There’s a moment early in Archbishop Michael Neary’s new
book where he tells a room full of priests that it’s alright to shake a
clenched fist at God. Not figuratively. Actually, shake it. He borrows
the gesture from the Psalmist, who did plenty of fist-shaking, and he
hands it to men who’ve spent 50 years being told to keep the collar
straight and the temper level.
I read that and put the book down for a
minute. You don’t often catch a bishop giving out permission to be
furious with the Almighty.
That’s the register of , and it’s why the book is better than it has any right to be.
Neary
is a Castlebar man, which is to say he’s from more or less my own patch
of Mayo, and there’s a particular pleasure in reading a serious book by
someone who knows the same weather you do. Scripture professor at
Maynooth before the mitre, a licentiate from the Biblical Institute in
Rome, then 27 years running the Archdiocese of Tuam and the title of
longest-serving Catholic bishop in the country by the time he handed it
back in 2021.
His was the wild archdiocese: Achill, Clare
Island, Inishturk, the Aran Islands, Croagh Patrick, Knock. I’ve watched
that same Atlantic he used to cross for Confirmations go from glass to
grey rage in about the time it takes to boil a kettle.
He
retired to Castlebar, and this book, now published by Aid to the Church
in Need, is what a thoughtful man does amid the quiet afterwards.
Retreat addresses, mostly. Talks he gave to fellow priests down the
years, gathered up and tidied.
Here’s what it isn’t. It
isn’t a strategy document. There’s no five-point plan for keeping a
parish breathing when there are two priests left to cover twelve
churches, which is roughly the arithmetic now.
Maynooth, which once held
five hundred seminarians, is down to a couple of dozen. The average
Irish priest is well the wrong side of seventy.
A few years back, the
papal nuncio called it an actuarial cliff and said the freefall was
coming.
Ardal O’Hanlon, of all the men in Ireland, ended up making the
television documentary about it, and they called the thing , and nobody in the room laughed.
So
Neary is writing for the last men standing, and he knows exactly that’s
who he’s writing for. What he offers them isn’t a rescue. It’s company.
His method is old, and it works. He goes back to
the Bible, pulls out the people who had it worse, and holds them up to
the light as a mirror. Jeremiah, who never wanted the job, who wore his
heart on his sleeve and got laughed at for it.
“You have
seduced me, Yahweh,” Jeremiah says, in one of the rawest lines in all
of scripture, and to his credit Neary doesn’t tidy it up or sand off the
anger.
Second Isaiah, preaching hope to people deported
fifteen hundred miles from home who’d quietly given up on the whole
business. Moses was entirely unconvinced he was fit for any of it.
Peter, who talked too much, denied everything and was handed the keys
anyway. And Mary, whose great contribution, in Neary’s reading, is her
silence.
The reality of this modern spiritual exile runs
through the book like a seam of turf, and he returns to it with
insistence. The pain of Babylon, the desert, Holy Saturday, that still
grey day between the cross and the empty tomb when God seemed silent, if
even defeated, and nobody yet knows if He’s coming back. This is where
he sees the Irish priesthood of today, and it’s the most convincing
stance in the book. He isn’t pretending the churches are full, nor is he
doing the thing churchmen do where they look sideways at a collapse and
decide to call it a form of divinely ordained renewal. He names the
emptiness, and only then asks the harder question. What on earth are you
meant to do standing inside it?
Then he gives us the line the book turns on,
openly writing about the scandals, the reports, the falling away of the
Church’s old authority, he says the gates that were shut have been torn
open, and that at least now the Lord can get in. I’ve gone back to that
sentence half a dozen times, and it’s the kind of thing you can only
write once you’ve stopped guarding the institution and started fretting
about the faith instead. There’s a nerve in it that’s refreshing coming
from a man of his vintage and rank.
He’s good, too, on
the small poisons. He writes about acedia, the noonday demon the desert
monks were frightened of, the grey listlessness that curdles into
blaming everyone but yourself. He knows the glib remark that kills a
project stone dead in its cradle: “We tried that before.”
We’ve
all sat in that meeting, church, parish council or the GAA, where one
tired voice lets the air out of the room in a single comment. Neary has
plainly sat through a great many of them, and he’s honest enough to
admit the rot can get into him as easily as anyone.
I have just one reservation, or perhaps a
guarded observation, take your pick. It is, however, a small one,
because a review without one would perhaps be a fiction.
The book, for
all its honesty about the enclosing dusk and the encroaching night,
drifts toward consolation and soothes, circling the same few notes, hope
and refuge and the rock and the stronghold, and after a while I wanted a
note of defiance or even a rallying call.
The Psalms he threads through
every chapter are achingly beautiful, but the cumulative effect tips
from bracing toward a resigned comfort. A younger priest, when such a
rare bird can still be found, might want less balm and a bit more of a
scrap.
I suspect that’s just me, a Mass goer, wanting the
wrong book. Maybe consolation is the harder, rarer thing, and I only
sniff at it because I’ve never had to bury a colleague on the Tuesday,
christen a stranger’s baby on the Wednesday, and hold a whole parish
upright on the Thursday with my own doubts howling in my ears.
Neary
has. He isn’t writing for the likes of me. He’s writing for the man
alone in a cold presbytery at eleven at night, wondering if there is a
Christian soldier willing to take up the flame he spent a lifetime
fanning into life.
The Mary section is the one that remained with
me the longest. Her silence, he calls it, and he ties it to our native
Knock, where the Apparition said precisely nothing, not one syllable,
but was rich with meaning and symbolism. In a country that cannot shut
up, that can’t abide a gap without stuffing it full of noise and hot
opinion and the next thing entirely, a bishop making the case for
silence feels close to subversive.
I grew up in a town where people
drove to Knock, and it would be easy to forget the whole vision was
wordless. Neary hadn’t forgotten. He builds a quiet theology of holding
your tongue and waiting, and I found that I couldn’t argue with a line
of it.
It’s a good book, and now and again a very good
one, written by a serious man who spent his life nearer to scripture
than most bishops could ever manage and who declined, at the finish, to
deliver the unvarnished truth to his own about the state of a Church he
dearly loves and dedicated his life to. That last part is scarcer than
it ought to be. There’s no triumphalism here, no pretending the numbers
can be prayed away if you only believe hard enough.
Just a Castlebar man
who’s watched the tide go all the way out, telling the few still left
on the strand that tides have a habit of coming back, and that Babylon,
for all its misery, was the exact place the hope got lit again.
I
finished the book thinking about the field and the beleaguered
Jeremiah. In mid-prophecy, in the unenviable storm of predicting the
ruin of everything, he threw in his lot in with Divine Providence and
bought a field outside Jerusalem.
A seemingly irrational but defiant
purchase, a calculated bet made in faith on a homecoming he would never
live to see. Neary rightfully loves that story, and I think it’s the
whole book’s message folded into one meaningful gesture of defiance.
Buy
the field and plant the thing you won’t be around to harvest.
Demolition is grim work, right enough.
But somebody has to believe in
whatever gets built on the cleared ground, and it may as well be the
last man still holding the shovel.
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