Justine McCarthy: How Creeslough’s priest reminded us of the church’s still-vital role

In these dark days of the soul when we struggle to speak of the unspeakable tragedy in Creeslough, churchmen have had no choice but to find the words. For theirs is the requirement to be wise amid grief. Theirs is the task to be with the bereaved families; to gather the stories of those who have been loved and lost for retelling in their funeral homilies. Theirs is the duty to parishioners to stay strong.

Since a sonic boom reverberated through the Co Donegal village, killing 10 people, men, women and children, in the crucifixion hour of three o’clock last Friday, the parish priest has been a constant presence. From distant, harried parts of Ireland, we have watched and heard Fr John Joe Duffy confess that he has no explanation for the sudden loss of so many lives and, in essence, could only offer love. “I am part of you, part of this community, and it is together that we will make the journey,” he told mourners at the first funeral mass, for Jessica Gallagher, a vivacious young fashion designer who should be learning the ropes in her new job in Belfast this week.

St Paul told the Corinthians that faith, hope and love were the primary graces and, of these, he said, love was the greatest

St Paul told the Corinthians that faith, hope and love were the primary graces and, of these, he said, love was the greatest. If any benefits can be gleaned from Creeslough’s appalling suffering, one may be the reminder it has provided for post-Catholic Ireland that a loving church retains a special place in our communities. This past week, pictures of the devastated service station have been followed by the images of people flocking to the celestial-white church of St Michael to say the rosary together each evening, the 10 red candles flickering on the altar in memory of the dead, the prayer vigils held in various parts of the so-called Forgotten County, the series of funeral processions to the final resting places. This was the tender-hearted church. The personal church that had been eclipsed from public conversation by the cruel institutional church of heartless diktats and child abuse cover-ups. For many cradle Catholics, this is the church etched on the native DNA.

John McGahern, an agnostic and a censored novelist, said he had “nothing but gratitude” to the church for introducing him to rituals and the sense of the sacred. When he was laid to rest beside his mother in the small graveyard at Aughawillan in Co Leitrim, there were no hymns or billowing incense or bishops splendidly arrayed upon the altar. There was only love, uninterrupted.

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Alan McGuckian, the Bishop of Raphoe, said on RTÉ Radio on Tuesday morning, before the harrowing funerals began, that people take comfort from “the words and the rituals”. These familiar ceremonies can be an anaesthetic when there simply are no plausible reasons why life is suddenly and violently snatched from a five-year-old child buying a birthday cake for her mother or from a man getting cash from an ATM to pay for his takeaway or from a schoolgirl bent over a fridge to buy an ice-cream. “God’s will” is not an explanation. If it was, he would be a hard God to love.

Ireland has been a more comfortable country since it shook off the stranglehold of the institutional Catholic Church – what McGahern called “the fortress Church”. Women and gay people are freed by it. Children are safer. Public policy has moved out from its shadow and politicians no longer quake at the sight of a crosier. But did some of us throw out the baby with the bathwater? “I’d like to go to Mass. I miss going,” says Joe Ruttledge in McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun. To which Jamesie replies that non-belief is “no bar” to church attendance. In his world, going to Mass is as integral to life as going to the mart and the post office.

In the new Ireland of ever-declining Mass attendance among ever-increasing urbanites, the priest has become a ghost in society. Some priests even fear wearing their clerical garb in public because of its associations with the organisation’s intolerance and its history of self-preserving deceitfulness; the cardinal sins that set this State on the fast-track to secularism. It is harder to conceal oneself in a village. Harder, too, to remain outside the loop of affection and to be unaffected by the joys and sorrows that transpire within it.

Transformation

Despite remaining largely rural and despite its physical isolation in the top left-hand corner of the country where it is screened off from Dublin’s direct line of sight by the Northern Ireland border, Donegal has undergone its own transformation. It is telling that three of the people who were killed in Creeslough were not born in Ireland. Martin McGill moved there from Scotland and was known in his adopted place as Scotch Martin, James O’Flaherty was originally from Australia and Robert Garwe came from Zimbabwe.

When lives are intimately entwined, the personal supersedes the institutional. It is the personal that reaches below the 10 commandments and the seven deadly sins to the heart of a community, weaving the church into its fabric

Yet Donegal has a reputation for being among the last parts to cling to the old Ireland, having recorded proportionately low votes in favour of abortion, marriage equality and children’s rights in referendums this century. Various theories have been posited to explain this trend, most predicated on the county’s remoteness, but, in the past week, another explanation has crystallised. When lives are intimately entwined, the personal supersedes the institutional. It is the personal that reaches below the 10 commandments and the seven deadly sins to the heart of a community, weaving the church into its fabric.

Without appearing to set out to, Fr John Joe Duffy has done more to restore faith in the power of the personal church than any pope could hope to achieve. He has done it with candour and care, displacing the image of a cold, authoritarian institution with the face of humanity. For all the many times these past seven days that you and I have thought, “there but for the Grace of God go I” since the explosion this day last week, Creeslough, in its sorrowing, has demonstrated something enviable. It has a pillar of its community whose role is to serve the people. Then he goes home, shuts the door behind him and is alone with his own tears. God, isn’t that love?