IF Fr Brian D’Arcy hadn’t been bursting to go to the toilet, he might never have had the chance to finish the Pope’s dinner.Sounds like a joke — but for the man once dubbed Fr Trendy, there was nothing funny about disturbing His Holiness mid-bite in the Phoenix Park 30 years ago this month.
Father D’Arcy was one of the organisers of the historic papal visit to Ireland in 1979 and inadvertently met the pope backstage after the celebration of Mass in front of over a million people.
"I was looking for the toilet and I knew there was one along a tunnel beneath the altar so I asked a young guard if that was the door and he nodded," he recalls.
"I burst into a room and, to my horror, there was the Pope having his dinner with the then primate Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich, Jack Lynch, President Hillery and Archbishop Ryan — I nearly fainted."
At the time, efforts were being made to get the Pope to leave for his next engagement but he didn’t want to go too soon. "He wanted to finish a great big cut of Mullingar heifer beef and didn’t take too kindly to leaving it behind him.
"Eventually he got up to leave, but as he passed by me he gave me a very dirty look.
"Cardinal O’Fiaich said to me: ‘You might as well sit in the Pope’s chair and finish his meal because it is the nearest you will ever get to being Pope’ So I did."
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