The Speakers
The Year of the Priest was relatively uneventful until the NCP conference provided a forum where questions were neither ignored nor suppressed.
People have been asking with increasing frustration:
- What opportunities are we missing by attempting business as usual with fewer and aging priests?
- What has the abuse crisis really done to our priesthood?
- Does anyone know what most lay people think of celibacy?
- Why the ‘summum silentium’ around Geoff Robinson’s confrontation of power and sex in the Church?
- Is it a crime to talk about the ordination of women? And many more.
Richard Lennan raised the notion of the “interrupting” God: How God may be interrupting our idealised understanding of priesthood, and how fear of humiliation may hold us back from discussing the hard questions.
David Tacey, like the prophet Amos, has been a troubler of two kingdoms, the Church and the University. Rejected by both, David embodies Matthew Arnold’s predicament: wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. One of the first to alert me to the tension between religion and spirituality, David is still a sign of hope as he awakens the mystics among our university students.
Geraldine Doogue was shocking: “The much criticised secular world in which lay people live (& receive lectures on!) is probably more functional, more ready to conscience-examine, than the institutional Church.” Sometimes, as a priest, I feel I live in a ‘platonic’ bubble, floating ideally above the real world. Geoff Robinson has been trying to prick that cocooning film with sadly little success.
The Fellow Travellers
The speakers were great; but an even greater highlight was to catch up with so many men who have inspired me over the years: the bishops, Pat Power, Peter Ingham, Michael Malone, Geoff Robinson; the priests, Peter Brock, Paul Hanna, John Sullivan, John Ryan, John Crothers, Eugene Harley, Gerry Iverson, and, of course, Michael Whelan and many others too numerous to mention.
The Humour
Dinner at the same table as Peter Ingham was sauced and spiced with laughter, while John Boyle’s Dimboola take on undertaking was a brilliantly understated tour de force.
Altogether, a most memorable conference making the Year of the Priest worthwhile.
Paul McCabe
