JOHN BOYNE’S PORTRAYAL OF CATHOLICISM IN IRELAND

LIKE MANY NOVELISTS BEFORE HIM, JOHN BOYNE TOOK ON THE CHALLENGE OF CREATING A WELL-ROUNDED PRIEST CHARACTER

BY EAMON MAHER

Probably best known for his novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), which was made into a successful film, John Boyne has also written about the negative influence of Catholicism on his life from an early age. Being gay in an all-boys school, Terenure College, in the 1980s, the writer described how he was molested by a lay teacher (not the convicted paedophile John McClean, whose trial in 2021 brought to light his decades of abuse in the same school), after which he was left with “a complicated, unhealthy relationship towards sex that continues to this day”. In a hard-hitting Irish Times article published in November 2014, Boyne noted how he was drawn into the orbit of the Catholic Church when he became an altar boy and witnessed how superficial the faith of many of those attending church services was: “….[I]t was rare to find true believers. Everyone knew which priests offered the shortest Masses and the briefest sermons, and no one ever told the truth at confession.” Worse than that, however, was the marginalisation of homosexuals by a church that purported to be continuing the work of Christ: “It’s not easy to be a young, gay teenager and to be told that you’re sick, mentally disordered or in need of electroshock therapy, particularly when you hear it from someone who groped you on the way to class the day before.”

The points raised by Boyne are completely valid and capture the hurt experienced by many from the position of the Catholic Church in relation to homosexuality, which it has portrayed as deviant, “disordered”, unclean and sinful. Expressing anger at that position in a newspaper article is perfectly acceptable, but there are times when in his fictional portrayal of Catholicism, Boyne lacks the objectivity and impartiality that are hallmarks of good literature and tends to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, a ‘cardinal’ sin for a novelist, if you’ll excuse the pun.

CLERICALISM

A History of Loneliness was published in 2014 and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, which is an indication of the widespread critical acclaim it received. The novel recounts the career of a Fr Odhran Yates, a man who could scarcely be described as a monster. Rather, he is shown to be

someone who has lived in a clerical bubble for far too long, with the result that he fails to question his role as a Christian witness in society or the actions of his fellow priests. He is aware of the antipathy that exists towards men of the cloth when they are seen in public in the wake of the revelations surrounding clerical sex abuse: “To be among crowds while wearing my (Roman) collar could be a demoralising experience.” But the inability or refusal to confront the reality that one of his “You knew it, you kept it secret and this whole closest friends in Clonliffe conspiracy that everyone talks about, the one seminary, Tom Cardle, was that goes to the top of the Church, well it goes a paedophile ends up in the latter abusing Yates’ to the bottom of it too, to the nobodies like nephew, who will carry the you, to the fella that never even had a parish of scars of that horrific his own and hides away from the world, afraid to be spotted.” experience throughout his life. In his attempt to assuage the guilt he feels about this, Yates poses the following question: “And who, in 1980, ever had cause to distrust a priest?” The response is quite simple: it is incumbent on us all to be vigilant, especially when one has the type of knowledge of a person’s failings and leanings as Yates had of his fellow seminarian. But Yates was a product of clericalism and groupthink, someone who put the church’s reputation and his own standing as a priest on a pedestal: The fact is that I was a believer. I believed in God, in the Church, in the power of Christianity to

promote a better world. I believed that the priesthood was a noble calling, a profession filled by decent men who wanted to propagate kindness and charity. I believed that the Lord had chosen me for a reason. I didn’t have to search for this faith, it was simply a part of me. And it would never change.

DISILLUSIONMENT

But change it did, and not for the better. Moved from the comfortable leafy suburbs of Terenure College to work in a parish, Fr Yates begins to despair about what the future might hold for him and his fellow priests. The ‘noble calling’ which had inspired his initial vocation slowly gave way to disillusionment, as he began to see that there was a disconnect between his vision of church and the lived reality for many people, including priests. As a young boy he was marked by the abuse he endured at the hands of a priest who had been invited into the house by Yates’ mother, worried that the attraction he was feeling for a young girl in the neighbourhood might pose a threat to his vocation. Although he unsuccessfully struggled to erase the abuse from his memory, it regularly came back to haunt him: “There he was; he was standing next to me now, his foul breath in my ear, his arm around my shoulder, pulling me to him, his hands tugging at my pants, reaching inside. I pressed my hands against my ears. He was there. He was all over me.”

The powerlessness he felt in terms of revealing this exploitation to anyone – his pious mother in all likelihood would not have believed him, nor would the police or any others he may have approached – is matched by Odhran’s failure to share his suspicions about Tom Cardle’s proclivities. Strangely, he goes to collect him when Cardle is released from prison after serving his sentence for child abuse.

Cardle blames the training in Clonliffe for imbuing in him a feeling of unworthiness: “They told me everything that made me human was shameful and dirty,” he says in an attempt to exculpate himself. It’s clear that he is unrepentant and far from grateful to his ‘friend’ for the support he is offering him. He even goes so far as to accuse Odhran of imperilling his nephew by allowing Cardle to stay in his sister’s house the night of their mother’s funeral, thus allowing him access to the unsuspecting boy. He continues:

“You knew it, you kept it secret and this whole conspiracy that everyone talks about, the one that goes to the top of the Church, well it goes to the bottom of it too, to the nobodies like you, to the fella that never even had a parish of his own and hides away from the world, afraid to be spotted. You can blame me all you like, Odhran, and you’d be right to, because I’ve done some terrible things in my life. But do you ever think of taking a good look at yourself? At your own actions? At the Grand Silence that you’ve maintained from the very first day?”

These lines are closer to a public pronouncement on the part of the novelist than a realistic exchange between the two priests. For that reason, I would lean towards the view expressed by Fr Martin Boland in The Irish Times (November 14, 2015), who began his critique of A History of Loneliness with the following warning:

Please pray for the novelist who attempts to create a priest character. He needs our prayers if he is to avoid resorting to hackneyed stereotypes of pantomime villain caricatures. The challenge, strewn with traps and pitfalls, is to portray a truly convincing priest, a man who lives out a deep interior reality.

‘THE GENUINE PRIEST’

Priest characters offer great possibilities for the novelist in terms of the potential drama provided by their struggle with tortured souls and their own quest for salvation (authors such as Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene and Edwin O’Connor immediately spring to mind in this context). However, there is also the danger of falling into the trap of hagiography or demonisation. To do the subject justice requires a full understanding of the clerical function and all that it entails. According to Boland, Boyne’s Fr Yates is never allowed to mature into a fully rounded person: “As a priest character, he is spiritually stunted. There is no sense that this man has a vocation, that he is a priest who, in all his human frailty, is nevertheless sustained by the imperceptible movements of grace.”

While part of me accepts this evaluation, I also believe that Boyne was actually sincere in saying that his desire was to write a novel about “the other priest, the genuine priest, the one who has given his life over to good works and finds himself betrayed by the institution to which he has given everything.” I wonder how many priests ministering in Ireland today experience the “imperceptible moments of grace” spoken of by Boland. It is possible that Boland’s own clerical status impinges on his impartiality in this regard. After all, it would take a novelist of the stature of Bernanos or Greene to put into the world flawed priests who accede to those moments of deep spiritual revelation that can turn them into saints.

For Boland, Yates is ‘Godless’, whereas for Boyne he is a victim of the institutional church to which he has given his life. For me, the answer lies between these two positions. Yates too often becomes a vehicle for the novelist to pronounce on issues that are close to his heart (most particularly clerical sex abuse and the gross mishandling of same by the Catholic hierarchy), but the absence of any real inner life or empathy for his fellow human beings renders Boyne’s character largely uninteresting, and somewhat stilted at times. Whereas the subject matter of A History of Loneliness contains within it the germ of a very worthwhile novel, on balance it falls somewhat short of the task it sets itself. Notwithstanding, it is still a most interesting and readable book.

Eamon Maher’s latest book, co-edited with Eugene O’Brien, is Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, published by Peter Lang.

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