THE funeral rituals of priests differ in some details from those of the rest of us. Not many people know that. Ordinary people, when their coffins are brought into the church, are placed in front of the altar feet first. Priests are placed with their heads closest to the altar.
We will be buried with our heads to the head stone. Priests ace buried with their feet to the headstone. And this applies to priests of the Church of Ireland, too, though I think only Roman Catholic parish priests are buried in 5 lined with brick. Practices like these that set priests apart have grown up over the years - because, whatever about the priests themselves, ordinary people want priests to be people apart.
If they were not, they would not seem to us to be suitable mediators of the different levels of significance we're aware of in our lives.
It is almost impossible to imagine an Irish funeral without a priest. Yet outside commentators seem to think the Roman Catholic Church here is falling apart and in rapid decline, in the wake of recent scandals. They forget this one fact. People here believe that they need priests. Not that they need them to be good or wise or hard working, but that they need them in themselves.
Down the centuries, we have been perfectly well used to priests fathering children, cheating on deals, bullying, drinking, exploiting the poor and so on. This has probably contributed to a certain two facedness in our culture. But it hasn't made any difference to the faith itself. I doubt whether the present, very much more shocking, revelations will make much difference, either. Reasonable people think that they must.
But a religious culture, like ours, is about everything. Churches and priests are only a part. And reason is only one element in all that goes on between birth and death. We don't want to die, for one thing, but we're given no choice. That isn't reasonable. The people we love die, and we have no power even over the manner of their going. Vast as the individual ego is, it seems to become extinct.
To deny this, we posit a God who knows the meaning of the brief trajectory of human life. And when we go, we need that passage to be set apart. The Humanist Association in Ireland creates, and performs, when asked, an increasing number of secular ceremonies for bereaved people who can't stand religion. The booklet Funerals Without God is their best selling publication. But mostly, the deaths of even the most thoroughgoing Irish agnostics are marked by religious ritual. And a proper, decent, Irish funeral is still religious. Who would want to go into the dark alone - without a community?
I don't know that I can get very close to belonging, myself. But I was in the presence of the real thing recently, at the funeral of an elderly lady related to us by marriage. Her whole send off was so perfectly done that I asked a nephew, afterwards, to see could he arrange for me something like it - a modest, heartfelt, traditional, Dublin funeral. The only difference being that I would be nowhere at the end, whereas Mrs Devitt was interred with her late parents and husband in Mount Jerome. I even assigned my Credit Union shares to my nephew to pay for it.
BUT now I realise that you can only have a funeral as authentic as hers if it arises from the truths of your whole life. The very church we were in had always been a sacred spot in her landscape. As a young woman she had walked up to Mount Argus with her mother, particularly when someone in the family needed the "cure" from Father Charles.
She went to the Easter ceremonies there, because the Passionists could provide the priests for a full altar". Her grandson was an altar boy there. She would have been gratified by her own funeral there, connoisseur of funerals as she - typical of her generation - was. "She could describe coffins in detail", her daughter says with affection.
The celebrant of the funeral Mass had not known her personally, yet he was the central, the one indispensable, figure in the occasion. He had familiarised himself with her life before the service. So he was able to make everything he had to say pertinent to this particular woman, who had led a life of unsung bravery after she was left a widow in straitened circumstances. Above all he was able to look at the congregation, and especially her grieving children, and assure them that, as Christians, they did not hope for eternal life - they were sure of it.
If a foreign journalist had tapped me on the shoulder after that Mass and said: "Scandals. I've come about the scandals and the decline of the church in Ireland," I'd have looked up blankly and said: "What scandals? What decline?"
They are only a part of a whole. What has the undoubted decline in the credibility of the clergy, for instance, to do with the hymns a young woman with a pure voice sang at Mrs Devitt's funeral? "Oh Mary we crown Thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May "Ag Criost an Siol." "Ave, Ave." "Sweet Heart of Jesus, Fount of Love and Mercy These are cornerstones of popular culture. And belief resides in them, irrespective of hierarchy.
Outside it was freezing, of course. The little crowd pulled their coats tight around themselves as they waited on the steps to pay their respects to the family. Work colleagues of her children and the like had been at the Removal of Remains the night before. Somehow there is a protocol everybody knows.
Then there was the slow gathering at a windswept corner of the cemetery. The grave diggers who could have come straight out of Shakespeare. The profoundly beautiful last prayers at the graveside, and the fact of earth. Outside the gates the Men With Caps, purple faced with cold, supervised car parking with many an audible reference to pub opening hours. And then the warm pub, where tea and drinks and a big, hot, meal was laid on for everybody.
And there the talk turned often to Mrs Devitt and her place and her times. Her neighbours had been thoughtfully brought in a limousine.
EVERYTHING was properly done. Everything is mixed in together, in the native way of doing something important. All other pieties are intertwined with the religious one. There isn't a separate thing called "religion" in ordinary Irish life. "Religion" cannot decline and leave everything else untouched.
Conversely, a strong edifice which is not religion props religion up. If half the priests in the country were scandalous and the other half were covering up for them, this funeral would still have been a product of Irish Catholicism. And that still feels right and natural. Foreign papers please copy.
I made a fool of myself in this space last week - generalising testily about Joe Duffy's conduct of interviews, on foot of an interview he didn't do at all. I deserved the punishment I got. I'm sorry.