Diarmaid Ferriter: Refreshing to hear priest fulminate against sinful excesses of sky athletes

I must be getting nostalgic for the thunderous Catholic priests and preachers of old. I found myself nodding in agreement with a retired parish priest in Mayo, Fr Tony King, who recently called for Croagh Patrick, Mayo’s holy mountain, to be declared off limits to extreme athletes.

Speaking at a Mass in Westport, Fr King was greeted with applause by the 1,000-strong congregation. In his homily, he said: “Evidence of what is happening on the traditional pilgrim path of this mountain is disturbing. The impact can only be described as devastation due to erosion and neglect. A lot of the damage, I am told, is due to it being used as a sky track for fitness by super-athletes.”

These ultra-runners may be super in fitness terms, but they are also selfish exhibitionists, not content with wrecking their own joints and family life through their constant long training sessions, but also prepared to disproportionately contribute to the erosion of what Fr King called “nature’s greatest cathedral of the west”, commonly known as the Reek.

It is refreshing to hear a priest fulminate against the sinful excesses of the sky athletes. What is wrong with a modest 5km or, on a hard day, 10km run around the roads or in a nice big park?

Such a running regime, favoured by old-school runners, is now regarded by the “super athletes” as in the athletic halfpenny place; even running a marathon, I suspect, is seen by them as inadequate unless you do another one the following day and then run up and down a few mountains before swimming from Dublin Port to Holyhead and back.

Left in the dust

Climbing Croagh Patrick can be a joy, but not if you are covered in dust and falling on loose stones as the fanatical racers leave you in their wake and then knock you sideways as they run back down.

As if that was not enough, in recent years the poor mountain has been subjected to a bra chain challenge, with 4,000 bras donated to this (charity) quest by Wonderbra, as well as a “Meet on the Reek” event, described as “a singles weekend with a difference”.

These latest desecrations of Croagh Patrick are just another chapter in a long history of abuse. A very early reference to St Patrick's penance on Croagh Patrick is found in the Book of Armagh from the seventh-century writings of Tírechán, the Connacht author who sought to document St Patrick's travels: "Patrick proceeded to the summit of the mountain . . . and stayed there 40 days and 40 nights and the birds were troublesome to him and he could not see the face of the sky and land and sea".

Centuries later, however, too many pilgrims could not see anything because they were blind drunk, before, during and after their climbs (or should that be falls?). A number of travel writers were struck by this bizarre combination of piety and revelry, and by the 19th century the debauchery and faction fighting associated with certain pilgrimages led to a determination by church leaders to suppress or reform them.

In 1907, Fr Angelus, a Capuchin based in Dublin, gave a sermon on the summit on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, on the evils of drunkenness, to “put before the people the havoc that drunkenness has wrought in every age” and announced he would administer the pledge for one year only, “that is, ’til next pilgrimage”.

Temperance on the mount

This was described as “the first occasion on which the temperance cause has been associated with the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick and it is believed that the association will produce happy results”.

It certainly did for some; in the Catholic periodical Irish Monthly in 1910 the pious narrator of an account of a pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick recorded of himself and his fellow climbers that "we are all teetotallers", though one of them before the climb was "almost worn out praying for a fine day". He would have been better off having a drink.

Nor could the Irish Monthly contributor resist some sectarian waspishness: "There was a Protestant lady who also made this pilgrimage and brought her little daughter (a Catholic) up along with her to the summit of the Reek. May God enlighten and move that good mother to embrace, in all its fullness, the same true Catholic faith which St Patrick preached!"

Drunkenness, however, remained a preoccupation for those sermonising on the summit, including a Fr Benedict in 1950, who referred to “a serious increase amongst our people of the vice of drunkenness and other sins which follow from it”. He also railed against the “imported press” and “imported films” and declared that “this new conquest of Ireland is going on insidiously, but thoroughly”.

Now, it is the ultra-runners who are attempting a new, insidious conquest. They should take a pledge to desist and leave the Reek for those who seek a bit of serenity in a hurried, noisy contemporary Ireland.