Brendan Hoban: Patsy’s new book will stand the test of time                

Western People 3.9.2024

Patsy McGarry, a proud native of Ballaghaderreen, has followed his recent retirement as the Religious Correspondent of the Irish Times, with a compelling retrospective account of his eventful life in journalism. His position offered him a clear view of a series of scandals that rocked the Irish Catholic Church and devastated its status and authority – among them the clerical child sexual abuse revelations, the Magdalen Laundries, the Mother and Baby Homes and other seismic events.

As well as that McGarry’s lavish skills as a journalist allowed him to fruitfully employ his forensic skills in analysing the who, the what and the why of the turbulent years of the last few decades for Irish society and the Catholic Church – as well as communicating his findings with precision, clarity and balance.

His new book, Well, Holy God, My Life as an Irish, Catholic, Agnostic Correspondent, also charts his own personal faith journey from a secure childhood religious belief to later uncharted waters of agnosticism. And while the book extends more widely than what my summary might suggest, it’s his faith journey that’s immediately striking.

‘Religion’, McGarry contends, was ‘never huge in our house’. As a child he accompanied his mother, whom he describes as having ‘a deep, private faith but was never pious’ as she cycled to early Mass every Sunday in Frenchpark with Patsy on the back of her bicycle. His father, who ‘regarded the Catholic Church, as an institution with suspicion’, stopped going to Mass in 1961 – ‘unthinkable in the rural Ireland of the day’. But while in 1961, his father gave up largely on religion, Patsy ‘went in the opposite direction’ even to the extent of becoming convinced that ‘I would be a priest when I grew up’. His happy childhood, full of the rituals and iconography of Catholicism, led him to adopting a series of religious convictions that would frame his young life.

After the family moved from rural Mullen to Ballaghaderreen, Patsy became more aware of the ‘stratospheric’ levels of Mass attendance as well the increased visibility of priests, nuns and Brothers including the ‘violent and brutal regime’ in the De La Salle Boys school and ‘the air of stern discipline you could find in a barracks’ in St Nathy’s College.

While in Nathy’s, Patsy’s relationship with religion took a radical turn for the worst. It wasn’t, he is quick to add,  because of anything he witnessed or experienced in that college but the stock issues of the time: the wealth of the Church; hectoring priests; bullying teachers; a dodgy sex education approach – ‘a celibate  instructing the virginal in what was wholly hypothetical’ – the religion classes where questions were not allowed; and the sometimes unchristian attitude of ‘religious’ people.

The result was that Pasty entered what he called ‘a prolonged process of bereavement’ after doubts about his faith surfaced and he struggled ‘to hold on to God’. Later in Galway university, though he read widely and followed debates on religious issues he only had questions and ‘no answers seemed adequate’. When he arrived at the foothills of adulthood, he realised he was like ‘a priest without a Church, a believer without a god.’ He missed his former intimacy with God and the solid assurance, direction and stimulus that a religious faith had added to his life. ‘I lost God’, he writes, ‘with deep reluctance’.

While Catholicism shaped his most significant convictions – a clear conscience; a strong sense of social justice; respect for others; and an attachment to family, friends and community – he became ‘that peculiar hybrid, an Irish Catholic agnostic, Catholic through cultural background, agnostic through lack of conviction’.

In 1997, Patsy became  the Religious Affairs correspondence of the Irish Times, surmising that his agnosticism may have influenced his interviewers of whom he had asked the pertinent question, ‘Would you appoint a member of a political party as the newspaper’s political correspondent?’

Patsy’s political background was Fianna Fáil – for his father ‘de Valera was as near divine as any man could become’ – but he had to steer a middle course (‘respectfully but without deference’) in dealing with politicians and religious figures.

In the years that followed, he would need all his personal and professional resources to sustain an even path in the multiple crises he reported on: President Mary McAleese receiving Communion in Christ Church Cathedral; the Bishop Eamonn Casey story in its multiple components; the odd case of Monsignor Micheál Ledwith, president of Maynooth College; the censuring of a number of Irish priests, notably Tory Flannery; and the removal of Fr Kevin Hegarty as editor of Intercom.

And, not least, the clerical child sexual abuse scandals and the tsunami that followed the Catholic Church’s ‘gross irresponsibility in addressing the problem and its callous indifference to the children abused and their families’ as well as its primary concern for its own reputation and assets; the television programmes like Cardinal Secrets that put names and faces on the grim statistics, the statutory inquiries and the reports that followed and the implosion of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Indeed, it was at a press conference after the Dublin Report, that McGarry’s anger and frustration boiled over and he spoke ‘from the gut’ listing a litany of church excuses, failures, obfuscations and deceptions around the abuse scandals ending with a question that resonated with so many; ‘Why should we trust the Catholic Church in Ireland again?’ 

It was at once the definitive question that he had both the right and duty to frame. I suspect too, that Patsy’s righteous anger was not unconnected with a sense of personal disappointment and loss for Patsy himself in losing a treasured faith, reflected in his childhood memory as a young lad who sat on the back of his mother’s bicycle as she cycled to Mass all those years ago.

Well, Holy God, isessential reading that will stand the test of time.

• Patsy McGarry, Well, Holy God, My Life as an Irish, Catholic, Agnostic Correspondent, €18.99