MARY CONDREN Irish Times.
Church figures cannot be allowed blame abuse on those without “real” vocations
TO THIS day, I can still see my father’s face when the letter came from the Archbishop of Dublin in the early 1950s. A young married man with several children, a labourer in Guinness, he too had witnessed the crocodile walks of dozens of children in the inner city, accompanied by women, young and old, in starched French head dresses, long woolly habits and ill-fitting shoes, their faces drenched in the perspiration of hot summer days.
Heartbroken, incapable of Not Knowing, he and his companions decided to act: Santa Claus parcels and parties in the Mansion House at Christmas; trainloads of children out of Dublin on summer excursions to Gormanston; film shows and parties at special seasons – all of these punctuated my childhood. But it was never enough: nothing ever would have been. These were the tragic consequences of a society committed to Not Knowing.
Rivers of alcohol ran through O’Connell Street in the Christmas of those times: pools of misery flooded the orphanages and tenements. My father and his companions made the connections and proposed a solution. A Christmas crib would be erected at the base of Nelson’s Pillar. The Artane Boys’ Band would be invited to play throughout Christmas Week. Collections would be made. Basic comforts for the orphaned and those who cared for them would follow from the citizens of Dublin. He wrote to the archbishop requesting his blessing on this work. Citizens of Dublin? To the archbishop in those days only Protestants were citizens; the rest were, in his words, members of “my parish”.
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