Northern clerics, long the voice of reason in the Troubles, are now taking a backseat as a new era develops, writes Fionnuala O'Conor
THE DEPARTURE from Belfast of Fr Aidan Troy removes another high-profile cleric from the northern scene. It leaves nobody comparable. Small wonder, really, since Belfast is no longer the city of religious nightclubs. Yet until very recently a cleric could still command attention on the airwaves if not in his own backyard. The Troubles habit of looking for comments to a man in a stiff white collar has been slow to fade, a strange survival for one of the most divisive sectors of society.
Not that even the bulk of the best known have majored in being divisive. The type Ian Paisley liked to slur as "Romish ecumenists" have always been at least as well represented as preachers of hate. It goes without saying that most controversy has been what might be termed politico-religious, politics and religion alike defined by local preoccupations: willingness to discuss organised religion is another matter.
When Free Presbyterianism and the DUP yanked the carpet from under their creator, it certainly removed the biggest clerical figure. The very different Paris-bound Fr Troy has won a share of the limelight since, quite a feat for a Wicklow man who came North seven years ago. But he arrived as loyalist picketers confronted parents and pupils at his parish school of Holy Cross, and the frontline moment lasted. Fr Troy sweetly downplayed swapping Ardoyne for an English-speaking congregation in Paris, though the switch can hardly be painful.
Appetite for publicity may vary but northern demands tend to bring more stress than reward. The Paisley pattern was a one-off. For many churchmen, for whom the Troubles meant funerals of people snatched out of life by violence, and other trauma, being forced on to a bigger stage has been less than fun. (No women as yet have managed the double challenge - or suffered the double strain - of finding a parish, then a wider audience.) There have, of course, been exceptions, never happier than in a television make-up room, taking calls from radio programmes or hitting the heights in conferences and special commissions.
Many were only propelled out of low-key existence by quarrels between their flocks and their neighbours and the strains of the times. Even the impulsive and outspoken Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich might not have been a unionist bogeyman if his time in office had not coincided with the hunger strikes and the dirty protest by prisoners - whom he said nobody could look on as criminals.
The Rev Joseph Parker was a Church of Ireland minister in Belfast in 1972, when the IRA exploded 20 bombs in the city in little more than an hour one July day, killing his 14-year-old son Stephen and eight others in what became known as Bloody Friday. The Parkers struggled on until 1974, Joe praying publicly for each new victim, before leaving for a seamen's mission in Vancouver. When he finished his stint there he told a local paper that he had left Belfast when "I was asked by my bishop to confine my peace activities to my day off." The death in 2006 of Denis Faul removed the most audible priest on the Roman side for almost 30 years. Scourge of security force excesses, wrongful imprisonment, IRA violence, integrated education and liberal permissiveness across the waterfront, many bishops liked to leave it to him. In later years Fr Faul - few noticed the belated promotion to Monsignor - cast dark aspersion on the Adams-McGuinness "peace strategy" and suggested the RUC title should stay. He did not live to see civil partnerships legitimised in Belfast, a squeak ahead of "pagan" Britain. But he would not have been surprised.
Some of the most durable reinvent themselves and team up with others. Fr Alex Reid and the Rev Harold Good were asked to witness the decommissioning of IRA weaponry because in different ways they had spent decades working for peace. The blip on the record when Fr Reid tripped into public comparison of unionists to Nazis and revealed an otherworldly generosity towards republicans, probably left his Methodist colleague unscathed except in the eyes of those who wanted no end to the Troubles but biblical retribution. Former priest Denis Bradley and former Archbishop Lord Robin Eames are supposed to come up with an alternative to costly inquiries into unsolved crimes. Their most likely memorial is likely to be the photograph of them sitting wearily side by side, hands supporting heads, as they listen to yet another rightfully incensed relative of the unavenged dead.
As "normality" develops, a man in a collar might stop being the most accessible man in the street. At the worst of times, it should be remembered to them that the man in the manse or the parochial house could be brought to say something. Sometimes it needed saying.