The power of example

The power of example

Ciaran was a good man. He was a very good man. In fact, he was so possessed of the ideal of goodness that, in the latter years of his teen-hood, he decided to become a priest. His goodness unsullied by the world, he made his unremarkable way through the priest-making factory until he eventually lost his name and became, to all but the initiated few, simply ‘Father’. He was protected from emotional upheaval by a gruff exterior; a shell from under which the soft-belly of his sensitive personality seldom emerged. He clothed himself in the spirit of the age and in the sartorial conventions of the time; black suit, black shoes; clerical stock or waistcoat and white, or in later years yellowing collar, around his bullish neck. It was as if he had been poured into his priestly outfit. He seldom emerged into public gaze without this protective scaffold. It was as if it kept him together. Even when he attended football matches, he kept protocol from under the sweaty, sometimes displaced, dog-collar that, in times of high excitement, swivelled under his swarthy chin and out of line with his Adam’s apple.

He was a good priest. An obedient priest. The people whom he served did not rave about how lovable he was but they recognised integrity and high standards. His manner was forthright and occasionally blunt. This was marked up to his credit when he confronted the British Army during his long tenancy in one of the North’s many cauldrons of conflict during the drawn-out and under-named ‘Troubles’.

Ciaran was never burdened with the clichéd label of ‘popular local curate’. He lived in the shadow of another who enjoyed such enthronement in the hearts of the people. He endured the domestic chaos and confusion that often accompany such a gift or charism and kept the parochial ship afloat at local level; balancing the deficiencies of a chaotic junior curate and an increasingly senile parish priest. His life became the living proof of the old adage that all professions are a conspiracy against the laity. If only they knew the human limitations with which he lived. His inner life and the domestic realities of his own existence often grated, but he allowed the friction to polish rather than to corrode.

Ciaran was a stiff character, after the mould of the age in which he was set. He did not allow alcohol to dissolve his reserve, but he mellowed in the warm glow of friendship. His holidays were taken with annual regularity among his class-fellows but the occasional lay-person was taken into his confidence, only if they had signed up, inadvertently or otherwise, to a set of Northern Catholic, middle-class values. He was self-deprecatory in humour but none the less insightful.

His clerical progress was snail-like but there was some evidence of a luminous trail. He endured the financial strain with the help of his ever-supporting family in the far North, while he hacked his way through the thickets of a more Southerly Ulster terrain.

He was a model of priestly life for me in my most impressionable years. The ‘youth priest’ or the ‘Father Trendies’ of those turbulent times meant little to me. I had skipped the usual teenage experience; going from junior seminary or boarding-school straight into the frenetic and multi-tasking world of commerce. Later as a student-priest I used to visit him in his new parish. He had acquired the requisite number of years of service and had been appointed, in late middle-age, to a part of the locality in which he had long worked and to which history had bequeathed the term ‘Lower’ during a division of parishes in the political past.

Ciaran was never of robust health, though he looked and sounded solid. He was given to a persistent chest complaint that shook him like an erupting volcano at times. He died as a relatively young man. The Bishop visited and preached at his funeral, referring to him as ‘Father Ciaran’ throughout. This struck me as somewhat false. He was not a first-name priest. Parishioners knew him and respected him as ‘Father Surname’ rather than by the first-name conventions of a later, more intimate age, into which he would not have fitted.

Before he died, he attended my ordination, little appreciating, and sadly less informed of the impact he had had on my slowly-emerging sense of self. He was invited to the post-ordination hooley and to the top-table, from which he gave a short and characteristically blunt, humorous and piercing speech. He told me simply, in the full gaze and hearing of an expectedly adoring public at an ordination that, if I lived long enough and behaved myself, that one day, like him, I might be considered worthy enough to be Parish Priest of that part of the once-united parish now known as ‘Lower’.