TOMORROW!!! ACP AGM 2023 – Tues 7 Nov 2.00-5.00pm Radisson Athlone
Theme: The Last Priests in Ireland – What is Life Like for Them?
Speakers: Paddy Byrne, John Dunphy, Julieann Moran and Tim Hazelwood
All welcome
Paddy Byrne
Paddy is the parish priest of Abbeyleix. From Carlow town, he was educated in Carlow CBS and studied Business and Politics in Trinity College Dublin before training to be a priest in Carlow College. He writes for a number of media outlets. He has almost 31,000 followers on Twitter. Just back from a trip to Asia!
John Dunphy
A 64 year-old from Ballinakill Co. Laois. Studied in the Salesian college there and after Leaving Cert in 1977 went to Maynooth. Ordained in 1984 and then spent 8 years teaching in Knockbeg College Carlow; 8 years as curate in Monasterevin parish; and 5 years as curate in Newbridge. Appointed Parish Priest of Graiguecullen parish in 2005 and ministering there ever since.
Julieann Moran
Julieann is the General Secretary of the Synodal Pathway of the Catholic Church in Ireland. She was a core member of the writing group for the Irish National Synthesis that was sent to Rome following the diocesan stage of the Universal Synod and was one of the four in-person delegates who travelled to Prague to deliver the Irish presentation at the European Continental Assembly. This presentation greatly impacted the final document that was prepared at this assembly and later the working document for the Universal Stage of the Synod.
Whilst a key part of Julieann’s role is the continued promotion of both the Universal Synod and the Irish Synodal Pathway, Julieann is also working with parishes and dioceses to embed synodal practices in the day-to-day life and mission of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Acknowledging the significant changes that are being asked of priests, Julieann is also working with clergy groups around the country, providing space for them to reflect on the future of priestly ministry in the synodal context.
Tim Hazelwood
Priest of Cloyne diocese and ACP Leadership Team member. Predominantly involved in the Care of Priests for ACP.
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I discovered a copy of that magnificent novel, Luke Delmege (1901) in the library here and was thinking of the Irish clergy in the late 19th century when I opened this site and read the chilling heading: “The Last Priests in Ireland.” Go bhfóire Dia orainn!
As Jesus’ priesthood was centrally about challenging an unjust religious and social system – i.e. about an actual sacrifice – and only secondly about the institution of a sacramental ritual – the Eucharist – how come the ACP are describing the merely ordained – the symbolic priesthood – as ‘The Last Priests in Ireland’?
It is this inability to see past the sacramental priesthood to the actual priesthood of the baptised – actuated daily in the care of others – e.g. incoming refugees and children – by women especially – that underlies the present crisis of the western church – and of the ACP.
If the ordained cannot see – and passionately defend, in synodal interaction – the connection between the ritual they perform and the actual priesthood that the care of others demands, is it any wonder they are facing extinction in Ireland?
All because of the elevation of the symbolic above the real, and the resulting ‘disconnect’ between the sacrament in church and what it signifies – i.e. calls us to do – in the world outside. Even though many are obviously doing that anyway!
The priesthood of Christ was not primarily about challenging injustice.
As the Roman Catechism teaches, the Mass is the Sacrifice of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus. At Mass, the Sacrifice of Calvary is made present when the priest lends his voice to Christ and acts in Persona Christi.
All other Sacraments flow from this. When we receive Christ we will of course be given the graces we need, to go out and practice love of neighbour.
The Church was never about building Utopia on Earth. Salus Animarum suprema lex. The Church only exists to save souls and bring the light of the Gospel to those who have not Heard it.
Many Holy Martyrs died for the Sacrifice of the Mass. Oliver Plunkett, John Fisher, Thomas More, Edmund Campion and Margaret Clitherow to name but a few.
Ignore modernist Claptrap and read the Roman Catechism and the encyclicals of Pope St. Pius X, Pope John Paul II and Pope Pius XII as a starting point.
The perennial binding public revelation of faith and morals NEVER changes. The Holy Ghost does not contradict himself.
Sean, Canon Sheehan is rather devastating about a Maynooth priesthood and his novel moves towards the conversion of his protagonist to a church of the people. Four years later George Moore deconstructed the myth of Maynooth in The Lake. In the 1921 rewriting of that novel the protagonist confesses: “I can now see that it was not piety that sent me to Maynooth, but a certain spirit of adventure, a dislike of the commonplace, of the prosaic.… The priesthood seemed to offer opportunities of realizing myself, of preserving the spirit within me”. I wonder if Moore had read Luke Delmege, which was a bestseller translated into several other languages. At least in the 1921 version of The Lake, the priest loses the faith, and broods: “still less could I continue to administer Sacraments that I ceased to believe in. I can imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his administrations after he has ceased to believe in them.” This is written in the atmosphere of the Modernist crisis marked by the encyclical Pascendi in 1907 and following Moore’s 1913 trip to Palestine, when he visited caves quite near the one where the famous Qumran Scrolls were to be discovered forty years later, and gave a remarkably accurate account of the Essenes in The Brook Kerith (1916). https://journals.openedition.org/babel/3670 Whereas in the first version his lady friend, Rose Leicester, gushes about Wagner, in the 1921 version she gets a proper Irish name, Nora Glynn, and pursues biblical studies along Modernist lines. A protege of Moore’s, Gerald O’Donovan wrote a fascinating novel, Father Ralph (1913) on the impact of the crackdown on Modernism on the Irish clergy (the protagonist’s confreres use the papal fulminations as a charter for suspecting him of Modernism). Oddly enough, I never heard of him during my years in Maynooth. The collapse of the Maynooth spiritual empire and the empire of the Irish clergy in general, reaching to the ends of the earth, has been so sudden that it induces an apocalyptic sense of time. Once we were scared to find the years flit by so fast — now it is the centuries!
#3 Many thanks for that, Joe. I am now regretting my tendency to view Canon Sheehan as a mere horse-drawn and verbose antique. The Wikipedia article alone has made me ashamed that I didn’t set myself to read him more thoroughly – ‘My New Curate’ did not set me on fire when I first read it.
So I have ordered the only paperback copy of Luke Delmege that I could find on offer this morning.
Ah ‘Modernism’ – what would we do without at least the ghastly rumour of that never-to-be-pinned-down-but-nevertheless-Satanic threat to the world?
Your references to George Moore are also intriguing, but I might not get to him I fear.
#3 If the priesthood of Christ was not primarily about challenging injustice why then did Jesus, and all of the prophets, do so?
And if Jesus’ father is not bent upon our liberation from injustice also, why did he free the Israelites from Egypt and the first Christians from fear of Caesar?
#3 explains only why Catholic social teaching never caught fire in Ireland – an understanding of personal salvation that can ignore injustice and essentially blames God the Father for the crucifixion – which Jesus never did. It explains also the collapse of Christendom – in the inability of Christian churches beholden to proud ‘Christian’ rulers to call out their pride and covetousness.
Jesus was not crucified for instituting the Eucharist but for disturbing the unjust Temple religious system – as the Gospel graphically tells us.
That the Father of Jesus is bent upon freeing us from the sin that causes injustice is clear from the totality of the scriptural record. And the greatest sin is the pride – the desire for superiority – that causes violence and injustice.
Jesus accepted crucifixion for the reason he gives us in John 16:33 – to overcome, for us also, the judgement of the world that condemned him. The martyrs of the Colosseum showed the same courage by challenging the injustice of that place too, and overcoming it. Their fear of Roman judgement and death had been overcome by their desire for the kingdom of God and their belief in their own resurrection.
The worldview of #3 would leave all injustice unchallenged: had the early church done the same the Colosseum would still be thriving.
What comes next, obviously, is the recovery of the spirituality of the new creation of St Paul, founded on loving justice and free of subservience to covetous governments. The church of Pius X, Pius XII and John Paul II that hid even clerical child abuse – rather than confront that injustice also – is dying for that very reason.
If ‘modernism’ is the calling out of injustice then Jesus was a modernist and the sermon on the mount is a summary of modernism. Perhaps that is what is meant by the saying that Christ is Omega as well as Alpha?
Much of what Sean is saying was the bread and butter of our theology and spirituality in the brief dawn after Vatican II. The disappearance of the Church’s Social Teaching as an effective hermeneutic and praxis leaves a sinister gulf at the heart of Catholicism. Here is what happened:
1. A Pope of Vatican II, a man of burning social concern, author of Populorum Progressio, became obsessed with dead topics, celibacy and contraception, and toward the end of his reign theologians were becoming used to living under suspicion,
2. A man obsessed with fighting Communism, and with fighting sexual freedom and abortion, reacted to everything new in the church with suspicion and repression. He had a particular horror of Liberation Theology and ardently supported the cruel crusades of Ronald Reagan in El Salvador and Nicaragua. His Fatima-centered spirituality drew the Blessed Virgin (Totus Tuus) into his ultra-conservative battle. Liberation Theologians were crushed. In Ireland, instead of a socially conscious Catholicism in the spirit of Vatican II we saw cults of moving statues (of the BVM) and of Medjugorje (an insane cult which nonetheless was the main channel to God for very many Irish pilgrims). Moral theologians were crushed. Feminism was crushed. Theology became an exclusive diet of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a learned aesthete who never, ever touched on social themes.
3. The Catholic world became flooded with reactionary obsessions, notably with regard to the liturgy, which were promoted by a neurotic and fearful man, under whose reign the Church’s Social Teaching completely disappeared. Instead, the only vibrant topic of debate in and about Catholicism became Child Sexual Abuse.
Joe@7, what an excellent synopsis of how our church had been so badly damaged.
Thank God for Francis. It was worth Holding out for a Hero!!, though many of us never thought we’d see one.
PS. I did think that there was more to Von Balthasar than that. He was appalled by the manner in which his colleague, Henri de Lubac SJ, was treated/abused by the Vatican after Corpus Mysticum was published.
Balthasar has great merits of course (his work on Barth, Maximus, and Gregory of Nyssa especially), but the adulation surrounding him was over the top (and often laced with contempt for Rahner and Schillebeeckx, greater theologians who were much more in sync with Vatican II and unafraid in addressing the modern world and the problems of the historical tradition). Jean-Luc Marion, too, has great merits, but does not represent the social awareness of Vatican II. It amazes me to find theologians even in America devoting their efforts to exegeting his most iffy theses, such as that God does not need to exist because he loves. It is hard to resist the impression that Catholic theology has lost the plot., retreating into a kind of mental ghetto.
This was exactly my impression when studying Theology at the graduate level in the US, when deciding on a PhD program, and when submitting papers for publication over the last decade. There was much more enthusiasm about for exegeting obscure texts with little or no effort to identify pastoral implications than there was about addressing the questions that people actually ask and that matter for the future of the Church. Questions regarding the implementation of Vatican II, the implications of modern biblical scholarship for doctrines articulated with recourse to anachronistic modes of biblical interpretation, or anything remotely involving Catholic Social Teaching were widely regarded as passe in the academy. Postmodernism was often invoked to essentially justify what was anti-modernism while trying to seem erudite in the process (e.g. attacking the historical-critical method) Marion was a darling of that camp. Not all American theologians or theology departments reflect this brand of intellectual snobbery or a phobia for the pastoral, but it is definitely at large. As the likes of Dermot Lane, Michael Drumm, and the late Gabriel Daly are being replaced by American theologians in some Irish theology departments, I hope this disconnect between the study of theology and the life of the Church does not take hold in Ireland. Without endorsing clericalism, maybe there was something to be said for a theological landscape in which many of the players had pastoral experience in parishes or in the apostolates of religious orders.