The Pope’s visit

“For those of us whose lives have been shaped by the ideals of democracy, free speech and academic dialogue, the Church, in the reign of John Paul II, was often an inhospitable place”

SECOND READING
FR KEVIN HEGARTY

Some years ago the Fine Gael MEP, Gay Mitchell, proposed that Dublin should seek to host the Olympics. Most of us thought he was having a laugh. He wasn’t, but the suggestion that Dublin could quickly acquire the range and quality of venues for the games was ludicrous.
The FAI and the Scottish FA also proposed that they would jointly host the European Soccer Championships. Theirs was a more restrained ambition but it faltered largely because Ireland had only one adequate venue, Croke Park, and its availability was problematic.
However, all is not lost. We can attract some big international events in Ireland. Pope Benedict XVI has come to our rescue. He announced recently that the 2012 Eucharistic Congress will be held in Dublin.
The first Eucharistic Congress was held in Lille in France in 1881. The event has taken place biannually since 1922. The purpose of the Congress is to develop understanding of and devotion to the Eucharist.
Dublin previously hosted the Congress in 1932 to mark the 1500th anniversary of the reputed date of St Patrick’s arrival in Ireland. It was one of the four great Ard Fheiseanna of Irish Catholicism in the 20th century. The others were the celebration of the centenary of Catholic Emancipation in 1929, the Patrician year celebrations of 1961 and the papal visit of 1979.
I was one of 2.5 million people who witnessed John Paul II’s visit in September of that year. I attended two of the venues – the Phoenix Park and Maynooth College, where I was then a student.
The announcement of the Eucharistic Congress for Dublin in 2012 sent my mind down memory lane to September, 1979.
The summer of 1979 was humid and wet. There was often a threat of thunder in the air. The weather mirrored the political atmosphere. In August, Anglo-Irish relations reached a nadir when the Provisional IRA blew up Earl Mountbatten’s boat, off Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, killing the Earl, his grandson and a boat boy. Later that day the IRA killed 18 British soldiers near Warrenpoint, Co Down. Through the summer and autumn Charles J Haughey was racheting up his opposition to Jack Lynch’s continuance as Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach.
The announcement of Pope John Paul’s visit to Ireland was one of the few good news stories of the summer. He had been elected Pope the previous October. At 58 he was young by papal standards and the first non-Italian to hold the office in over 400 years.
The announcement initiated a frenzy of organisation in the Catholic Church in Ireland, especially in the seven venues he was to visit. Bishops beamed daily from our television screens and our newspapers, stressing how significant the visit would be for the Irish Church.
Not all clerics rejoiced in the activity. The then Bishop of Killala, Thomas McDonnell, was a shy and scholarly man who had made the economic use of words into an art form. He disliked any excitement, even – or especially – of a religious kind, disturbing the tranquility of his austere life. Noting the amount of organisation deemed necessary for the papal visit to Knock, he commented: “Thank God, Knock is not in Killala.”
When I returned to Maynooth in September, the place was agog with excitement. I have to say I found it difficult to share it. I belonged out by the side of most of it.
I find big religious celebrations with cardinals, bishops and masses of priests overwhelming and somewhat oppressive. For me they drown out the whispers of the transcendent. Give me a walk in the solitude of Cross beach any day!!
I was also ambivalent about the hero-worship of the Pope, then unconsciously expected of students for the priesthood. I dislike hero worship of any kind.
I admit I never warmed to Pope John Paul II. I admired his opposition to war, his role in the disintegration of Communism and his writings on the dignity of the human person. I was perturbed by his opposition to liberation theology in South America and his authoritarian approach to the administration of the Church. For those of us whose lives have been shaped by the ideals of democracy, free speech and academic dialogue, the Church, in the reign of John Paul II, was often an inhospitable place.
As students for the priesthood, we had bit parts to play in the celebrations. The final year students got the bigger bit parts. They attended on the Pope at the various venues. They returned to the college with stars in their eyes. They had met the Pope and he had blessed them. They were given papal trinkets as mementoes. They displayed these tantalisingly as if they hoped we might be jealous...
The rest of us had to make do with distributing communion in the Phoenix Park. So that we might be identified for giving out Communion, we were ordered to wear soutanes. The soutane is a long, black gown, once the daily apparel of priests. Its attractions as a piece of clothing have long escaped me. My main memory of the Phoenix Park is of sweltering in serge under the relentless autumn sun. The Pope was a white speck in the distance and only occasionally could we hear what he was saying.
By Sunday evening the locus had switched to Maynooth where the Pope was to arrive on Monday morning. For security reasons we had to vacate our rooms. To keep us gainfully employed, the college authorities organised an all-night vigil of prayer. The night was punctuated by regular visits to the college refectory where we partook of strong tea, curled sandwiches and weak oxtail soup. Micheál Harding, now an ‘Irish Times’ columnist and always a consummate actor, enlivened the solemnity of the night by hilarious cameos of John Paul II in action.
The Pope was scheduled to be in Maynooth by 7am. At 6am we were expected to be in the College Chapel to await his arrival.
Over 1,000 people spilled into a space which was comfortable only for 400. It created a heavy, feverish atmosphere. I was sandwiched between two exuberant young monks, already, in girth, well advanced in emulating Friar Tuck. The one highlight for the two hours – the papal helicopter was delayed in Dublin by poor weather conditions – was the music of James Galway.
About 8am he was drowned out by an eruption of ‘He has got the whole world in his hands’, which is No 1 on the list of hymns that I hate. I admit that there is tough competition for this accolade! The Pope walked up the chapel, smiling inscrutably in response to the hymn. When he reached the sanctuary, noting how we were wedged in the chapel, he uttered what was, for me, the most welcome sentence of his papacy: “The speech will be outside.”
The Papal visit was not the start of something new. It was the last fling of traditional Irish Catholicism. The golden glow of September, 1979 faded quickly. Relatively soon afterwards, the dark secrets of Irish Catholicism were to come tumbling out of the woodwork.