A Message From Hell

Father Sean Fortune was a showbiz priest without the showbiz. He ran his parish like the Gestapo's idea of a village fete, browbeating his flock into parting with often vast sums of money, ran fraudulent journalism courses for #1,000 a pop, and generally corrupted everything he touched. In his spare time, he abused little boys.

Fortune killed himself with pills and whiskey in March of last year, aged 45, while awaiting trial for sexually abusing eight young males. Now Alison O'Connor, an Irish Times reporter who covered the story of Fr Fortune for the paper in the mid-1990s, has chronicled the life and times of perhaps Ireland's strangest priest over 249 frequently jaw-dropping pages.
A Message From Heaven (the title comes from Fortune's own self-justifying suicide note, which was headed "A message from heaven to my family") is a generally uncluttered, well-written narrative which gathers together the content of interviews with the young males Fortune preyed on, as well as a number of local observers, such as Wexford People editor Ger Walsh, local TD Hugh Byrne, and Sean Cloney.
The latter, a longtime Fortune-watcher, was often discredited by pro-Fortune elements due to his past troubles in Fethard-on-Sea, the small Wexford town where the cleric served as parish priest from 1981 to 1987.
Married to a Protestant woman, Cloney was an innocent bystander in a 1957 row between the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland over where the couple's children should be educated. There ensued a boycott of Protestant businesses in Fethard-on-Sea. The whole sorry story was later retold on celluloid in the 1998 film A Love Divided. Whenever Cloney tried to warn people about Fortune, he was frequently painted by others as a bloody-minded troublemaker.
Bishop Brendan Comiskey, in whose diocese Fortune got away with murder for so many years, declined to be interviewed for the book. Hardly surprising: he emerges as a weak man enslaved by his predilection for booze, fobbing off unconvincing letters to the abuse victims that contacted him, and generally paralysed by indecision, unwilling to rock the boat too much in his own diocese.
The opening chapters of the book paint a picture of Fortune as a sort of ecclesiastical Phileas Barnum, devoting most of his time to hare-brained schemes designed to part people from the contents of their wallets as quickly as possible.
At one point O Connor writes:
It seemed as if the church constantly needed work. A local businessman agreed to sponsor a new bell but was afterwards startled to see that the replacement was in fact the old one which had simply been repaired.
Fortune was not above resorting to other, more sinister methods of amassing hard cash.
"I remember a fella who broke his back, a young man in the prime of his life," says a local man. "He was paralysed after an accident. For months after that Fortune was saying masses for him at a fee. He promised he would get him to walk. There was another woman that he 'cured'; of course, she was dead not long after. It would sicken you to watch it."
There are many more such anecdotes in the book. Even before the abuse revelations came to light, Fortune had already divided his bailiwick squarely down the middle into pro- and anti- camps. The child abuse, the familiar ritual of the gifts and honeyed words escalating into the fondlings, the buggerings and finally the dark warnings to keep quiet, would not come to light until much later.
After leaving Wexford for Dublin, with a trail of unpaid bills behind him, Fortune was diversifying into other areas of expertise. When he ran journalism modules and programmes, charging students #1,000 for what amounted to thirty days of largely low-quality tuition and spoofery, he had enough overbearing charm to cajole well-known RTE types like presenter Theresa Lowe, newsreader Michael Murphy, presenter Sean Duignan and producer Bil Keating into involvement with the project.
Now is probably the best time for this writer to 'fess up to the small part he played in Father Sean Fortune's downfall. In March 1996, Craig Fitzsimons and I pieced together an investigation for hotpress into the quality of Fortune's media courses. The libel laws prevented us from mentioning the 60-plus charges of child sex abuse then hanging over him, but the sheer monstrousness of a showbiz priest charging massive sums of money for effectively worthless journalism "diplomas" made the story, we reckoned, strong enough in its own right.
As part of the investigation, Craig attended one of Fortune's courses, held at the Montrose Hotel in Dublin 4. What ensued was a grotesque eyewitness sketch, as the oleaginous priest grew ever more shifty and evasive in the face of Craig's questioning. The exchange is reproduced virtually in full in A Message From Heaven.
"What are your qualifications as a journalism expert?" [asked Craig]
"Well, I've none. I'm a priest, you see, it'd be a dual vocation."
"So you're not a member of the NUJ?"
"I'm not, no. No, no, no. I've actually a great respect for the NUJ. They're very good, very good, yes."
"If I'm not mistaken, Father, your diploma results are never below 95 per cent, and are frequently 100 per cent."
"That's not true, oh no, that's not true."
"So you deny that your diplomas are totally useless on the jobs market?"
"I do. I do deny that."
When the piece appeared, Fortune, true to form, responded by firing off a solicitor's letter to hotpress and by immediately running another ad in the Sunday Independent plugging yet more courses.
As a detailed sketch of one of the weirdest characters ever to mount a pulpit, A Message From Heaven is generally excellent. As a reference work, though, it has some noticeable flaws. There is no index, making it difficult to hunt for information on particular facets of this monstrous story, and, save for the cover shot, no photographs of Fortune. This is a shame, for plenty of pictures of him exist, such as the infamous snap of him ingratiating himself with Pope John Paul II at a ceremony in the Vatican in 1993.
That particular picture is also a rarity, in that Fortune is pictured in profile, enabling the viewer to glimpse his flint-like blue eyes behind his sunglasses. The priest wore shades at virtually all times, an old psychological trick to stop other people looking into his eyes.
O'Connor also makes no attempt to get inside the chaotic, Escher-like maze of Fortune's mind, instead preferring to let the bald facts of the psychiatric reports speak for themselves. This certainly helps the narrative in some ways, but also leaves certain holes in the patchwork of possible explanations of Fortune's mad behaviour. For example, the premature death (possibly a suicide) of his domineering mother is said to have "devastated" the then 22-year-old, but there is subsequently no exploration of this.
These shortcomings apart, A Message From Heaven is a clear-eyed study of the excesses and madnesses of an individual whose capacity for wreaking havoc was matched only by his relentless, prodigious energy.
"He was the greatest liar that I ever met," said Sean Cloney in the wake of the priest's death. "A horrible man. He had all the deadly sins except sloth."

A Message From Heaven: The Life And Crimes Of Father Sean Fortune is published by Brandon at #9.99.