Amidst all of the Church’s troubles, this man of God epitomised faith, hope, and charity
HE was the bravest of men, among the humblest, and his sense of humour in the face of adversity impressed all who knew him, from close friends to those of us who learned of him only through newspapers, radio or television.
In April 2018, Fr Tony Coote received one of the most devastating diagnoses imaginable. He was stricken by a disease that cruelly shuts down the functions of the body one by one and leads to inevitable death.
I think it’s fairly safe to say the prospect of having motor neurone disease terrifies all of us. Unlike cancers that once were just as feared but now come with at least a chance of survival thanks to medical advances, MND offers no such comfort. The symptoms can be mitigated but there is no cure, and that must be overwhelming for anyone who hears the dreaded words from a consultant.
Most of us, I suspect, would go into a deep depression, but not so Fr Coote.
Instead, he decided to put the diagnosis to good use.
Last year, he organised Walk While You Can, a 550km sponsored walk from Letterkenny in Co. Donegal to Ballydehob in Co. Cork.
He covered most of the distance while being pushed in a wheelchair because the symptoms of MND were already advancing, but with epic fortitude he completed the trek and raised more than €600,000 for the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association.
It was a welcome boost for the coffers after the earlier windfall from the Ice Bucket Challenge craze that gripped the world in 2014, and brought the condition to global prominence.
Admiration
Fr Coote died on Wednesday, as he knew he would, and I was profoundly sad when I heard the news yesterday morning.
I remembered seeing him on The Late Late Show last November, when he appeared with neurologist Professor Orla Hardiman of Trinity College, whose admiration for him was obvious.
It wasn’t hard to see why, because the one thing MND could not and did not claim was Fr Coote’s sense of humour.
The sparkle in his eyes was undiminished, and while his speech was slow and sometimes slurred, his laugh was unaffected.
Because of that appearance, I later watched the documentary Walking The Walk and I remember laughing when, as he was interviewed in his wheelchair, he said wryly: ‘It’s difficult when you were six foot one and suddenly you’re just four foot.’
He also said something that stuck with me.
‘Illness is not the person,’ he sagely observed. ‘The person has an illness, and I’m still the same person.’
Yes, the disease was clearly debilitating, he said, but he refused to let it take his spirit.
Such was his growing fame, he also wrote his autobiography, Live While You Can, and in it he addressed the question of how he could reconcile the vicious nature of his condition with the concept of a merciful God.
He wrote: ‘People have asked me, “How can a God of love allow you suffer with this illness?” I don’t see God punishing me in any way. Through my illness, I have seen the love of God in the kindness and care of so many.
‘People have come back into my life whom I have not seen for years. With them they bring memories from the past.’
That, to me, shows a quite extraordinary generosity of spirit.
Even if I was devoutly religious, I can imagine my faith being shaken by an MND diagnosis and I certainly never could imagine being as magnanimous as Fr Coote.
As I have written here before, the word ‘priest’ in Ireland has pejoratively been linked with another word as the result of clerical scandals committed by men who, unlike Tony Coote, betrayed every vow they made and preyed on the most vulnerable in their congregations.
Here, then, was a man who displayed the utter flipside, the kindly benevolence spread across his two south Dublin parishes of Mount Merrion and Kilmacud.
His was a taxing workload, but while he was busy all day, he returned to an empty house.
Heartwarming
The life of a priest nowadays is a lonely one – where once there was a parish priest and two or three curates, it is more usual these days that one man carries the burden alone.
It was oddly heartwarming, then, to read that Fr Coote and three colleagues from his days in the seminary – Charlie, Declan and John – met up almost every Sunday night for 27 years in pubs and hotels and had a few pints together, and went on holidays together too.
They were sounding boards for each other and offered support during their respective challenges.
Well, they had pints when they were younger – as Tony memorably said, as they got older, it was all about tea and the colour of the tablets they had to take. Age creeps up on us all.
It is all too easy, especially for those of us brought up in an era when priests could be haughty and remote, to forget that a younger generation of clerics struggles to reimagine its role in a changed world.
Behind the collar, there are humans with the same need for company and friendship as all of us, and the same worries and fears too.
Fr Coote will be removed to the Church of St Laurence O’Toole in Kilmacud, arriving at 6pm on Sunday, and the funeral Mass will take place at 11am on Monday morning in the Church of St Thérèse, Mount Merrion, followed by a private burial.
And, of course, Charlie, Declan and John will be there, doing what priests do, parking their own worries and sadness as they instead offer words of comfort to others.
All over Ireland, there will be funerals today at which priests just like these four loyal friends will do the same, gently guiding families through their grief and hoping to leave them with an uplifting message of hope that a loved one has gone to a greater reward.
Many will, like the Cootes, maybe quietly give thanks that the suffering of a relative has ended, that the spirit has been liberated from the cruel confines of a sick body and now soars free.
All of us who have been through significant bereavements also know that time is a great healer – the tears dry eventually and happy memories ultimately replace the sad ones.
Memories
And what happy memories they surely will have of Fr Tony Coote.
Those of us who never met him but saw and heard him in our living rooms were filled with admiration for his optimism.
He was no stoic, because that suggests he bore his illness with grim determination, and anyone who saw him on television knows there was nothing grim about him.
Instead, he was a happy, smiling, laughing man, a fully rounded human being whose faith helped him deal with a condition that would floor the rest of us.
Above all, though, he reminded us of something important, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. We all have our down days and we all face challenges that sometimes seem insurmountable, but Fr Coote was absolutely right – walk while you can.
He was an inspirational man. May he rest in peace.