know, emotional, spiritual, etcetera, you know!”

He proffered his right hand: “Peter, Fr. Peter.”

“Tom Lynch,” I told him and shook his hand.

“May I take from your name you are a Roman Catholic?”

Before I could answer, he carried on. He was so glad to find another Catholic here. He’d been staying at the abbey for a fortnight now among an array of Anglicans and Presbyterians and Protestants of an unspecified sort from “somewhere on the continent.”

“All very nice, you know, but not the same.”

The abbey, once a Benedictine monastery, had fallen over the centuries into ruin. In 1938 the Reverend George MacLeod, a minister from Glasgow, founded the Iona Community, rebuilt the medieval abbey, and began its mission “to rebuild the common life, through working for social and political change, striving for the renewal of the church with an ecumenical emphasis, and exploring new more inclusive approaches to worship, all based on an integrated understanding of spirituality.” Its brief at the close of the twentieth century was determinedly liberal, open to any and all.

Fr. Peter thus found himself tucked away in remotest Iona, a month after even the abbey had ceased its program offerings for the season, among the other variously wounded souls who were sent here to winter out for their own reasons, sharing household chores and meals and dorm rooms; he was clearly in need of a co-religionist.

“I don’t mind the cooking and washing up and keeping the fire going, Tom, not even the bunk beds and shared loo. But this push, push, push to be ‘community’—I came here to be alone, you know, with my thoughts and prayers. You know, St. John in the desert, or Our Lord.”

Yes, I told him. I understood.

“And the worst of it is I’m stuck here till the bishop sends for me and I don’t know which of them here is his inside man. Or woman for that matter, for we are, after their fashion, a mixed company. It’d be just like him.”

I said I thought it would make the “community” better to have women in on it.

“And what brings you to Iona?” the priest asked.

“I don’t know.”

I told him that I’d just felt drawn to see the place, that my life, such as it was, had achieved of late a kind of calm I’d never been accustomed to, and that my faith, for reasons I was only beginning to isolate, was deepening—the sense that whoever was in charge of things in the larger sense was in charge, likewise, of things in the small and was, I could only hope and had some reason to believe, keeping an eye on me and mine and that this filled me with a sense of safety and connectedness I had never discerned in my life before, but for which I was, here, now, right in the moment, filled with thanks.

Fr. Peter looked curious.

I said I was grateful at the moment for the good death my mother had gotten two years before, for the tenuous hold on life my father then enjoyed, for the kinship I felt among my brothers and sisters, for the connection I had to the neighboring island and the life of my cousin Nora there, with whom I’d be visiting, please God, in a matter of days. What’s more, I could count as an abundant blessing the writerly life I was allowed to lead, catch as catch can, among my other duties—to be reading things written in private in public forums felt like a kind of affirmation.

The priest looked perplexed.

Mostly, I told him, I was thankful for the lives of my three sons and my only daughter and the love of the woman I’d married just months before, after years of fear and procrastination. I was grateful for her beauty and good counsel and the peace she had brought to our household where, at the moment, she was tending to my children.

The cleric, I could see, was calculating.

Finally I counted, a proper confession required my telling, as a coincident and no doubt correlated blessing, the sobriety I had enjoyed for two and a half years, as an addendum to the litany of blessings I was after reciting, and the release, just recently noticed, from the cycle of guilt and shame, fear and anger, regret and distemper my drinking life had become for me. I knew, of course, and could bear witness to the fact that life, each life, had its share of suffering and the future was full of uncertainties. But what my sobriety had given me was the sense that God, whoever that was, would handle the lion’s share of these, if I only handled what was given to me.

By now it was clear to me that this was what I’d come here for—to take an inventory of my life and times much as Columba had done in his early forties, fifteen hundred years before; to stare into a sea devoid of any familiar island or vision, and to say out loud into the void what Job of old had said in the midst of his worst days and his best, to wit: Blessed be the name of the Lord, whatever name it is he, or she, as the case may be, answers to.

Further it occurred to me that Fr. Peter, whom I’d but moments before regarded as a bore and an intruder, might actually be an agent of God sent to this holy place to facilitate this fresh epiphany, and I was in that moment nearly overwhelmed with appreciation for his priestly ministry, for the gift he’d given me outright when he’d asked what it was I was doing here.

“Did your first wife die? The mother of your children?”

His question caught me by surprise.

“No, no, of course. . . . No, thanks be to God . . . divorced. We were divorced. Years ago now.”

“And was the marriage annulled, then?”

“No,” I told him. I could never bring myself to turn over to a group of men who had never been married the job of deciding if we, my former spouse and I, had been. I remember the erstwhile parish priest, once he got word the ink was dry, coming by with the forms for the annulment. He was fulfilling, no doubt, his sense of pastoral duties in the matter. I told him I needed a housekeeper more than the approval of a bunch of chastitutes downtown. I wasn’t very grateful for the trouble he’d gone to.

“Well, you know, don’t you, that the Church still recognizes your first marriage as valid and binding.”

By the time it was over, I assured Fr. Peter, it was completely invalid, and so were we both, hobbled with mistrust and mutual contempt.

“You know, of course, that as far as the Church is concerned, you’re living in adultery with this other woman.”

“This ‘other woman’ as you call her, Father, is my heart’s true love and beloved wife.”

“Not in the eyes of the Church, I’m afraid.”

I said we hadn’t done it in the Church. We’d gone to the courthouse where a friend of mine, the local judge, sentenced a fellow before us to ten years in prison for dealing in cocaine; then went in and changed his robes from black to white, came out of his chambers smiling, and told us we “were sentenced to life!”

“Of course that was only a ‘civil’ marriage,” Fr. Peter said.

“Well, that would be an improvement on the one before,” I told him.

“It has no standing in the eyes of God.”

The eyes of Fr. Peter seemed oddly glazed over, as if he’d gone into a kind of automatic pilot, giving out with the cant of a mind colonized by years of clericalism.

Just then I found my own eyes looking around the beach for a stone or a board or something with which to bang the man at the place on his face from which these godawful words were issuing forth. “Snap out of it,” is what I wanted to tell him coincident with a mild pummeling. I told him the Church would be wrong about that—our “standing in the eyes of God,” etc.—and that maybe he’d want to be moving along now, surely some of his inmates at the abbey would be keeping his dinner warm and worried about him.

“And all that AA business—nothing but cults,” he carried on. “I see them in the back hall at St. David’s, all smiling and pious, hugging each other and smoking like chimneys, and never once would you see them at Mass.”

Something my father used to say about there being no shortage of assholes in the world came into my mind just then.

“Everybody’s got at least one, Tom,” he used to tell me. “It’s just more obvious on some than others.”

And almost miraculously I could see that Fr. Peter had an asshole too, maybe two of them—more pronounced than any other member or mannerism—one of which was opening and closing and giving out with shit in the middle of his face where his mouth should be and I was figuring the distance between it and my fist and preliminary to the attack I was planning, I said some especially righteous if patently un-Christian things, incorporating words and phrases I’d not used before or since and not one of them surplus to requirements or worthy of repetition here.

On hearing same, he backed away, shocked, blushing, muttering something about not blaming the messenger, clearly unpracticed at being told what he could do and where he ought do it. I could feel the fist forming with which to smite him and the overwhelming urge to do the needful thing was forming too. To every cow its calf, I told myself; to every asshole its thumping. I stood up straight and took a step in his direction. He turned on his heel and walked off briskly, shaking his head.

The light in the western sky was declining. I waited for another half hour to lessen the chances of meeting him in the road on the way back. By the time I’d returned to my quarters, it was dark and cold and there was no power.

“Never meddle with a priest,” is what Nora told me.

“Don’t ever cross one, Tom, you’ll come to grief.”

In these parts a priest could curse as well as bless and those who believed in the power of one believed in the power of the other. She had stories of priests who had called down some mayhem upon the lands or family of someone who didn’t pay their share or who failed to give them drink or refused to come to Mass.

“The devil you know’s better than the one you don’t.”

Liam O’Flaherty writes in his Tourist’s Guide to Ireland:

He is the great and only power in the district. Confident in the blind worship of the peasants and the village loafers and the fishermen of the seaside, he forces the wealthier people to obey him in the most minute matters. He is practically master of the body and soul of every individual. When they are born they are brought before him and he baptizes them for a few shillings. When they begin to go to school they come under his supervision. He hires and sacks their teachers at his discretion, very often at his whim. He flogs them if they mitch from school or if they fail to learn their catechism. When they become striplings he watches them carefully lest they make love clandestinely. When they reach marriageable age he marries them for a few pounds. If they don’t get married he nags at them, eager for his fees. He abuses them from the altar unless they pay him what he considers sufficient money at Christmas and Easter. When they die he buries them, but before doing so, he levies a further toll in hard cash over their dead bodies. This toll is levied from all their relatives.

From their first yell at birth until the sod falls on them in their grave their actions and thoughts are under his discretion. He is, almost invariably, himself of peasant extraction and almost invariably he is just about as well informed as a well informed peasant. So he is not burthened by a very refined religious conscience in the civilized sense of the word. Being mentally on a level with his peasant flock, he is up to all their tricks. He knows what is passing in their minds, of what they are afraid, how to tickle their greed, how to overawe them with threats of hell, or to enthuse them with promises of indulgences and eternal happiness. So they are proud of him, as of something that has sprung from their loins, that satisfies their innate greed by giving a promise of Heaven and that is just a little cleverer than themselves. Not too clever, for too much cleverness inspires a peasant with distrust. —pages 19–22

It was just such a priesthood, satirized by O’Flaherty in 1930, that the young priest in the picture no doubt aspired to at his first Solemn High Mass in Jackson, Michigan, on that bright June morning in 1934—a ministry of gossip and goodwill, moral authority and fear of the Lord, shame and salvation, tribal bias and beatitudes, deep humanity and flawed humans. It was a priesthood of a people and a faith familiar to his father, who’d brought it from the small house in West Clare he’d left in the decade before the new priest was born. It was the faith known to those who stayed put in these western parishes at the edge of the world. It was Irish and Irish American. It was Hollywood and Holy Roman, icon and idolatry. It was the faith of my youth and instruction. All my life I have been dogged by priests whose voices I hear when my conscience speaks. I think of them as fellow pilgrims, placed at random or by the hand of God at intersections in my own journey. However imperfect these men have been, all they’ve ever done was good to me.

When I meet Fr. Culligan in Carrigaholt, I hear Fr. Kenny in his voice, and Fr. Killeen, and Fr. Murphy and Fr. Walsh and Fr. Lynch. It is the same language that Fr. Ron and Fr. Bill and Fr. Leo in Michigan speak. It is a dialect of faith I understand. It is the language I first learned as a child, safe in the arms of my Blessed Mother, my Holy Father, the curious syllables of secret, sacred speech rolling off my tongue by rote. And there’s a comfort in it, a return to the safety of my childhood, to the certainties I had then that someone was in charge and watching out for the likes of me.

But faith, it turns out, is not child’s play, seasoned as it must be by the facts of life—love hurts; we die; hope falters; God, it seems, goes missing sometimes.

This is where the smarmy and narcissistic doxologies of the day fail us. Faith is not for dealing with God’s grandeur—the sunset, the candle flame, the child’s face. God is manifest in a lover’s eyes. Faith is rather for the hours of God’s absence, when we are most alone, betrayed, in pain, afraid. The life of faith is less a journey into ever-more-pleasant horizons or agreeable truths, and more a kind of rummage through the doubts raised by mere existence. This is when the discipline and traditions, the rubrics and language of religion provide a necessary infrastructure for our own voice, crying in the desert, at one with pilgrims everywhere. But more and more our churches have become a kind of spiritual country club or theme park or religious mall endeavoring, as everything in the marketplace does, to entertain, excite, comfort, or soothe us. What faith is after is not comfort but salvation.

For many of the faithful, the politics of the Church and the failings of churchmen and religious have made their religion at best a distraction, at worst an impediment to the life of faith. They cling to the disciplines and language, observe the rubrics and rituals, say their prayers, and go about their lives keeping an arm’s length between their religiosity and spirituality. They are Catholic by birth and baptism, training and temperament. They simply have little to do with the Church.

On Ash Wednesday of 2004, when two reports commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops revealed the scope of clergy sexual abuse since 1950 in the world’s largest Christian denomination, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the conference said, “The terrible history recorded here is history.”

Like those who proclaim “closure” at a memorial service, often just before the Merlot runs out, thus suggesting that grief is “finished,” the prelate’s declaration seeks to make finished history of all-too-current events. But history is a perspective that, like closure, is achieved, not proclaimed. Unless and until the Church deals not only with the scandal of problem priests but also with the vastly more egregious conduct of a hierarchy that has failed the faithful badly, lay and ordained alike, Catholics are right to be wary of this old boys’ network of company men.

That Boston’s Cardinal Law resigned in December of 2002 is little comfort to those who believe he should have been arrested. That he was restored by Pope John Paul II, early in 2004, to a cushy and largely ceremonial post at St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome is an insult and further proof that at its highest levels the Church still doesn’t “get” it. That good men of God, servants to their parishes and communities, innocent and heroically kind practitioners of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy have been made sexual suspects and left hanging in the wind by the cover-ups and cronyism of their ecclesiastical uplines is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Hard times, these days, to be a parish priest in Ireland or America—indeed, around the world. Damned if they do and if they didn’t, in ways the old movies never foretold, they are called to imitate Christ: to bear the beating due the sins of others, to take a scourging in the public square, to suffer all the large and little deaths and to live in the ever-present fear that God is watching or that God isn’t.

WE CATHOLIC BOYS all listened for the call—the voice of God exquisite in our ears: Come follow me, or, as it was with Paul, thunder and lightning, or to Noah, Build an ark. Even when God speaks in riddles, as in “Be fruitful, but not the apples,” there is comfort in the conversation. Belief is easy when God speaks to us. The ordinary silence—there’s the thing—the soul-consuming quiet, the heavens’ hush that sets even the pious wondering. Lord, spare us all, we doubting Thomases who, even with a trembling finger in the wound, still ask aloud, “My Lord? My God?”

Once in the basement of my grandparents’ house, I found the dead priest’s cassock and Roman collar hanging from a rafter, blessed and bodiless. I was the age my father was when his uncle was ordained. And under it, a trunk of priestly things, surplice and biretta, bright chalices, a sick-call kit and leather breviary. I tried them all. Though nothing seemed to fit, all the same, I kept on listening.

Fr. Thomas Kenny—never “Tom”—that Holy Roman Irish Catholic Man who never wavered, never doubted in the least but lost his bearings when they Englished everything, taught me to pray to know God’s purpose in my life. “Discernment,” he called it, and I keep praying for it.

It was a language I learned to speak, lovely and Latin, a sort of second tongue, given by my parents and people, nuns and priests, that lingers in the air like incense and song, ghostly and Gregorian—memories of which are always flooding then fading, coming then going, but never gone.

WHEN THE YOUNG priest in the picture died, that last day of July 1936, they took him, I’m told, back the high road to Taos from Santa Fe past the holy shrine at Chimayo and the mission churches in Cordova, Truchas, Las Trampas, and Penasco. And after a wake on Saturday night and Mass on Sunday in Our Lady of Guadalupe in Taos, they took him back the low road for Mass in Santa Fe at the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi. The route meets the Rio Grande southwest of Ranchos de Taos and works its way south through Velarde, Arcalde, and San Juan Pueblo, with the river to the right and mountains everywhere. A reporter for the Santa Fe paper, Katharine Darst, wrote it down and sent a copy of the article to my grandfather. Along with a handful of photos sent home with his things, it was the only document we ever had that brought to life the man who went out West and died and wore the cassock that hung in the basement of my grandfather’s house on Montevista Street in Detroit.

PATHOS IN BURIAL OF YOUNG PRIEST
UNTIMELY DEAD AT TAOS

While eastern tourists flocked to the horse show, or drove gaily off to Jemez for the Indian dances, a somber little procession wound down the mountainside from Taos Sunday—a procession carrying the Rev. Thomas Patrick Lynch to burial.

These black draped Mexican women with withered faces, these young boys, and mothers with babes in their arms, were the people the young priest had come west to serve. At their head rode Father Balland, weeping.

Two years ago the young Irishman from Detroit had made the journey up to Taos for the first time. Full of hope he was starting his life’s work in the missionary parish. And that work was not entirely one of preaching. When Father Lynch had ministered to the spiritual needs of his little flock he had a way of taking off his Roman collar and his coat, and giving the boys a few pointers at baseball. And they respected his advice, for here was an athlete, a virile man. And he loved them. Why else had he come?

When the little procession started from Taos Sunday no relative accompanied the body of Father Lynch, but all that little band of mourners. Slowly, carefully, they bore their friend down through the chasm cut by the Rio Grande. Somber skies and the great black mountains cast a shadow of their own upon them.

In Santa Fe they bore the casket through deserted streets. Silently the Dominican monks, children from the orphanage, the nuns, His Excellency Archbishop Gerken, friends from Taos and Father Balland bore Thomas Lynch into the Cathedral for the last time. There his hands, as the hands of a saint, were touched to their rosaries.

A few people returning early from the horse show looked with curiosity on the quaint procession. Stray motorists who were stopped by traffic police, paused before they turned their cars down the detour. But nowhere was there a Willa Cather to make immortal the passing of this boy. She who had felt so poignantly the death of an old archbishop with his life work accomplished, was not here to witness the infinitely more pathetic exit of this boy whose life had been shut off “’ere half his days were done.” Here was a sorrow which needed her pen, and alas, only I was there.

Let this be my excuse for touching something so far beyond the ability of a simple newspaper reporter.

When they were through in Santa Fe, they put the dead priest on the train back East to his people. Bishop Gerken fronted the hundred dollars, which was later reimbursed by the dead priest’s estate, which also paid the undertakers in Santa Fe three hundred dollars for the embalming and coffin. It was late on Tuesday when the train arrived in Jackson. It was Wednesday, August 5, 1936, that my father’s father—the dead priest’s brother—took his twelve-year-old son along to Desnoyer Funeral Home in Jackson to organize the requiems and burial. And it was that morning, while his father talked details with Mr. Desnoyer, that the boy who would become my father wandered into the basement where he saw two men dressing the dead priest in a fresh white alb and green chasuble in preparation for the wake that night and ten o’clock Mass at St. John’s in the morning. That vision—a young boy’s witness of a dead priest and living men lifting him into his casket—shaped his life and my life and my family’s life for going seven decades now. Who we are, what we do, our lives and times have been shaped by it. Were it not for that moment in our father’s life, when his journey intersected with his dead uncle’s journey home, God only knows what we’d all be doing these two-thirds of a century since.

What if, there in the doorway of the embalming room, my father had been “called” to become a priest instead? Or what if, after all of Fr. Kenny’s plotting and prayers, I’d gotten the vocation he’d in mind for me?

“‘What if’s a mug’s game,” Nora would say. “Things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. Of that you can be sure, my boy.”

But in truth my people’s pilgrimage, across oceans and countries, from Ireland to America, Michigan to New Mexico, up and down mountains, through the desert and distant places and home again, wherever those homes were, began here in this small house in Moveen, where Fr. Thomas Lynch’s father, Thomas Lynch, first had a vision of a future in America. He only had the testimony of his father who’d been there, briefly we figure, in 1875; and others from the townland who’d gone out before. But it was 1890 now. His mother was dead. His roots to the home place loosened. His prospects in the familiar parish dimmed. The future, like Michigan, was a far country—a leap into the distant and unknown, oceans and rivers full of loops and turns, tides and repetitions, ways that widened and narrowed and crossed themselves. He took it all on faith, as pilgrims do.