There may not be an afterlife, the causes of paedophilia are
uncertain, arguments against women’s ordination are not at all
convincing: the unsettling but refreshing thing about the retired bishop
of Killaloe is that he thinks aloud, trusting in the listener to
respect the many debates he has with himself.
WE LAST MET in the bishop’s
palace in Ennis, a rambling, shambling old house, ill-designed for home
or office.
A Traveller man had been at the front door since dawn and
wasn’t leaving without €20,000 towards a new house.
As the bishop
made tea in the dim, chilly kitchen, a priest walked in through a side
door.
Come noon, the phone was ringing non-stop and the Travelling man
was still at the front door.
Palace indeed.
Like Heuston Station, with
added aggravation.
Eight months on, Willie Walsh is now the bishop
emeritus and has retired to a little house opposite St Flannan’s
College, where he was once a boarder and worked, later, as a teacher.
“Lovely” is a favourite word, cropping up frequently to describe his new
life, new home, even the new bishop. The modest, homely bungalow is his
first taste of true privacy.
“I came in and closed the door and
said, ‘This is lovely, I’m at peace, there’s nobody going to walk in,
the phone isn’t going . . .’ People were saying it’d be kind of
traumatic but my new life is lovely. ’Tis lovely.”
After his
successor’s ordination in August, he took a week in Rome long promised
to a nephew and niece, followed by 10 days in Newcastle, Co Down, with a
couple who have been his holiday companions for over 12 years and who
arrange house swaps from Sweden to San Francisco.
“Lovely, just lovely.
I’ll be offering this one as a swap next year,” he says with a laugh.
He
has “a small group of very close friends”, forming “the odd couple”
with an older man, a widower, when they go socialising with couples.
He
is close to his siblings – two sisters, who are pharmacists, a brother
who is a vet and two more who run the farm they grew up on near Roscrea.
His regular golf outings are with a small group of clergymen.
The
implication is that Willie Walsh will not be found in indiscreet
situations with women.
“The very close friends I have are couples and,
while the friendship might have arisen through the woman I’d be very
careful . . . I wouldn’t make a habit of visiting the house while the
husband was away.”
Temptation did beckon, especially in his 40s,
over several turbulent years. While his opposition to institutional
celibacy is well documented, he also had his own struggles with it.
“There would have been a very strong attraction there at times,
certainly, and you would of course wonder, wouldn’t it be lovely to be
married to that person, even to the extent of wondering whether I should
leave the priesthood,” he says.
“Thankfully I don’t think I’ve ever
exploited those sorts of loving relationships, which certainly have
enriched my life.”
And how many women would have turned his head?
“More than one is all I’ll say. But nowadays what I’d see as part of the
sacrifice of celibacy would be a degree of envy I’d feel when I see
grandparents and how much new life and wonder and joy grandchildren
bring to them. That would make you lonely at times.”
But the
midlife struggles went deeper than celibacy.
“I would have been
struggling with faith itself. In some ways faith is a leap in the dark.
There was never a doubt about the values which I believe Christ showed
us – truth and compassion and forgiveness – but there would have been
questions of how deep is your belief?”
Such as in the divinity of
Christ?
“As deep as that.”
He worked on it by becoming stronger in
prayer and spiritual reading.
“Even now I’m not smug about it. I’m
content that I’ve lived my life generally the way I feel I should have
lived it, and I have no regrets. But I see now more and more when I’m
talking to close friends, loyal to the church all their lives, and their
children are saying: ‘I don’t want any part in that, the way you treat
women, the whole abuse thing.’ And those parents would be saying to me:
‘We begin to wonder at this stage did we get it wrong?’ And I begin to
say to myself – I don’t want to say it to myself . . . ”
He hesitates.
“Well, could it end with a hole in the ground?”
To question the
existence of an afterlife is a startling thing to hear from an Irish
Catholic bishop, though not so surprising perhaps from a scientist or a
man who grounds his beliefs in the messy realities of the everyday.
“I
suppose at this stage I have decided that I choose to believe to some
degree, but I can’t prove from reason these teachings.”
The “big
question” for the church, he reckons, is not moral behaviour but faith,
faith in God.
“I think if you can accept the existence of God, then all
the other things are possible. And there’s the other side, which is that
if you believe in nothing, you can believe in everything – like The Da
Vinci Code. So, ultimately, believing in God and the afterlife is the
only way I can make sense of life. It’s a huge leap.”
The “only
one thing” he is “absolutely satisfied with”, he says, is that his God
is not a harsh God, nor judgmental.
“I just can’t accept condemnatory
judgments from anyone, because every time I come across something that’s
wrong or evil there’s always a story behind it. Yeah, that’s
wishy-washy, I know. It worries me a bit but I certainly prefer that to
this harsh judgmentalism.”
That reluctance to judge may partly
explain his disastrous radio interview this time last year, immediately
after the Dublin report on clerical child abuse, when Bishop Donal
Murray was under pressure to resign.
He accused Murray’s critics of a
“gross misreading” of the report, of looking “for a head on a plate”,
then said he hadn’t read the report.
“If Bishop Willie Walsh doesn’t get
it, what hope is there for the rest of the institutional church?” asked
Fintan O’Toole.
“What I really wanted to say was, let’s try and
examine these things in a calm atmosphere. Then the next thing is the
person asked, ‘Have you read the report?’ And I said no. I just
panicked. I had looked at bits of the report that referred to different
bishops, but that was the panic answer I gave. I did feel for Donal
Murray as a man who had given his life to the church and I did feel a
sense of loyalty to him. But I can certainly understand people’s anger .
. . Even a very close friend of mine told me that she was enraged by
it.”
Piecing the story together, it appears a call made to him
that morning placed him under intense pressure right up to air time and
certain phrases were spun at him – such as “gross misreading” – that he
blurted out at the interview.
“I was caught, yes, and I got a hammering,
but I don’t have any sympathy for myself when I see what has happened
to men like Eamon Walsh and Ray Field. What I do know is that Eamon
Walsh has done the best work in this area of any bishop in the country.”
The
danger with Bishop Willie Walsh contextualising anything is that he
thinks aloud, always trusting in the goodwill of the listener to hear
and respect the entirety of the debate he is having with himself.
A
discussion about his early teaching days at St Flannan’s leads into an
enlightening riff about the superfluity of priests in the country then:
bright, educated to third level, bored, stifled and underemployed in
far-flung parishes with no likeminded companions beyond their own
compadres, who were also rivals in the power grab for schools, sports
and drama groups.
All that may explain the “abuse of power”, he says,
“but the sexual abuse I think is more complex”. He thinks future studies
will show that there were no more abusers among priests than among lay
people but priests had access to more victims.
By now he is
wondering aloud, dangerously, whether the true culprit was not celibacy
but the formation of the boy priests.
“From the time I was 12 years old
until my mid- to late-20s, I lived in a totally male environment and I
think that has some significance in your growing to sexual maturity. I’m
very nervous about saying this – it’s an issue that hasn’t been faced –
but practically all the abuse that I’ve come across has been abuse of
boys, and boys of 14, 15 years old. Now, that raises some serious
questions, and if you really went into them you would be accused of
mixing up homosexuality and paedophilia. If a priest abuses a 16- or
17-year old, is that homesexual? It’s certainly not paedophilia. Where
does the division come? It is a very hazardous area – and there’s no
question in my mind that I’m not equating homosexuality with sexual
abuse by priests. No, I’m not. But I’m saying that at a certain point
the distinction is not that clear.
“There’s the whole argument: is
our sexual orientation there from birth or does it come about from
early sexual experience? I think and believe it’s not one or the other,
but I think that early sexual experience is a factor and that there is a
risk in an all-male environment of sexual experimentation, and that can
in some way affect their sexual development. I mean, some people would
argue that a male who abuses a 15-year-old is really himself a
15-year-old sexually.”
And while the church was “very, very strong
on the seriousness of sexual sin”, he says, he wonders if confession
offered an “easy way out” for some perpetrators.
“He has confessed, he
is forgiven and therefore he can go on from here?”
He is not
remotely convinced by arguments against women’s ordination and is irked
by the welcome accorded by Rome to (usually married) Protestant
clergymen fleeing their own women priests.
“I wish if people were
changing to the Roman Catholic Church, they’d find a better reason than
the non-ordination of women. I find that bothersome,” he says with
uncharacteristic edge.
“I really don’t want to cause division in the
church, but what I have real difficulty with is that some subjects are
not for discussion. I don’t see how we can be that certain of things –
celibacy is another – which I don’t see as belonging to the essence of
the Christian message.”
Yet he has been accused of waffling, of
trying to have it every way on church teaching. When asked about a
church marriage for gay couples he is firmly opposed.
But he has called
for a “greater understanding” towards gay people, which would include “a
recognition that people don’t choose their sexual orientation”.
But if
the church persists in its teaching that homosexual acts are sinful,
what use is “understanding” to a committed gay couple?
“Sexuality
is much wider than, say, the use of genital organs or whatever. It’s an
essential part of the whole person. I think the fact that I don’t have
sexual relations with somebody doesn’t mean that there isn’t something
of sexuality in our friendship.”
We digest this in silence.
Then
he wonders aloud whether it’s right to expect “clear, cut-and-dried
answers to everything. Life is very messy, and to have clarity on every
issue I think is just not possible.”
The astonishing thing is that
he ever became a bishop. On July 25th, 1968, when he was just 33 and
working as a parish holiday locum in a New York presbytery, he was
“stunned” to hear about Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae encyclical,
reaffirming traditional Roman Catholic teaching on family planning.
“That was a watershed. Up to that time, I think, practically all
Catholics accepted that, whether they disobeyed Catholic teaching or
not, the teaching was right. It was there that the questioning began.”
In
many ways his subsequent response to it defined Walsh’s essentially
decent, painfully conflicted responses to similar challenges throughout
his priestly life.
“I felt it was going to cause a lot of suffering, but
I suppose I did what a lot of theologians and various people did: I
tried to water it down in some way and find excuses in my own mind and
find excuses for people, but somehow felt that the church couldn’t be
that wrong – that was early in my priesthood. But you were sort of
saying, well, conscience is the primary thing anyway no matter what,
that people have to go by their own conscience – which in many ways was
an attempt to soften the teachings.”
Keeping that precarious
balance between loyalty to church and to personal convictions can’t have
been easy, especially for a man who claims he “lacks the courage for a
fight”.
“I’d put up with things rather than fight with somebody. I
sometimes say I’d sell my soul for peace.”
Yet, when approached by
the nuncio with the offer of the bishop’s job, he was upfront with his
questions about church teaching.
“I said I wasn’t a campaigner but I did
have some difficulties in the area of family planning, the treatment of
people of homosexual orientation, people in second unions, sexuality . .
. ”
And the nuncio said? “He listened and said something like,
‘At times we all have question marks.’ I was only a short time in it
when I raised the issue of celibacy and was reminded this wasn’t for
discussion. Yeah, Rome would have reminded me a few times.”
So no
freedom of thought, then?
“Oh, there has to be some sort of freedom,
acknowledging and recognising that we may change our views on things.
[Cardinal] Newman, who was beatified recently, was often questioned
about this and said that ‘where there’s a battle between my conscience
and Rome, my conscience will win’, which is a very strong statement.
“I don’t think he’d become a cardinal now,” he says wryly.
Ultimately,
you sense that all this stuff is complete palaver in his eyes, that
what he really wants to ask, loudly, is what the hell any of this
angelic pin-dancing has to do with the simple life and gospel of Jesus
Christ.
He is desperately uncomfortable about the pomp, the robes, the
art, the material possessions of the church.
“I think what we need
– and this applies to all of us and to me sitting in a comfortable
house – I think what we really have shied away from or watered down is
our teaching on justice. That’s one of the ways where we can show people
that we really believe.”
CV Bishop Willie Walsh
BORN
January 1935, youngest of six, on a comfortable, mixed farm near Roscrea, Co Tipperary.
EDUCATED
Boarded
at St Flannan’s College, Ennis. Won a scholarship to St Patrick’s
College, Maynooth, and gained a science degree while studying for the
priesthood.
CAREER
1959 Ordained a priest
in Rome and completed canon-law studies at the Pontifical Lateran
University. Taught for a year at Coláiste Éinde, Galway, then returned
to St Flannan’s as a maths and physics teacher, while coaching hurling
teams at all levels.
1970 Involved in setting up the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (now Accord) in the diocese.
1988 Appointed curate at Ennis Cathedral, then administrator.
1994 Ordained Bishop of Killaloe.
2010 Succeeded by Fr Kieran O’Reilly SMA. Retired to the See
SIC: IT/IE