My crisis of faith in the sepia-toned memories of our parish childhood

Igrew up in a parish run by the Spiritans, or the Holy Ghost Fathers, as we knew them back then. It was another time, a foreign country. The five priests in our parish didn’t just say Mass and shake hands on Sundays; they were stitched into the fabric of the community. They were part of every meeting, every bunfight. At sales of work in the local primary schools, people paid money to guess the weight of the priests. At the annual children’s sports days in Kimmage Manor, the nearby home place of the order, my siblings and I finished red-faced last in countless races. There were other heady events in that huge field: steam fairs with awesome, spitting engines and motorcycle display teams forming human pyramids as we gasped into our sticky candy floss.

My mother was very active on various parish committees and when I was 12, she began studying theology in Kimmage Manor, eventually becoming the first woman in Ireland to complete the ordination course. She was in Kimmage every day for years — and because it had loads of fields and very little adult supervision, we were often there too, on less spiritual adventures. You could go playing there and, when we were older, it was a handy spot for teenage courting.

It was in secondary school that I really got to know a man I will call Fr Seán. He’d been one of my dad’s closest friends for years — a bond formed over a shared love of sport and “a good yarn”. In an absolutely surreal vignette from my childhood, Fr Seán was once examined by the GP who had called to our home to check on my scarlet fever; I languishing on the sofa in my reduced state watching a huge priest in his vest having his heart listened to.

And he was huge. He had a booming, bassy laugh that began in his legs and lit up every room that it erupted in.

When he came to join us for dinner after my sister’s confirmation, he asked the hotel receptionist where he might find the Looney party, and she apologised that there was no cabaret that night. In the dining room, when he told us that story, every head turned at the sound of his laughter.

In our secondary school, Fr Seán was the curate connected to the folk group, an appointment that we loved to slag him over as the man was completely tone deaf. But he was fun and funny and as we grew towards adulthood, we were very, very fond of him — not as a friend of our parents, but an ally in his own right. one time, on a scorching hot day in the middle of the summer holidays, four of us called to his house and demanded he bring us to the beach. Protesting that he couldn’t just down tools on the whim of four giggling schoolgirls, he drove us anyway, and we spent a perfectly lovely afternoon on Sandymount Strand, the four of us giving out to Fr Seán for smoking and slagging him for the knotted hanky he fashioned to keep the sun off his huge balding head.

When I tell that story now, I know that people expect a sucker punch, a horrible twist, but there was none.

About 15 years ago, a man stood up in the middle of Mass back in my old parish church and said he had been abused as a boy by a priest there. He named the priest, a man who had heard my first confession and had been moved to another parish soon afterwards. Up until then, in our astonishing naivety, I think we thought the Holy Ghost Fathers were not like other priests.

Ten years ago, when I heard that Fr Seán was dying, I went to see him back down in Kimmage Manor. In the dying of the light and angry at the accusations against his confreres that were now percolating more frequently, he was having a crisis of faith that was hard to hear. “What if I have wasted my entire life?,” he asked me. I assured him he had been greatly loved and that was never a waste and I hope I was right.

And I’m telling you all this because I cannot stop thinking about Fr Seán and the fact that while my childhood was being enriched by a good man and a wider connection to the Spiritans, other children’s lives were being destroyed by others in the congregation. I look back on those memories that are drenched in the sepia tones that colour all our lovely childhood pictures. And I don’t know if I can trust them anymore.