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Does fear of clericalism keep priests like Pádraig Standún off the ACP site?
March 26 2013
Mary G-B
Who could have imagined that the Association of Catholic Priests website would blossom into a healing confessional for the laity. This has been my grateful experience.
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13 July 2025 – 15th Sunday (C)
July 13 2025
Thara Benedicta
Key Message: Samaritan moments are our life's beautiful moments!! Homily: Testimony: "Whenever my aged mother called me to talk with me, I used to feel that I knew more than her and would start interrupting her whenever she talked. When she started a sentence, I would end it. I would hear the silent promptings of the Holy Spirit, "Let her talk". But I would never listen to His promptings and continue to interrupt her. Later, when my daughter did the same to me, I understood how painful it was. I realised that I did not show kindness to my mother." Our Lord Jesus teaches us through today's Gospel that getting a ticket to Heaven is too simple. We can just be a good Samaritan. Each one of us can be a Good Samaritan, maybe not on the road to Jericho, but in the hallway, the kitchen, the workplace, in traffic, or like in the above testimony, even in a phone call. A good listening heart mixed with kindness is powerful to make us climb a step towards Heaven. Opportunities are available, wherever we are. We don’t need a first aid kit or a donkey. All we need is a compassionate heart. Our Lord Jesus portrayed the "Good Samaritan" as an example for us to follow. He was a man who didn’t plan to be a hero or work towards fame. He became a hero by noticing the need of his neighbour and acting on it. He wasn’t wearing angelic robes. He was probably sweaty, tired, and had errands to run. Yet he paused. He was committed to being compassionate. Sometimes we wait for big opportunities to do something “worthy,” forgetting that holiness hides in the cracks of daily life. A smile for someone sad, an extra spoon of rice to someone hungry, listening without interrupting, letting someone cut ahead in traffic… these are Good Samaritan moments. Saints aren't superheroes either. They are simply people who stop when love asks them to. Moses reminds us in Deuteronomy: “The word is very near to you… it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.” So, you don’t have to cross oceans. Jesus is in the person next to you. Close your eyes. Take a slow breath and let your heart grow quiet. Now, imagine Jesus lying on the side of the road, wounded and forgotten. No one stops. People walk by, too busy, too afraid. Then you come. Your heart is little, unsure… but you kneel, and whisper, “Jesus, I am here.” And suddenly, His eyes open. He smiles. And Heaven bursts into song. In truth, every time you comfort a friend, every time you forgive, every time you are patient, every time you don't interrupt someone else talking, you are tending to Jesus Himself. Let your soul whisper: “Jesus, make me love You in the faces I meet today.” Can you look for small chances to serve someone with joy? Your life will become beautiful!!
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Does fear of clericalism keep priests like Pádraig Standún off the ACP site?
March 26 2013
Joe O'Leary
I just penned this review: Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, Pádraig Standún: Sagart ’a Rún (Maigh Nuad: An Sagart, 2022), 358pp. This very personal book is a full-scale response to Ireland’s best-known priest-novelist and more broadly a reflection on the state of Catholicism in Ireland today. Having known so many of the people it mentions and having lived through the events described, I felt that the book was constantly murmuring ‘tua res agitur’ and at the same time telling me that all this history has faded like a dream. It is a remarkably upbeat book, laced with nostalgia, and also breathing indignation about the ‘lost opportunities’ that another priest-novelist, Brendan Hoban, deplored at the time of John Paul II’s visit in 1979—the ‘last hurrah’ of a failing church. Maynooth College, in the mid-sixties of the last century. was a seminary housing up to 500 young men, all devoted to the ideal of the Priesthood, which they believed would always be cherished in Ireland and worldwide. In this sheltered world, the seminarian ‘takes pleasure in simple things: the company of his friends (comhluadar a cairde), concerts put on by fellow-students, the short trip to Dublin, the first film of the term, the first summer swim… The end of the road [priesthood] is the star of hope in the course of the seven years… This it is that makes the clerical students in Maynooth the merriest youths in Ireland’ (p. 16, not clear who is being quoted). In a video advertising the flourishing Maynooth University of today there is no mention of the ecclesiastical past and the historical seminary grounds are referred to simply as ‘the South Campus.’ History has advanced rapidly, with crushing strides, so that even this fascinating book seems a ghostly chronicle. In the class that entered Maynooth in 1964, to be ordained in 1971, the taciturn, brooding Pádraig Standún, then known as Pat Staunton, might draw attention by his striking good looks, fashioned by the wild landscapes of his native Co. Mayo, or by his poems in student magazines (including one on ‘The Spirit of George Moore’) that already struck the subversive notes of his later work. When he was ordained a deacon, he burst into speech, in sermons that disturbed the authorities (who had him submit them to his bishop), particularly one given in the town in which he warned the people to be wary of the College in some land deal. His comments on church affairs in various journals in the following years might shock, but they were unanswerable. While we were supposed to make a fuss about the inefficacious new rite of the Sacrament of Penance in 1977, he calmly declared that this sacrament was obsolete, and so it has transpired (in part because of the Vatican’s refusal to implement the theologically perfectly valid rite of collective absolution). I last saw Pádraig Standún in the later seventies when, on my way to see a classmate who was curate in Inis Meáin, I noticed a knot of workmen in a field, and one of them shot up his arm in salute—none other than an Standúnach himself! While Ó Dúshláine sensibly deconstructs the image of the Sagart Aroon, intensely evoked in the haunting 18th-century song ‘Fill, fill a rún ó,’ he presents Standún as a modern version of the beloved priest, close to his people, whose rights he has upheld in showdowns with civil authorities, and whom he engages in fictions that cut through the miasma of clerical silence and speak to people where they are, and where we all are if we are honest enough to say so. He wants ‘to rage from the clifftops, to roar in the wilderness… by churning out a novel a year for the non-élite market, the underground of the local radio services and the supermarket shelves’ (quoted, p. 51). Tadhg Ó Dúshláine’s study of Standún’s fiction gives pride of place to his first novel, Súil de Breith (1983), which was filmed as Budawanny (1987) and in an expanded version in the wake of the Bishop Eamonn Casey affair of 1992 as The Bishop’s Story (1994). The film might seem no more than an amusing tale of an island priest who gives shelter to a woman in need; she rushes to his bed during a thunderstorm, and next morning he remarks at breakfast, ‘So much for celibacy’ (in English in the text). Later he states at Sunday Mass (in the film; I have not read the book): ‘My dear people, soon you will have more than one reason to call me “Father,” but I intend to stand by this woman and I hope you will too.’ Hilarious, but the jesting cloaks a probing reflection on the problems of mandatory clerical celibacy, and has even been criticized for its urge to preach a message. Ó Dúshláine argues that any novel worth its salt must have a message in which the author has invested his whole being. Standún has never drawn ecclesiastical censure for his attack on celibacy, not only because it is rooted in Irish literary tradition, but because it is doctrinally impeccable (though the demand for women priests was artificially made into a doctrinal crime by John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger). Paul VI and Pope Francis tried to introduce the ordination of married men at the Synod sessions of 1971 and 2019, and Ratzinger as pope created a huge breach in the discipline by welcoming so many married Anglican clergy to join the ranks of the Roman Catholic presbyterate. Whether or not he has pursued the moral quandaries of celibacy, the potential for hypocrisy, to its last depths, it should be noted as another strength of an Standúnach, fully shared by an Dúshláineach, that he laces his most unsettling messages with an irresistible sense of humour. Cian Mná (1993) has a lesbian couple and provides Ó Dúshláine with the opportunity to celebrate the liberalization of Irish attitudes on the LGBT front. A. D. 2016, Standún’s favourite among his novels, published in 1988, is presented under the heading 'apologia pro vita sua.' Without chapter divisions, the novel has a long conversation between ‘Pádraig’ and ‘Stan’—the former a priest who holds forth with Bernanosian directness on the love of God, the latter a doubter. Thus musing on his marginal or contradictory position, Standún makes us feel that it is in fact central, as is confirmed by his popularity with his classmates (who asked him to preach to them at one of the Maynooth reunions held every five years), the connivence of his bishops, Joseph Cassidy who lauded him for exploring human experience, and Michael Neary who was his unlikely roommate during his third year in Maynooth. Ó Dúshláine himself blends the roles of literary critic, sociologist of religion, and prophetic messenger, as he traces prefigurations of Standún’s protest in three powerful novels of priesthood in crisis: Canon Patrick Sheehan’s Luke Delmege (1901), George Moore’s The Lake (1905; revised 1921), and Gerald O’Donovan’s Father Ralph (1913). Ó Dúshláine admires my mentor Fr Peter Connolly (1927-87) for his championing of the novelists Edna O’Brien and John Broderick, and for his incarnational vision enriched by study of D. H. Lawrence. I don’t think Connolly ever taught Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as suggested here. In 1967-69, at least, he took us through Lawrence’s greater novels, Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow (but not the terrific Women in Love). It is a matter of keen regret that Connolly never produced his projected book on Resurrection in Lawrence. Ó Dúshláine takes issue with Connolly for his failure to see beneath the ‘anticlericalism’ of Moore and O’Donovan to the truth and realism of their vision, and also for his failure to perceive the Rabelaisian dimension of Moore’s treatment of priests in The Untilled Field. He also deplores Connolly’s neglect of Irish language priest-novelists such as Peadar Ó’Laoghaire (1839-1920) and Pádraig Ó Duinnín (Dinneen, 1860-1934), but in fact the former of these wrote only one tale Séadna, which is hardly a novel, and the latter, a famed lexicographer, wrote only one novel, which is unknown. Another mentor, Fr Enda McDonagh (1930-2021), shares with Standún and George Moore a contemplative rapport with the Mayo landscape, which is another imponderable strength of the Standún persona. McDonagh kept his rooms in Maynooth through thick and thin, though the post-Vatican II liberalism which he came to personify was even more marginalized there than in Standún’s island outposts. Hence Mary Robinson’s lament that Enda’s latter years were so lonely. Morose in its decline, the Irish Catholic Church was never to know the festive joy that its prophets might have brought. This book is largely an avalanche of quotations, very interesting in themselves, and often in English, which is helpful to one who must plough through the Irish text with the help of the Gearrfhoclór Gaeilge-Béarla (Short Irish-English Dictionary) published in 1981 by An Roinn Oideachais (Dept. of Education). Standún’s novels are broken open one by one, not for close literary analysis, but in order to name the religious and social currents at work in them, enticing the reader to explore further. The errata (especially regarding the name of the great Mayo biblical scholar, Seán Freyne, not ‘Frayne’) can only be deplored. Even so, the book offers an illuminating contextualization and overview of a singular and fascinating literary oeuvre.
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Gerry O’Connor CSsR and ACP Leadership Weekly Sunday Homily
July 3 2025
DOM
Sean in (1) makes a key point "the dignity of service rather than the arrogance of power" and this is very necessary in the Church going forward. A simple example, in a cluster of five parishes all the Saturday Vigil Masses have been suspended for the Summer. The Vigil and Sunday Masses are official Masses for the whole parish, weekday Masses are devotional in nature. It is clear that so many parish clergy need some respite but the needs of the laity should also be considered. An arrangement is needed to balance the needs of the clergy and the parishoners. The balance might be achieved by suspending some weekday masses leaving the Vigil Masses in place.
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Does fear of clericalism keep priests like Pádraig Standún off the ACP site?

13 July 2025 – 15th Sunday (C)

Does fear of clericalism keep priests like Pádraig Standún off the ACP site?

Gerry O’Connor CSsR and ACP Leadership Weekly Sunday Homily