I LIKE priests. It may not be fashionable to say so, but an unusually high proportion of the most admirable and memorable people I have met in my life have been members of the often derided caste of "holy men".
In the 1970s, when I was a young journalist in Central America, they were the Spanish Jesuits of El Salvador, notably Rogelio Pedras - a brilliant and kindly guide to the horrors and wonders of that beautiful, tragic little country - and Ignacio Ellacuria, the university head gunned down by the goons of its US-backed military regime.
In the 1980s in Northern Ireland, they were the leaders of the visionary Corrymeela Community, the Presbyterian ministers Ray Davey and John Morrow; the former Presbyterian moderator, John Dunlop, and Methodist president, Eric Gallagher, men of straight words and deep wisdom; William Arlow, the lonely voice of peacemaking in the Church of Ireland; and, before his just anger at the way his people in Ballymurphy were being treated drove him into the isolation of extremism, Des Wilson.
Parallel currents
In the 1990s, as the Irish Catholic Church in particular was driven onto the rocks of scandal and inability to cope with the contemporary world, I met and spent long days and nights talking with many inspirational priests. There was Austin Flannery, a towering figure on the "left' of the Church (it is interesting how those two great parallel currents of human striving, socialism and Christianity, have become similarly discredited in the land of the Celtic Tiger), Kevin Hegarty, Enda McDonagh, Bernard Treacy, Walter Forde, Tony King, John Kirby, Peter Meldon, Dermot Lane, John Dardis, Gabriel Daly, Tom Stack, Gordon Linney, Richard Clarke - I could go on and on. I have written elsewhere of my admiration - despite our many disagreements - for Cardinal Cahal Daly.
I think I liked these men because in a crazy, fast-moving, post-modernist world, obsessed with money and technology, it was a deep pleasure to sit down with them to discuss philosophical, political and spiritual questions. What happens to God in a world of religious indifference? What happens to Christianity in a country which has always prided itself on its spirituality when the rampant wealth and materialism of Western capitalism comes to stay? What happens to social justice after the great ideological dead-end of Marxism, for which so many idealistic people fought and died? What happens to Irish Catholicism when the dead hand of 19th-century authoritarianism has no more to offer an educated nation? What happens to Irish Protestantism when it becomes known throughout the world as the cradle of bigotry and sectarianism?
These are the kind of subjects this Unitarian journalist enjoyed thrashing out with the men in collars, often over a meal or numerous late-night whiskeys. A serious debate about the struggle of the human spirit is hard enough to come by in these superficial days; God knows, outside the occasional column in this august organ, you rarely get it from the media.
Working abroad
Such thoughts were provoked by reading a recently published novel by a priest. When the Acacia Bird Sings (Columba Press, £6.99) is by James O'Halloran, a Salesian who has spent 30 years working abroad, much of it in Africa and South America, with lengthy periods in Swaziland and Ecuador.
As a novel it will never win the Booker Prize. But where it succeeds is as a moving story of the triumph of the human spirit over appalling odds - in this case the journey of a Mozambican woman and her family, fleeing bloody civil war across the vast and inhospitable wilderness of Kruger Park, in search of her tribe in neighbouring South Africa. The book is dedicated to "refugees everywhere".
It tells of danger and suffering which we in the well-insulated comfort of middle-class Ireland can only conceive of as the stuff of nightmares. In Africa such a trek as this - a homeless, refugee family fleeing terror and starvation - is the lot of tens of millions of people. Only last month I watched a televised Anglican service in southern Sudan, after which Bishop Harold Miller talked to a smiling elderly woman who had just walked with her five children 160 miles through the bush and across the desert, virtually without food, after a break in that country's civil war had allowed her to return home.
Father O'Halloran's bestknown books are about basic Christian communities, Brazil's great gift to the Catholic Church, with their emphasis on the need for the Church to take up the cause of social justice and the "option for the poor" in the face of Latin America's deep injustices and obscene gaps between rich and poor.
Dissenting voices
During the vicious military dictatorships of the 1970s, these basic Christian communities were often the only forum for dissenting voices, and as a result the Church wielded great influence. In these more democratic times, there are other avenues of protest, and the lessons learned and taught by the radical Christians of Latin America are in danger of being forgotten (as indeed, is the whole continent, judging by how little interest there is in it from the European media).
This is why we need widely travelled priest-writers like Jim O'Halloran: to disturb our smugness, prick our consciences and force us into guilty action to help those less fortunate than the citizens of the world's 20th richest country. Long may he and his kind flourish.