GIVE the devil his due , we say. But we don t. A county Carlow priest has spoken of his fears that local teenagers are practising devil worship . Fr Edward Dowling (PP, retired) last month told church-goers in Bagenalstown to be permanently vigilant for signs of involvement in the occult by local youngsters.
Fr Dowling revealed that 100 candles had been stolen from St Andrew s church in the village: some of these had later been discovered scattered around at Church Road. Others were found in the grass in the park at Fair Green .
Fr Dowling also informed a hushed congregation that he had been made aware of reports of unidentified teenage boys walking in the area with a ouija board .
Fr Dowling has won the public support of the chairman of the Bagenalstown Town Commissioners, Mr Paddy Kiely (FF) who, according to The Irish Times, said he had seen for himself five blue signs of a sinister nature on a wall at a local railway bridge .
An unnerving experience, no doubt. We must hope that by now Mr Kiely is sitting up in bed, and perhaps taking light nourishment.
But what we really should be asking is, where s the equity? Is this report not thoroughly biased against the devil? Does it not simply take for granted that worship of the devil is something to be feared . Imagine the outcry if that were said about the devil s direct rival, God!
Whatever happened to balance, objectivity, the right of reply?
It sometimes seems to me that the devil or Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, foul fiend, call him what you will is just used as a handy scapegoat, never given a fair crack of the whip.
You don t find followers of the devil descending on neighbouring villages with bayonets in their teeth, to shout The Devil is great! as they cut children s throats. But there s no shortage of pro-God elements doing just this all over the place, screeching that God is great! as they go about their business.
You never hear of war-mongers geeing people up for slaughter by assuring them that We have the devil on our side . No. It s always, We ve got God on our side.
Remember that schlock-jock Jones, who bewildered close on a thousand people of all ages in Jonesville in Guyana to swallow poison and die in mass suicide? Did he tell them to do it so as to join the devil in hell? No, he did not. He told them to do it so as to join God in heaven.
So who s the good guy in all this and who the bad man, eh?
When s the last time you heard a news item from the North telling that members of the devil-worshipping community had gathered outside a competitor s gig belching hatred and threat?
Is it followers of God or followers of the devil who are creating most of the bother and misery in this world? Go on. Tell the truth, and don t wrongly shame the devil.
I know of many bad things done in Carlow, and the devil had nothing to do with it. God s crowd, though, were well involved.
WHEN I first knew Dublin, in the 60s, Peter Connolly was one of very few priests you d hear talked about in pubs. He was Professor of English Literature at Maynooth, and a mighty campaigner against censorship.
He was widely looked up to those who were into, for example, beat poets and black music. No clergyman in the country had more cred. He had famously joined Edna O Brien on stage at a public meeting in Limerick to protest the ban on her early novels. His essays and literary and film reviews his enthusiasm for Bergman and Fellini was especially influential were brilliantly illuminating, and, because always just one step ahead of their time, both trail-blazing and comfortable to keep up with.
He was a widely knowledgeable intellectual adventurer, unafraid of authority. It is this which makes his silence about Gerald O Donovan so intriguing.
O Donovan is the priest-novelist I wrote about here last issue, whose Father Ralph, published in 1913, provides a harshly unflattering picture of the imminent rulers of independent Ireland in the early years of this century. I remarked that Father Ralph had been so comprehensively suppressed that few people even knew of its existence, much less had read it.
To find out more, I turned last week to Peter Connolly s 1958 essay, The Priest In Modern Irish Fiction and found nothing. Either Connolly had never heard of O Donovan or had chosen, bizarrely, not to acknowledge him.
The essay originally a lecture, then published in The Furrow was widely read and discussed at the time. It examines the depiction of priests in Irish short stories, novels, plays and poems, ranging over the work of Joyce and Joseph Tomelty, George Moore, James Plunkett, Mary Lavin and Frank O Connor, Liam O Flaherty, Sean O Faolain, Norah Hoult, Yeats, and many others. But there isn t a single word about O Donovan or about Father Ralph, a work of modern Irish fiction, by a priest, about priests.
At one point Connolly writes: How strange, then, to view the same tension at work [between Artist and Priest] literally from the other side and from within the priest through the eyes of Canon Sheehan, Joyce s contemporary and the only priest-novelist of the century.
This suggests strongly that Connolly simply wasn t aware of O Donovan s existence. And yet everyone I talk to who knew or studied under Connolly dismisses as preposterous the notion that he could have been ignorant of a work so obviously within his own specialist area of expertise.
Like so much else about religion, and about the interpenetrations of religion and art, what we have here is a mystery.
There are more secular mysteries surrounding O Donovan, too.
At his death, at Albury in Surrey in July 1942, the London Times published a brief obituary which mentioned other novels than Father Ralph, and gave sketchy detail of O Donovan s life in southern England after he d been driven from Ireland and the priesthood in the Vatican crack-down on modernism . O Donovan had been sacked by the Church in 1907, when he refused formally to renounce modernism, as required of all priests under the decree Lamentabili. He had been a curate in Loughrea, Galway, at the time.
He became a sub-warden at the east London mission centre, Toynbee Hall (a position taken some years later by another exile , the disgraced former Tory War Minister, John Profumo). He worked as a publisher, and then became head of the Italian section of Crewe House. From 1938 until his death, he devoted himself full-time to the cause of Czech refugees fleeing towards London from Nazism. The obituary ended with the observation, its poignancy somewhat out of place in the sombre environ of the Times obituary page, that To know him was to love him .
Signed in the Times style, A Friend , the obituary had in fact been written by the essayist, novelist and travel writer, Dame Rose Macauley. Interestingly, the entry on Rose Macauley in the Oxford Companion to English Literature records that her finest novel, The World My Wilderness, appeared after a decade in which she wrote no fiction and followed her return to the Anglican faith from which she had been long estranged through her love for a married man who died in 1942.
It can be inferred that O Donovan had made a deep impression on Rose Macauley, as he seems to have on all who knew him, and that both religion and adultery were regarded by writers with rather greater reverence then than now.
It would be wrong to imply that O Donovan ever quite disappeared from view in Ireland. Seamus Deane included an excerpt from Father Ralph in his Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature. In an essay in the same volume, the late Augustine Martin briefly contrasts the priest-figure in O Donovan s novel with Canon Sheehan s contented curates.
Martin, professor of English Literature at UCD until his death last year, studied under Peter Connolly in the 50s.
Thus there are loose ends and strange aspects to this which it would be fascinating to trace down and tie up. It is curious indeed that Gerald O Donovan strayed so far out of history s sight as to be overlooked even by Peter Connolly.
Part of the dark religion of our past which we would benefit from shining light on even now.
More later. n