'Being a priest could be a lot of fun'

MY OTHER LIFE:In our continuing series – in which Irish Timeswriters consider their alternative lives – FINTAN O'TOOLElooks back at his Dublin childhood when he thought of becoming a priest

‘TO HELL with God!” He paused for a moment, then gathered himself again: “To Hell with the Pope!” I could see from the side of the altar, where I was sitting, the mostly middle-aged and elderly ladies who made up the congregation at eight o’clock Mass that miserable winter’s morning, jump in fright at Fr Seery’s first shout from the pulpit and freeze in horror at the second. The world was coming to an end. The nice, somewhat posh, priest had revealed himself as the Antichrist.

I looked across at Fr Seery. His tall, slightly stooped form and thin, bony face had their usual ascetic, almost unworldly, demeanour. He seemed calm and in control and there were no signs of his horns or tail. He paused again to register the shock and savour the unusually full attention of his normally torpid early-morning congregation.

And then he breathed, in a soft, melancholy tone: “That, my dear people, is what is being heard increasingly in the faithless world beyond our shores.”

His face remained completely straight and I was not close enough to see whether a little smile of mischief was playing around his lips.

I was eight and it was the first time it struck me that being a priest could be a lot of fun.

For anyone under 40, it is hard to imagine an Ireland in which, at some point in their young lives, most kids thought about the possibility of becoming a priest, a brother or a nun.

If you were vaguely bookish, generally well-behaved, from a “decent” family and outwardly devout, the possibility was real.

I was all of the above. I was a capo at the sodality, taking the names of those who were present (and more importantly absent). I knew my catechism and had a working knowledge of the liturgical calendar.

Most importantly, I served Mass for three years at our local church, St Bernadette’s, in the newish Dublin suburb of Crumlin. During those years, between the ages of eight and 10, I often heard my oldest relatives whisper to each other: “Wouldn’t he make a lovely priest?”

As an altar boy, I was already a little of the way across the divide between the profane and sacred worlds. While the civilians entered the church through the huge public doors, I went round the back, up the steps to the special door that led to the sacristy. Like those who work backstage at the theatre, I knew the mechanics behind the magic. I lit the candles on the altar before the punters gathered for Mass. I knew how to load the thurible with charcoal in the bottom part and incense in the top, so that clouds of mystical, heavy-scented smoke would drift over the altar, catching the light that flooded in from the vast cruciform windows on even the dullest days.

I knew the sweet smell from the mundane bottles of altar wine, like sherry brought out for ancient aunties at Christmas. And I saw the priests arrive for seven o’clock Mass, having tumbled out of bed, their hair askew, their eyes heavy with sleep, and throw on the sacred vestments, transforming themselves from flawed mortals to messengers of the divine.

Perhaps, in retrospect, this familiarity ought to have made the priesthood seem less glamorous. Instead, it made it seem like the kind of job that you could imagine yourself doing. And it seemed, in the Ireland of the mid-1960s, a pretty decent job too. Not all of my attraction to the idea of the priesthood was mercenary. But a lot of it was.

While we were five-to-a-room, priests had nice, spacious houses – groups of curates lived together in what seemed to a boy like the perfect circle of male pals. Priests had housekeepers to look after them – like having a Mammy who was not the boss of you. They had cars – very rare in Crumlin. And they had prestige – people looked up to them and they could wander into any house for a cup of tea or a plate of rashers.

The non-mercenary part of the attraction was not exactly religious, but it was to do with ritual.

I started out as a pretty disastrous altar boy. At my first Mass, I dropped the heavy liturgical book as I moved it from one side of the altar to the other. Shortly afterwards, I got bored during the sermon and started to play with the screw that held together the three bells that I was to ring during the consecration. The screw came off the top and the three bells clattered one by one down the high, red-carpeted steps of the pre-Vatican II altar, tolling out my impious carelessness for all to hear.

But I did come to love the ritual – the sonorous secret language of call-and-response Latin formulae; the candles and incense; the luscious whiff of altar wine; the dazzling white of the host. It was great to officiate at weddings, being vicariously a part of other people’s happiness.

Even amid the adult grief of funerals, holding the holy water for the priest to sprinkle over the coffin made me feel serious and important – rare feelings for a child in those days.

And when our parish priest, Joseph O’Connor, died, the uncrowned king of Dublin, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, came to celebrate a solemn requiem Latin high Mass. It was a thrilling show to be part of. I remember lighting the stepped rows of tall white candles on the altar with a taper attached to a brass fitting on the end of a long wooden shaft. I remember the white gloves we were given to wear especially for the occasion. I remember the solemn ranks of clergy there to concelebrate the Mass. I remember above all John Charles’s regal bearing, his utterly unforced assumption that he was in control of all he surveyed. Being in his presence was like being a minor courtier at the palace of a great potentate.

MY CLERICALcareer vanished from the horizon as sex and thought intruded on that perfectly-sealed world. Latin was replaced by plain English. Life in a house with other grown-up men began to seem less magical. God and I developed irreconcilable differences.

It was surely just as well: I would never have lasted in an institution that values obedience above all else.

And the life seems hard now. St Bernadette’s, which had half a dozen priests and four Masses on weekdays has one priest and one daily Mass.

My sister’s wedding photographs are hard to look at now, because the priest who is in so many of them has since had his own chapter in the Murphy report.

I suppose, though, that something of all that stays with me. I have my own pulpit and my own articles of faith. And people like me have even taken on some of the ritual functions of the clergy. Priests used to bless public events. They used to open things and launch things. Now, it’s minor celebrities who do the honours.

Recently, when I spoke in Dublin City Hall to mark the 50th anniversary of a charitable organisation, I looked down at the audience and saw two archbishops politely listening to my sermon. The smells of old incense and altar wine drifted for a moment into my mind.