a matter of faith

The best preacher I ever encountered was Father Nally, an intense northern padre who came to Kilcullen as curate a few decades ago.
His sermons had an unlikely memorability.
Once heard never forgotten you might say.
And it wasn't always what he'd say as much as the way he said it.
Father Nally had a stirring epic almost Shakespearian style of delivery.
Why it was like listening to some great actor declaiming from the altar.
Johnny Gielgud.
Or Richard Burton.
Or me.
The congregation would sit there looking stunned.
Often because they were stunned.
I remember one Christmas morning how he electrified the sleepy congregation with the following classic:
"Some of you are here for the first time this year. And what the church is saying to you is..."
We all waited for the cosy cliche of welcome.
"... go away," said Father Nally.
Years later my cousin Jennifer was telling me how wrong he had been to speak this way.
I asked her how many other sermons that she'd heard throughout her life could she recall with such clarity.
She recalled no other.
Only this one.
Curious eh!
During Ireland's Bishop Cronzey scandal, (Bishop meets girl, Bishop beds girl, Tony O'Reilly's newspaper group gives birth to triplets, yadda yadda yadda), Father Nally was not at all abashed by the wave of negative newspaper comment being directed towards institutionalised religion.
He confronted the issue during a sermon.
"So you think the clergy have failed you?" he demanded of us one Summer's evening. "Well you have failed us. Massively!"
Now that's good shooting.
Father Nally occasionally allowed himself an uplifting and cheerful discourse about the after life and the likelihood that many of those present in the church would shortly be going to hell.
When he got going on that theme, he'd scare the bejabers out of you.
I remember one utterly incomprehensible absolutely terrifying story he told where a nurse looked in on a sick man and said: "Oh, he's getting better."
The doctor at the bedside shook his head. "Can't you see?" said the doctor. "The flies are already half way in control."
Father Nally told that story with great relish and then added without a word of explanation but with a most sinister intonation:
"Jesus had many names for him."
You know who Father Nally was referring to?
Let me put it this way.
It wasn't the patient.
It wasn't the nurse.
It wasn't the doctor.
I still get shivers when I remember the way he orchestrated that particular story.
Father Nally was also sometimes capable of a surprising sensitivity to other faiths.
At least it surprised me.
As the Berlin wall fell and a new era of freedom seemed to be dawning for the world, he spoke to us about the followers of the Russian Orthodox religion.
Wise men from the east, he called them.
I think he hoped they'd show us the way to a deeper faith.

Father Nally must have known great unhappiness.
I sense it.
There was a desolation in his voice at times.
An anger.
In some way he had judged himself not just us.
And he had judged harshly.

But the sermons were superb.
Thunderous orations against the excesses of an age that worships itself.
And his service to the community was beyond reproach.
Weddings, funerals, baptisms.
Those sterile ceremonious moments when the Irish grudgingly allow priests into their lives.
At other times when we meet the Padres, it's just "How ye Father," and we hurry past.
How many times do they hear respectfully muttered "How ye Fathers?" Do they ever get sick of it? I wonder do they ever yearn for someone to say "May I call you by your first name, Father," and laugh a bit.
Perhaps for Father Nally the sermons were his only moments of honest self expression.
The only times he could show some emotion.
When he left our town, there was a collection taken up and an official presentation afterwards.
At the presentation Father Nally addressed his former parishioners for the last time.
"Some of you will be glad to see me go," he said with a sad little smile. "May God forgive you."