The inner life of the alienated Catholic intellectual is something else again. Take the late Monsignor de Brun of Maynooth College, a Limerick man, you might say, who may never have set foot in the place.
I ve just come across snatches from an unpublished poem of the Monsignor s, and it tells me more than any official history about the turmoil and tension which characterised life in Maynooth just a generation ago, and helped shape the minds of the men who control Catholicism in Ireland today.
The piece was written in the late 50s or early 60s and comprises 26 verses, each offering an observation on one of the 26 Irish bishops of the time.
Past pupils testify that de Brun was brilliant, moody and, in the right company, startlingly outspoken. Like all teachers of Catholic doctrine, he had taken the oath against modernism the belief in a scientific method of intellectual investigation declared anathema by Pius IX. Nevertheless, all who knew him say that he was decidedly in the modernist camp.
The fact that he could treat the defining oath of Church orthodoxy at the time as an empty formula gives some indication of the depth of de Brun s disillusion with the institutional Church and its approved doctrine. There is some reason to believe that in his heart he was agnostic.
He was regarded by the college authorities and the hierarchy with wary suspicion. However, they were reluctant to move against him. The reticence wasn t based on respect for his intelligence and learning, but on reverence for the fact that he was gentry from one of the landed families whose presence in Ireland pre-dated the Elizabethean settlement and who had held fast to Catholicism through the Reformation. That is, he was an Old Catholic .
Despite his apparent eccentricity, de Brun may have been a more representative figure than is apparent on first inspection. Anyone who attended a Catholic diocesan college in the period will have known priests of quiet, daunting mien, who ever had the air of the outsider about them. They d walk the grounds silently engrossed in a book, and were frequently full of sighs. Perhaps they drank in secret.
All, including other priests, were in awe of them, but everybody knew they d never be promoted to college president or become a bishop. If you got to know them, they d want to talk politics, or about a recent movie, or about some row that had broken out concerning the Kennedys.
Perhaps they had been put towards the priesthood and had discovered all avenues of escape cut off by the time they realised how empty was the life that stretched before them.
The piece of verse of de Brun s which I have in mind was called The Congress Of The Potentates. Over the years, it has been much more talked about than quoted from. As far as I know, it s never been published. It s not certain De Brun ever wrote it down. But from time to time he d recite selections from the 26 stanzas, each in the style of a Limerick, to certain groups of students. There were other students in whose presence he never let a line pass his lips.
Whimsically patterned after Irish epics like The Parliament Of Clann Thomais, the poem depicts each bishop speaking in turn at an assembly at Maynooth. The bishops are given nicknames or identified by reference to particular characteristics. The priest friend who recited these two stanzas to me recalls them in particular because he retains in his mind s eye a vivid picture of de Brun declaiming the words while watching through a window with a small cluster of students as the two featured bishops strolled in the grounds of Maynooth.
The late bishop of Galway, Michael Browne, is the hairy mahout , while Dublin archbishop John Charles McQuaid is the King of Siam .
Then up spake the hairy mahout:
What s all this pother about?
You may think it odd of me,
But I prefer sodomy.
Cries of Shame , Kick his arse , Throw him out !
Then upspake the King of Siam:
For fucking I don t give a damn.
I find my joy
In the arse of a boy.
You may call me a bugger: I am!
These are the words of a man who regarded the intellectual basis and norms of the institution he was trapped in with bitter derision. His evident relish for the ribaldry of the language suggests deep frustration with the waxen solemnity around him. The hearty obscenity of his references to gay sex and paedophilia directly contradicts the prim evasions which men like Browne and McQuaid would publicly have resorted to in real life.
Intriguing stuff, to say the least of it, and surely telling about the intellectual life of the Church, and of the internal build-up of elemental pressure towards the tail-end of its era of seemingly untroubled supremacy.
If there s anybody out there who can supply further fragments of The Congress Of Potentates, get in touch. Publication and anonymity guaranteed. n