Farewell to my friend Fr Pat – a man first and then a priest, always with a twinkle in his eye

I TRACED my fingers along the worn limestone flags at St Batt’s Holy Well while my friend Fr Pat Moore was being laid to rest over the road in old Aghavallen.

He was a man for all reasons, a man for all seasons. Pat died from cancer but it never killed his faith or his spirit. He went through some doubting days and sad days. He was one of us, you see. One of you, and one of me. A man first and then a priest.

To be made in to a saint from one of us, miracles are needed. Moore, as we called him at school, performed his miracle. Just one, but it was a big one. He was lovely to everyone.

His miracle was like St Brigid’s cloak. St Brigid asked for a site to build a monastery in Kildare and the cynical chieftain agreed to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Brigid threw the small cloak on the grass and it stretched out over hundreds of hectares. Moore covered so much ground and made so much out of so many. His blogs beat time and distance. He was inclusive and wrote as he spoke.

“It didn’t matter who you were, or what you were. He had time for everyone.” So said a man who had nothing, bar Moore and his rosary beads.

In the end, Fr Pat was a kind of a modern-day martyr. All that giving took its toll. He wore out. The good priest didn’t know how to say the word “no”, but he was mad for tea and talk. It was his call.

Fr Pat was the one who said: “We do death very well in Ireland.” And we do. He got a great send-off. The scholar loved the bit of Latin and he loved the serene. The parting was in his likeness.

If Moore was a lake and a meteor dropped in to it from outer space, there wouldn’t be so much as a ripple. He was calm and giving, funny and spiritual. He never killed the boy most men stifle. When we met, we got giddy, like we did all those years ago in St Michael’s. I have come to the realisation my old school friend is still with us. By coincidence I was in our school on the day he was buried. I had the old class in my eye and where we all sat.

I got to thanking him. The abuse cases and the failure to embrace gay people turned me off the Church. I am all for women priests. Pat was too. Women loved him and he loved the company of women.

Every now and then he would casually, accidentally on purpose, drop in a story of great goodness or spirituality in the course of our conversations. He won me over when mam was dying. Thanks Pat. Tell her to keep an eye on me.

Moore had so many causes, so many cases to deal with. He managed to be one thing to all men, and that was compassionate. Fr Pat was a great scholar but he always managed to distil his hours of thinking in to one simple, meaningful sentence. Moore always resisted the temptation to show off how much he knew.

Sometimes I would steal his sermons, with his OK, and I often got a whole column out of one of his stories. Every now and then I supplied him with “joke of the day” as I had been doing steadfastly since we were 12. There was a “joke of the day” at Mass every Sunday in Duagh. Moore was pure box office. The bells rang out ‘Danny Boy’ for the emigrants. He was a man of his own people. But he was a priest too. There were over 50 at his funeral. Most of them I know, and they are good men, who do their best to perform the miracle of the cloak on a daily basis.

I met a grandmother, a mother and a daughter at his funeral Mass. The little girl cried for him until her eyes were red. One man, who suffered from the nerves, said to me: “If Fr Pat thought enough of me to keep on calling out to the house, even when I was a bit off, well then I must be some use, mustn’t I?”

I was about to go to see my friend on the day he died, last Monday. The story I had for him was about the two lovely Lebanese sisters who called in to the pub that very morning. The Lebanese ladies told me their mother had two outfits in the basement of her apartment in New York. One was in case she died in the summer, and the other was in case she died in the winter. He’ll love that, I thought. And then the word came through.

Moore too was getting ready. The Irish are like the Pharaohs. And I’ll tell you how he made his preparations later on down the page.

Pat told me he couldn’t cry when his mother died and it bothered him. Moore loved his mom so much, and he was very good to her when she fell into bad health. Pat cried for his mom before he died. He didn’t have time for himself until near the very end. There’s a priestly veneer and he discarded that. He opened up. Fr Pat wrote to me a couple of weeks ago. It was private but in the end I think he was ready.

Just before Christmas, we met up by accident. We leafed through his plans for death. Pat wrote a book. It was his way of getting ready and of getting us ready. “It needs more,” I said. “You have so much more to say.” He replied: “That’s as much as I can do.” I knew then.

He wrote so beautifully. All 5,000 copies of ‘Weathering a Storm’ were sold. Moore, the great communicator, wanted to leave some of him for us when he was gone. There’s a line or two where he says his friend Billy advised him to go to St Batt’s to trace his fingers along the old stones where his people walked and prayed. “And ask the ancestors to re-ordain me in all that is life giving.”

So happy I was to be called his “friend”. And for all of you who feel the one of you can do so little to help others, Pat asks: “How many wells does it take to make a river? One, if it’s big enough.”

Here’s the last “joke of the day” from the man himself. My friend was not capable of delivering a sermon without at least one laugh. He wrote about meeting a man who had cancer. Pat told him his story and he knew the man was going to ask about the prognosis. “To deflect him, I decided to be as bold as himself, and ask where he had it,” Pat said. “His face and chest filled with air and joy collectively.”

“Down there,” he pointed, “in the playground area!” Only Moore could knock a laugh out of cancer. I turned back and kissed him on the forehead the last time we met. It was goodbye.

But I believe he is still with us. I believe he was there with me at St Batt’s Well on Thursday when I traced my fingers along the grainy old weathered limestone, just as he had done a few months ago, here in this place of some peace.