Sean Walsh

I live in Dublin, Ireland. Sometimes. Most times I live in my head, quite unaware of my surroundings – if you know what I mean… If you succeed in tracking Sean Walsh, please let me know, ok? I’ve been searching for him for years…

LINK: https://sean-walsh.me/blog/the-search-for-xavier-2/

The Search for Xavier

Published on Saturday 27th December 2025 by Sean Walsh

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.

Copyright © 2025 Sean Walsh