Turbulent priest – Frank McNally on Fr Clarence Duffy and a religious rebellion in 1970s Cavan

Fifty years ago this week, there ended in Cavan a short-lived but bitter religious dispute that, at its height, revived a practice of the Penal Law era: the celebration of Mass outdoors, in defiance of authority, by a rebel priest.

The authority in this case, however, was the Catholic bishop of Kilmore. And in another twist on historic precedent, the focus of the rebellion was a former Protestant school, long used as a Catholic church until the diocese order it closed.

The bishop considered the building unsuitable and, in an era of falling vocations, a drain on scarce priests. But the people of Portlongfield, a remote townland on the Cavan-Leitrim border, had other ideas.

Unwilling to forgo their local place of worship in favour of a four-mile trek to the nearest alternative, Killeshandra, they were determined to keep the converted chapel open.

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So they approached the septuagenarian Fr Clarence Duffy – a native of Shercock in East Cavan, but radicalised by many years in America – who came out of semi-retirement to lead their rebellion.

With the interior of the church locked, he instead took to celebrating Mass against a gable wall outside, using a borrowed table for an altar and an improvised structure comprising what a local newspaper called “gun-barrel piping, overlaid with polythene normally used to protect silage” for a chapel.

The dispute made national headlines for a while. Despite pulpit warnings against attendance, a fund-raising “social” organised by the rebels was oversubscribed, with 200 people showing up, many more than expected.

In an attempt at conciliation, meanwhile, the diocese turned to another vestige of penal times: offering a series of occasional “station Masses”, hosted by the homes of selected parishioners, in lieu of a local church.

But the stand-off ended on February 5th, 1973, with a new bishop provisionally reopening the building at Portlongfield and celebrating a Mass of reconciliation there.

At which point, Fr Duffy returned to semi-retirement, while warning that he would hang around the area for a while in case the bishop reneged.

Even before the Portlongfield drama, to borrow a phrase from crime reporting, Fr Duffy was well known to the church authorities.

Educated in Salamanca, he had spent decades in the southwestern US where, working among the Hispanic poor and writing for the Catholic Worker newspaper, he became “a thorn in the side of the hierarchy and the state department”.

As explained in an interview with this newspaper in 1970, he returned to Ireland a believer in “Gaelic Christian Socialism”, agreeing with most of the politics of James Connolly and James Fintan Lalor.

But he was also critical of many Catholic Church doctrines, including the Ne Temere decree, which required that children of mixed marriages be raised as Catholics.

He thought many of Ireland’s problems, including the renewed Northern Troubles, were the result of “sectarian schools”, favouring a general separation of church and state, with a new constitution on which Northern Protestants would be consulted.

And he blamed what he saw as the Catholic Church’s regressive attitudes to women on “the Italian idea of sex”.

During the row over Portlongfield, he announced plans to set up “an ideal model parish”, which would include a “credit union, maternity guild, and health clinic”.

But the church question aside, he was also preoccupied with cross-border cooperation and with ideas that might peacefully end partition.

At one local meeting, attended by invited representatives from north and south, he proposed a nine-county autonomous Ulster, to be part of a federal Ireland within the British Commonwealth.

This was promptly rejected by a unionist delegate, who feared a nine-county parliament “would vote itself out of existence and into a 32-county Republic at the first opportunity”.

But in his desire for north-south co-operation on socialist principles, Fr Duffy was open to all political possibilities.

“You might even get Paisley in charge”, he warned, a prospect that did not worry him. The two had already met for talks: “We got on all right. I did not expect to convert him, but he is honest. The first thing he said to me was: ‘We will have no Christian unity.’”

After his brief spell of national notoriety via the church protest, Fr Duffy seems to have faded from the news, at least in Ireland.

If the Portlongfield dispute was permanently resolved, he told the Irish Press in 1973, his next move would be in Northern Ireland, encouraging “all the people of the Six Counties to return to being Christians”.

How far he got with that mission is unrecorded in newspaper archives. By the time he died in 1976, according to the Anglo-Celt, he was back in the US. He had spent what remained of retirement working with “youth training programmes, rehabilitation centres for alcoholics, and senior citizen co-operative colonies” in New Mexico.