Memoir:The original 'Father Trendy' is also a self-questioning, tortured soul
As a 17-year-old Passionist novice, Brian D'Arcy was made to go to his room three nights a week and flagellate his own naked bum with a scourge of tightly knotted cord for as long as it took to say five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys and five Glorias. The sounds of whacking and whipping echoed down the corridors of the monastery at night. "To do it in the privacy of your room/ cell was an advance. Even then it felt sick," he writes in his new book - part-memoir, part-social document - which has gone straight into the bestseller list.
Now aged 60, D'Arcy believes that the Passionist order at that time was a brain-washing cult and he feels ashamed of his unquestioning cooperativeness in becoming one of their clones. The draconian monastery regime at The Graan in Enniskillen "was designed to kill your own unique spirit and you had to become whatever the institution wanted you to be . . . It was about killing your self-esteem, even though most of us hadn't much of it to kill", he states. To this day, D'Arcy feels crippled by his own unworthiness and has to constantly struggle with self-image.
A sadistic training system enabled dysfunctional people to mask their shortcomings in the worst aspects of religion. D'Arcy himself was sexually abused by a priest at the age of 10, then again in the monastery soon after he entered it. It took him years to even acknowledge the destruction of his deepest self, much less mourn it, and he still occasionally feels a crippling guilt.
He was meant to leave behind his old life, so that even when his own father rushed up to greet him for the first time in a year, the priest leading D'Arcy by the hand insisted that he keep his eyes directed at the ground and not speak. "The priest said, 'Isn't your son looking well, Mr D'Arcy?' and he chucked me by the hand in case I would touch, speak to or look at my own father. I glanced back as I was pulled up the street and I saw my father with tears in his eyes looking aghast as I disappeared around the corner."
This compelling memoir contains many such moments of heartbreak as D'Arcy persevered with the Passionists because he didn't want to return home in shame as a "spoiled priest", especially since his parents had tried to dissuade him from the priesthood. He still struggles with remaining a priest in an institutional Church that has lost credibility due to its dishonesty, cover-ups and disrespect for the laity. He wants to see women becoming priests and priests marrying, but doesn't hold out much hope that either will happen in his lifetime.
IT IS DIFFICULT, at first, to reconcile this tortured, self-questioning man with D'Arcy's public persona as a name-dropping "Father Trendy", who has been chaplain to the show business community, turning up in dance halls six nights a week in the early days, then following the performers he admires to concerts in the UK and the US. The book is full of pictures of D'Arcy with Johnny Cash, Daniel O'Donnell, Cliff Richard, Terry Wogan and many others, showing how D'Arcy always had a camera at the ready and pursued friendships with the famous with an almost frightening persistence. One wonders if he needs these famous friendships in order to feel good about himself.
D'Arcy explains that, for him, Jesus Christ was a human being and that singers and songwriters are the people closest to Christ's Passion in the way they put listeners in touch with emotion, even when - in the case of Johnny Cash - they themselves self-destruct. Priests belong in the middle of life, in "relationship" with other people, or else priests self-destruct, he argues. His close friendships with women have always been non-sexual, even though he has been "in love" and at times he has had to disentangle himself from women who tried to "own" him.
But why persist with being a priest when it means giving up so much?
D'Arcy tries to answer this question, using as his inspiration the theological writings of Thomas Merton, Henry Rouwen and even the paintings of Van Gogh, who was himself a "spoiled priest". D'Arcy's theological chapters show the serious, insightful and soul-searching side of his character, yet sit alongside some pretty corny anecdotes about the showband era and Jimmy Magee's Allstars.
There's an asexual innocence to D'Arcy that makes him seem, at times, like an enthusiastic pop puer eternus - like Daniel O'Donnell and Cliff Richard - whom age does not wither.
No stranger to ridicule, D'Arcy was so cautious in writing the book that he asked psychologists to read it before publication because he didn't trust his own motives. This says a lot about D'Arcy, a man who is deeply uncomfortable with being a priest in the current Catholic ethos, so that even today as superior at The Graan, he believes that if he doesn't continually reflect on life, he will be "like the out-of-breath climber - caught up in the journey itself, without fulfilment, purpose or peace". He argues convincingly that writing for the Sunday World, going to concerts and saying Mass in Las Vegas hotel rooms is precisely what a priest should be doing if he is to sow the seeds of faith that the laity may one day choose to nurture with a new kind of church of their own. With this valuable memoir, he tries to give them the tools to do it.
• Kate Holmquist is an Irish Timesjournalist and a novelist. Her book, The Glass Room, was published earlier this year by Penguin Ireland
A Different Journey By Brian D'Arcy Sliadbh Bán, 332pp. €14.99
