Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty
Fr Ned Crosby tells of the Galway undertaker who overheard a conversation in a Ballyhaunis pub about the difficulty the then parish priest, Canon JG McGarry, had in getting people to attend a series of theological lectures.
Later he regaled his friends in Galway with the story: “This canon, ye see, came down from Maynooth and was all about theology. Then he brought down these theologians to talk but the people didn’t turn up to hear them, d’ye see. They didn’t want it. Why would they? Theology in Mayo?”
I suppose it is to be expected that an undertaker from the university city of Galway would find it hard to credit any intellectual endeavour in rural Mayo! The city always has contempt for the country! But we have our intellectuals, and some of them are in the field of theology, as two reports in this newspaper last week illustrated.
One concerned Seán Freyne of Tooreen, who has held posts in the theology departments of Maynooth and Trinity. He has been appointed visiting Professor at the Harvard School of Divinity. An accomplished scripture scholar, he first claimed the attention of Mayo people by an achievement closer to our hearts when he captained Mayo minors to an All-Ireland Final triumph in 1953.
From the second report we learned that Fr Enda McDonagh has become a Canon at the Church of Ireland Cathedral, St Patrick’s, in Dublin. Those of you blessedly uninterested in the arcane minutiae of clerical life might well ask what is the big deal. What renders this appointment significant is that it is the first time since the Reformation that a Roman Catholic priest has taken a place in this chapter.
In his address of welcome to Fr McDonagh, the Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Alan Harper, said division among Christians is a ‘permanent scar on the body that is Christ’s’. He asserted that this initiative ‘brings a measure of healing and renewal within that part of the body which is the Church of Ireland’.
Fr McDonagh, a native of Bekan, has been, for half a century, one of our foremost moral theologians. He also has a considerable international reputation. Among the major concerns of his work are the promotion of ecumenical dialogue between the different religious and political traditions in Ireland, the horror of war in the modern world, the poverty of the third world, AIDS victims in Africa and the pastoral care of homosexual and lesbian Christians. He also has explored the fruitful connections between art and literature and theology.
Dr McDonagh is an academic, but he does not live in that clichéd place, the ivory tower, remote from the passions of everyday life. The literary critic, Dorothy Van Ghent, judged the quality of a novel on the depth of ‘felt reality’ in it. There is a felt reality about Dr McDonagh’s theology. He has suffered and created for us.
In his autobiography, the novelist, Francis Stuart, wrote: “There is an emptiness within the human breast, a hunger for we hardly know what, that is the deepest and wildest of all desires. It is the falling in love with life, the dark, deep flow below the surface. Subtle, crude, beautiful, terrible. A few have dared to open their arms to it, to plunge into it, and always they are wounded and humiliated, but they have been touched, have been caressed by those fiery fingers that curved the universe and there remains about them a breadth, a spaciousness, a warmth of genius.”
He could have been writing of Dr McDonagh.
Enda is a provocative thinker, an engaging conversationalist and a generous host. He has a delightful sense of humour, often tinged with a self-deprecating irony. He is the soul of courtesy. One of his friends, the sculptor, Imogen Stuart, sums him up well: “When I think of Enda McDonagh my inner eye sees somebody who radiates a deep joyfulness. This joy is something I imagine was a quality the early Irish monks had and kept through all their harsh and ascetic lives, and in their tumultuous years of raids and other disaster and which they retained. It shows a kind of spirituality you acquire through loving nature – seeing God all around you – seeing God in all living creatures and having an understanding of human frailty. All this is enveloped by Enda’s intelligence, or better said, wisdom.”
His radical thinking on moral issues has often disturbed Church leaders. For a person of his intellectual openness, the institutional Catholic Church has been a ‘cold house’ in recent years. He is a prophet who is little honoured there, not that it worries him. He would have made an inspirational President of Maynooth. His colleagues in the archdiocese of Tuam recognised his ability when, on two occasions, they chose him as their candidate for Archbishop of Tuam. The Vatican, unfortunately, failed to recognise the stirrings of the Holy Spirit among the clergy of Tuam.
I know that Enda rejoices in the ongoing reconciliation between the different religious and political traditions in Ireland. He also desires to see the abolition of war and the creation of world peace. As an enthusiastic follower of Mayo football, he longs to see the county win the Sam Maguire. Sometimes I wonder wryly which will be the easier to achieve.
