The global villager from Collooney

ALL his life Father Michael Paul Gallagher SJ has enjoyed silence. Maybe that is why he includes the following quote from cardinal Newman in his new book: "You must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached not by reasoning, but by an inward perception."

He uses it in a personal epilogue to Clashing Symbols, an introduction to faith and culture, which was published recently. He writes about "the village of my childhood". Collooney, Co Sligo. It was his "small and total world, which moulded how I feel and imagine everything, even today". This despite the broadening of his horizons to include India, Venezuela, Paraguay, Ethiopia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Iran and Malaysia, as well as five years at the Vatican and 20 plus years teaching at UCD's English Department.

His village roots have been "a constant, if often unconscious, blessing", an anchor. Something young urban dwellers, he noticed when in Rome, do not have. He senses them "drifting on the surface of themselves". Their "more broken context" leaving them stranded from reality, "from our true humanity, from God".

Clashing Symbols is his fifth book in five years, all of which deal with themes of belief and unbelief.

Faith, he describes as "a disposition, a freedom to believe". It is a receiving apparatus", "a quality of meeting life", "a sensibility", "an attitude to life." But not everybody is free to believe. Circumstances, hurt, "wounds to the sense of trust in life", mean that some are disadvantaged where faith is concerned. But it is open to all. And "the spirit is at work in all that is good", regardless of whether a person believes. "The question is not about what you believe, but about what you do, how you care, or do not, about others." Faith is secondary, love is primary, he believes.

Father Gallagher attended UCD from 1957 and by the end of his time there in 1960 he was "a church atheist", one of those people who was dropping faith because they didn't like the church. His subjects were English and French. A year attending Caen university in Normandy turned out to be one of the most important periods of his life. There he discovered a community of young people who were much more excited about being Catholic than their counterparts in Ireland. He began to read the Bible for the first time and discovered his vocation. At 22 he went to the Jesuit novitiate, then in Co Laois. During this period he also studied English Renaissance poetry at Oxford and contemporary American literature at Johns Hopkins university in the US.

Returning to UCD at 26 he began lecturing in the English Department. Those were heady days but he missed UCD's so called "Gentle Revolution" in 1968 as he was studying abroad. He does remember, however, the "aggressive debate" of the period and being heckled during lectures. There was a book burning episode. He had praised the work of Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan. When he attended for his next lecture he found a book by Lonergan smouldering on a rostrum. Having quenched the fire he began to read from it "as though that was the most normal thing in the world". Now he feels "rather nostalgic for those aggressive old days".

Among his pupils were Neil Jordan, Jim and Peter Sheridan, Dermot Morgan, Aidan Matthews, Frank McGuinness, and later Joe O'Connor. As with most of those, he had a great interest in drama, and recalls a reading of Waiting For Godot, involving Neil Jordan, the Sheridan brothers and himself, before a group of nuns on a course in Navan. "That was probably the first time any of them were paid for theatre," he says.

HE was ordained in 1972 and continued at UCD to the mid 1980s when be had a sabbatical coming up. His plan was to go to Canada but Joe O'Connor "challenged me" to go to Latin America. He went to Paraguay, where the Jesuits had a mission, and spent one of the most fulfilling years of his life. It was a period of "enormous happiness", being with people on the margins and taking sides in, the struggle for justice. He experienced "a kind of religious consolation, fully living the radicalness of my vocation at last". He felt he had his hands on history, particularly through the theology of liberation, which he believes has been maligned by being likened to Marxism. That, he feels, was a Reaganite slander".

Ronald Reagan had deliberately, he says, employed a policy of defamation against liberation theology which succeeded. At the end of his sabbatical year (1986-87) his plan was to leave UCD and return to Paraguay, but his provincial wanted him to stay in Dublin and he went to live in Ballymun. He did so for the following three years commuting to Belfield by motorbike and bus. He had already written Help My Unbelief which sold out shortly after being published in 1983, and in 1987 Free To Believe was published. These, and other books between, brought him to the attention of the Vatican where he was appointed to work for five years, mainly with the Pontifical Council for Culture. The work involved preparing symposia on culture and religion, with believers and unbelievers, particularly in the English speaking world and operating as a sort of research assistant to Cardinal Poupard.

He went to Iran at the invitation of the government there for dialogue purposes. Similar dialogue took place with Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia, and with the Hare Krishna movement, and there were symposia with the new religions including Scientology, all of which he found "exciting and stimulating". But when his term was complete it was quite clear to him the time had come to leave.

He had also begun to teach theology at the Gregorian university in Rome from October to February each year, which he still does. The remaining six months he spends in Ireland writing, conducting courses and seminars in theology, and "enjoying continuing contact with some of my creative exstudents".

His next book will be "a personal dialogue with literature" in which he hopes to explore how exposure to literary masterpieces has challenged his own spiritual and theological journey.