Sir, - The suspected suicide of Father Sean Fortune, a suspended priest of the Diocese of Ferns at his home in New Ross last Saturday morning, like the natural death of Father Brendan Smyth, the convicted paedophile priest while serving his prison sentence in Arbour Hill, will be contemplated with mixed feelings by many.
For Father Fortune's family and friends, as they say a final farewell to a person and priest they loved, the days ahead will be a heartbreaking time of great sadness and grief which they will relive over and over again for many months and years. No one should intrude on their private grief. As one who shared the ministry of Catholic priesthood with Fr Sean, my prayers and sympathy are very much with his family and friends at this time.
Father Sean Fortune was before the courts on very serious charges. He was accused of violating the dignity of others to satisfy his own sexual appetite for pleasure. It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that the disordered use of sex tends progressively to destroy a person's capacity to love by making pleasure, instead of sincere self-giving, the end of sexuality and by reducing other persons to objects of one's own gratification. The charges against Fr Fortune - 29 counts of sexual abuse - were so serious that a judge deemed it necessary to detain him in custody pending his trial. Father Fortune had pleaded not guilty to all charges.
On the Monday before his death, he was granted bail and released by an order of the High Court from Mountjoy Prison only on certain conditions being fulfilled. From there he returned to his diocese and home to die alone by an apparent alcohol and medication self-induced death.
May I ask Bishop Brendan Comiskey, Father Fortune's Ordinary, what help - spiritual or other - was offered to Father Fortune (who in court was clearly a very ill man) after his release from prison in the days immediately before his death? The Roman Ritual on "The Pastoral Care Of The Sick" declares: "The Lord himself showed great concern for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the sick and commanded his followers to do likewise."
Since it seems from media reports that Father Fortune barricaded himself in his house after being released from prison, I wonder did this also place him beyond diocesan help and the spiritual support, comfort and consolation of his Church in an obvious time of illness and great personal disgrace and shame?
The Catholic priest, conscious that each human person is looking for a love that is capable of bringing them beyond the anguishes concomitant with human weakness and egoism, and above all with death itself, must proclaim that Jesus Christ is the only answer to sin and death. The individual human person, created in the image and likeness of God, in his or her needs and all his or her complexities, whatever the just demands of civil authority, must only and always be the primary focus of the Church's pastoral care and concern. - Yours, etc., Rev Peter O'Callaghan,
Candlemas, Inch, Killeagh, Co Cork.