Seán Walsh: The Search for Xavier

An insider piece: set in a friary in Dublin, Ireland, in the late 60’s.
A play centred on friars living in community – in poverty, chastity and obedience – in the immediate aftermath of Vatican Two but before the effects of that Council have really begun to take effect… Inside the cloister, behind closed doors.

The status quo is shaken when one of the brethren disappears overnight; a young priest goes AWL…
Worry… speculation… finally, consternation:
the search for Xavier ends when it is established beyond doubt that he is in London and co-habiting with a female…
A search that gives rise, in turn, to a searching of hearts…

Why the 60’s?
A modern audience will be able to look back/look into the Church as it was at that time;
the strict regime of “the old days” had only just begun to give way to the changes and uncertainties resulting from Vatican Two;
the old regime of “black is black – white, white” was slowly, inexorably, being eroded;
the element of fear – correction, reprimand, punishment, transfer – loomed large in the clerical psyche;
the shock waves caused by the defection of Charles Davis from the priesthood and the diocese of Westminster had only just begun to reverberate around the universal Church;
the old certainties had begun to give way to the new uncertainties;
when the term, paedophile, was far from common coinage;
when the debate on clerical celibacy/married clergy was still in its infancy;
when the aristocratic Pope Pius XII was still a vivid memory in the minds of the faithful;
when the clerics and religious who lived at that time could not have foreseen the scandals that would rock the Church of the 90’s and subsequent decades…

Briefly, a modern audience will be able to look back at the Church of the 60’s – a Church that no longer exists to any great extent – an era that formed their forebears; view it objectively and with a certain curiosity.
Change, then, is the operative word. Church of change… of friction, dispute, challenge, doubt, uncertainty, the old absolutes gone for ever.

There are several orders of friars/male mendicants in the Church – Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites etc. Each with its own insignia, rule.

The Latin of the liturgy – Mass, Divine Office – is contrasted betimes with the music, laughter and bonhomie of a community at recreation.

The song – Mary Anne – is a piece of nostalgia that was well known among the friars at that time. The chorus rouses them to join in… at the centre and again at the end… rising to crescendo… before giving way to moriendo…

Available from Amazon:

The Search for Xavier. (Amazon ebook and paperback.)
“This play shows why art is needed – to go where history cannot: in this case into the internal impact of a ‘defection’ from the fortress church of Irish Catholicism in the 1960s. Xavier, a monk, has disappeared, but why – and what will this mean for the morale and mission of his brothers? How are they to make sense of it and what does the future hold for ‘the church’ anyway, a church over-identified then and now with its celibate clergy?
That question is not yet past history of course: ‘The Search for Xavier’ helps the reader – and not just the Irish Catholic reader – to articulate those questions we tend to suppress because of the ‘Seamus Heaney Protocol’: “Whatever you say, say nothing”.
It obviously took great courage for Sean Walsh to write this story, but it is also his skill as a writer that makes the book one of those as yet unknown classics that historians of the future will need if they
are to map our recent past and present.
No other book has taken me so close to the inner turmoil caused to that fortress church of the 1960s by the answering of a vocation to a life that can nourish the heart as well as the soul.

• Sean O Conaill