Father Michael Sweetman SJ [2] His Story

Dublin Housing Action Committee Vs Gardai c 1968

This is a follow up to my article "Father Michael Sweetman SJ - declining to Baptise the Spirit of the Age"

Father Sweetman, Dad and the Dublin Housing Action Committee

During the early 1960s my father was a Garda Sergeant and Inspector based in Store Street Garda Station near Dublin City Centre. It was a period of agitation and protests and my father told me about a couple of baton charges that he led to clear the streets. At some stage he also mentioned the Dublin Housing Action Committee   - probably in connection with its links to Sinn Fein. At some stage I also realised that Fr Michael Sweetman had been a prominent member of the DHAC. After both had died (my father in 1994 and Fr Sweetman 2 years later) I put two and two together and jokingly told people (including  a local historian) that my father might have baton-charged Father Sweetman. I never actually believed that, because I understood that it would have made the headlines. BUT I certainly thought that my father had baton-charged the DHAC! In fact I see from the Wikipedia article that the group was set up by Sinn Fein in May 1967 - by which time Dad had been promoted to Garda Superintendent and transferred to County Clare. A nice illustration of the fallibility of human memory and the way we construct stories in order to make sense of our lives - or just to make events appear more dramatic than they actually were! 

[ Dad also told me about a struggle with a Sinn Fein member when he was Garda Inspector and policing a meeting outside the GPO c1964. The SF guy grabbed Dad's cane and tried to break it over his knee BUT it was a presentation stick made of walnut and wouldn't break! This may have contributed to my false memory regarding the DHAC ] 

According to a file made public by the National Archives in 2000,  Department of Justice mandarins viewed the Dublin Housing Action Committee as "an IRA offshoot"  Judging by the list of prominent members given in the Wikipedia article on DHAC, this judgement seems to be more or less correct. Secretary Dennis Dennehy was a member of the Irish Communist Organisation; Sean Mac Stiofain joined "Provisional" Sinn Fein after its 1970 split; Sean O'Cionnaith, Mairin de Burca and Prionsias de Rossa joined the Official Sinn Fein faction and the latter later broke away to form Democratic Left; Michael O'Riordan was founder of the Communist Party of Ireland - one of the smallest and also one of the most Stalinist in Europe! However much these people disagreed among themselves, their  bigotry and extremism remained constant. (Members of the relatively "moderate" Democratic Left brought down the Irish Government in 1994 by peddling fantasies about a supposed conspiracy between a Cardinal and a Catholic Attorney General to protect a paedophile priest.)

The decency and desire for social justice exhibited by Fr Sweetman and his Dominican colleague Fr Austin Flannery were exploited by people whose hatred of the existing social order far exceeded their concern for human rights.  To the accusation of being a communist, [Fr Flannery] would retort that sitting down with Michael O'Riordan no more made him a communist than sitting down with Michael Sweetman made him a Jesuit. I think they were both wrong on this issue, but I honour their memory in any event!

THE LIFE OF FATHER MICHAEL J SWEETMAN SJ

The main part of what follows is an article by Father Sweetman on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the launching of the Jesuit Quarterly Review Studies in 1912. Fr Sweetman himself was born in 1914 and so observes "I am almost the same age as Studies and so should be in a good position to write of our three-quarter century.". I preface his article with the Irish Times obituary dated 24 October 1996. Fr Sweetman was born the year the Great War broke out, joined the Jesuits in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power in Germany and was ordained a priest in 1945 the year World War 2 ended. He died in 1996 a few months after my mother and two years after my father so I lost a lot around that time, but I was 46 myself. 

I have highlighted in blue some striking passages from Fr Sweetman's article and undoubtedly the most relevant to this Blog is the following where he compares his own educational experiences with those of boys who were committed to Industrial Schools:
As a boy I experienced boarding school in Mount St. Benedict's, Gorey, and Clongowes Wood College. Later, as a priest, I had many contacts with boys who were in Daingean Reformatory or one of the Industrial Schools. When I described some of my experiences, and they turned out to be quite similar to theirs, I remember the astonishment with which they would say: 'And you paid to go there!' 

Another passage seems more innocuous but it bears comparison with former President Mary McAleese's thuggish comments on Catholic traditionalists - and her latest diatribe against Pope John Paul II:
Conservative people, and I do not use this term in a belittling sense, tended in the last couple of generations to lose creativity and seemed to think it enough to pass on the faith and its practice in exactly the same form as they had received it.

Father Sweetman was a bridge - between various social classes, generations and religious traditions. He has few successors in today's world!

(A) Irish Times Obituary of Fr Michael Sweetman (24 October 1996)

Social reformer Father Michael Sweetman dies at 82
  
The death has occurred of the Rev Michael Joseph Sweetman S.J.

Father Sweetman, who was 82, was prominently associated with social reform and the concept of a "just society". He was a member of the Dublin Housing Aid Society and CARE and wrote many articles on social and moral problems. His main ambition, he once said, was to see bad housing conditions eliminated.

He was born in Dublin on March 20th, 1914, and was the seventh child of Roger M. Sweetman , a member of the first Dail, and Katherine Sweetman. He was educated at Mount St. Benedict's, Gorey, Co Wexford, at Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare, and at University College, Dublin. He studied philosophy and theology at Milltown Park, Dublin.

He joined the Jesuits in 1931 and was ordained a priest in 1945.

Father Sweetman did pastoral and social work up to 1972 and was the prime mover behind the establishment of the Los Angeles Homes, which were set up to house homeless boys. He also gave readily of his time to delinquent boys, often giving them legal advice and helping them with their financial problems.

He lived for a number of years in Dublin's inner city, where he operated an "open house" policy for anybody who needed help, and he also worked in Ballymun's Centre for Faith and Justice.

Father Sweetman was identified with the liberal wing of the Catholic Church and made many pronouncements on controversial issues of the day. He consistently rejected the hierarchical view that the use of contraception was against natural law.

He also argued that many of the problems affecting the disadvantaged were economic as well as religious or moral. He was, on more than one occasion, described as a priest who was "ahead of his time".

(B) A Personal Experience of Christianity: 1912-1987 Michael Sweetman, S.J. 

Michael Sweetman works in a deprived area of Dublin 
Source: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 75, No. 300 (Winter, 1986)

I am almost the same age as Studies, and so should be in a good position to write of our three-quarter century. But it must be admitted that for the first' twenty years of its existence we were not aware of each other. After that I have been a fairly consistent reader. I certainly have changed a great deal during that period of rapid change. Usually I have zigzaged along merrily with the trends of the time, occasionally anticipating them, usually lagging far behind. A few times I have gone into sharp reverse, now and again I seem to have come full circle, and I have taken, also, an odd excursion down unapproved roads, where, I must say the view of the surrounding country was quite exciting. It is, I suppose, inevitable that in old age one discovers the truth of the cliche that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Religion 

Yet some of the changes I have experienced are substantial, most of all in the area where I should be competent-  religion. I have been a Jesuit for fifty-five years and a priest for forty-one. The main purpose of religion is to guide and change life - one's own and other people's, in accordance with what you believe God to want. The full and perfect life is to find and do the will of God. The drive of religion, then, is to produce whole or holy people. It is precisely in the concept or image of the holy person, and specifically the Christian holy person or saint, that some of the greatest changes have taken place. The ideal most common among Christians when I was young was of a loving and totally unselfish person. This, I take it, remains the ultimate desideratum. But the qualities that implied and the methods by which it is to be attained have changed quite radically. While courage, sincerity and service were always held in high esteem, in the beginning of the century they were conceived of rather negatively: the perfect man, the saint, did not enjoy himself much, denied himself totally, was detached and passionless. He acted from supernatural motives and was hard on, if not contemptuous of, the flesh. This was true of her as well as him! Physical asceticism was much admired, and practised. Even when it was not fully achieved and only spasmodically acknowledged, the ascetic ideal at least produced its own peculiar brand of all-pervasive guilt. Conformity to a pre-conceived model was important, and dumb obedience to Ecclesiastical Authority advisable. The will of God was handed down along clear and rigid lines; adherence to this will was the essence of perfection. Some great-hearted and original men and women reached effective Christian perfection within these confines, or burst out of them with such unmistakable Spirit that no one could catch them; but lesser spirits were cramped and even warped by restriction and narrowness. 

The effort in the earlier years was to find God through strictly religious ways; later people seem to need to find Him in all things, everywhere. Staunch efforts were made to break through into the supernatural world; we extended ourselves, pushed ourselves, drove ourselves onward. The present tendency relies much more on being discovered by God, on starting from where we are, in our bodies, and looking inward rather than upward for direction.

Conservative people, and I do not use this term in a belittling sense, tended in the last couple of generations to lose creativity and seemed to think it enough to pass on the faith and its practice in exactly the same form as they had received it. There was a danger of dead formalism. This was inclined to put the next generation completely off. So they rejected everything, without giving consideration to the possibility of putting fresh life into the old substance. At worst the old forms were imposed in an authoritarian way, or worse still, perhaps, presented in an unconvinced and diffident way. 

Clergy 

There has been a deep and remarkable change in clerical style. It was an avowed'aim in former times to mould and produce a clerical type. Suitability for the vocation to priestly or religious life was essentially dependent on ability to conform, or at least to appear to conform, to a pre-ordained model. There is now much more respect for the freedom of the Spirit to blow where it wills. Within limits, there is tolerance for the unexpected, and room is allowed for making mistakes. Of course even in the old days genius did break out, and eccentricity established itself, but the hope remained that it would be eliminated in the next generation. This hope still holds; but the criteria of eccentricity have changed. 

Clergy felt bound to conform to certain standards of speech decorum, dress etc... and were expected by most of the laity to conform. This naturally led to a vein of hypocrisy on the one hand, and the elevating of people on to pedestals on the other. All this has largely gone, together with the top hats and frock coats. The humanity of the clergy is readily, admitted now; the wish to be superior, or even different, has been abandoned by many clergy. 

The only disadvantage I see in this change is that clergy may appear now to have nothing special to offer, because they demand nothing exceptional of themselves. Formerly priests and religious of both sexes were easily considered extraordinary, because they led such different lives. They got up at 5.30 a.m., meditated, observed silence, fasted and undertook ascetic exercises. They were witnesses to an ideal for which they were seen to be willing to sacrifice much else. Jean Genet admired St. Vincent de Paul for identifying himself with the galley slaves, the scum of that time: but he pushed it a bit far by saying: 'if he wanted really to be one of us, he should have committed our crimes. The modern religious person is more ready to admit that he or she does commit the crimes as well. But then where are we? All in the same boat? Who is to do the saving? A mystic might answer to that: well, Christ truly identified himself with sinners, and may still be willing to enter into the sleazy lives and the perverted sufferings of the down-trodden, more so than we give him credit for. Modern holy men and women are ready to risk getting muddied and having' their fingers burned, and yet hope that Christ will be with them through it all. 

Certainly it is no longer considered acceptable to edify people by putting on, or keeping up, a show. Personally I have a far deeper understanding now than I had in my more conventional phase, of what Christ really meant when he said that the harlots and sinners would go into the Kingdom of Heaven before the Pharisees and approved people of his time. I have, I think, recognized in some of them the special qualities that always merited His warmest commendation: impulsive generosity and humility. Religious persons are, necessarily, often in a dilemma, caught between the desire not to think themselves better, or be thought better than others, and yet to fulfil the injunction to be a light to the world, and salt to the earth. They may have to set a standard which puts people on edge. They are a challenge in non-Christian places. Perhaps they have become afraid of being an affront to the style accepted as normal in much of the Western world, and so they become counter signs to people who do not worship at the shrines of the idols of that world. With a bit of a groan we may have to admit to the wisdom of St. Thomas More in Utopia when he said 'Priests shall be of exceeding holiness, and therefore very few'. 

Missions

 I came to manhood in the papacy of Pius XI, the pope of the Missions, and was affected very much by the missionary urge. This was-to spread the faith, essential to the eternal salvation of souls. There was unquestioned confidence that this preaching would confer undiluted benefits on the converted people. Given a wise evangelization I still have no doubt about those benefits. Even in the days of more naive faith there was always a caring, healing aspect to the ideals of the missionaries. What we have gained now is a vastly increased respect for the cultures, customs and beliefs of other peoples and a more realistic skepticism about the advantages of bringing European civilization to 'primitive' cultures. The motivation involved in the belief that you would be removing the danger, or indeed the certainty, of eternal damnation from the people who were unbaptized, has gone. This has lessened the urgency, and so vocations have decieased. But I see now an equally urgent love taking shape in the mute demand that we save people from starvation, exile, exploitation and degradation or rather help them to save themselves. In this respect hell has shifted its base in time and space; vocations will perhaps begin to increase again. 

Readiness. to lay down one's life in the cause is undoubtedly at the heart of our faith. But readiness to lay down one's life so that `our side' may be victorious, because we are right and everyone else is wrong may too easily slip into readiness to kill for the cause, to repress, censor and persecute. The logic is that error has no rights. But we all surely know by now that totally logical people are always mad and usually dangerous. 

Morality, Sexuality

 In the cognate area of morality there have been two shifts of emphasis which I think have been towards the truth, but with attendant snags. In the first half of this century, and for several previous ones, it was commonly taught in seminaries, and so became the accepted doctrine in the Church, that every slightest indulgence in sexual activity, even in thought or phantasy, outside of a married relationship, was gravely wrong, and needed to be confessed before receiving the Eucharist. In the early sixties, conviction as to the tenability of this doctrine weakened,. was undermined and collapsed.

Looking back on it, it seems to me now that the fatal flaw in the teaching was the emphasis on pleasure as being the criterion of evil. The question 'did you take pleasure in it?' was seen as vital. It was a false criterion and infected the whole teaching. A period ensued which showed a great reluctance on the part of many counsellors and advisers to give any direction at all and so, it seems to me, there is too little guidance given now as to the harm that can be done to others by casually selfish, violent, deceptive and cynical exploitation of the sexual urge. The baby went out with the bath water. Pleasure became the sole criterion in many cases as to the desirability of any performance. A not altogether desirable volte-face. In literature, it might be noted, with the absence of ultimates in belief and sanctions, a good deal of the tension went out of the Catholic novel. I wonder to what extent Mauriac and Graham Greene are capable of being appreciated by the modern youth. 

Social Justice 

In matters of justice the older tradition spent almost all its time and expertise in teasing out the ways in which the Haves might be wronged, mostly by the Have Nots, and how they could succeed in getting restitution. It was acknowledged, in small print, that in extreme necessity everyone had a right to take what was required. When this principle was invoked and acted upon in the housing agitation of the late sixties some astonishment was expressed. Now justice is seen largely as the right of everyone to a decent human life. It takes no great perspicacity to see that the great idol worshipped as alternative to God is Mammon. 

The Church in its official documents has sharply and scientifically criticized and analysed this worship; but the one teaching that 'got across' universally in our country was that communism was the great enemy of the Christian ideal of social justice. Similarly in the area of sexual morality the one teaching that was universally known, even if not always accepted, was the 'evil' of contraception. Why some teachings are so successfully put across and others so ineffectively, is a mystery worth investigating. I have been impressed recently with the conviction expressed by some Catholics involved in the world of business and high finance, that their world is, as far as the influence of Christian principles goes, missionary territory. It is untouched, virginal in the worst sense of the word. 

Sacred Scripture 

A vital change in Christian understanding of its sources, and therefore of its ideal, came from the abandonment of a literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. It was really no fault of anyone that I grew up in an era which taught that the world was created about 4,000 years before Christ or at least that Adam and Eve lived and committed their happy fault around that period. In the atmosphere of the time one could take that. But I remember as a university student setting out to read the Bible through. When I came to some of the so-called historical books and read the stories which, then, one was expected to accept literally, I closed the book and said to myself ;This is too much for me, and decided to wait until I did theology to make up my mind what to do. Fortunately by that time a wiser and deeper attitude prevailed, after the publication of the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1949. 

While the strain on one's credulity was eased, the rapid development in Scriptural scholarship did not always help toward a convinced practice; everything seemed open to various interpretations. Of course crude instinct told one to be wary of following every latest theory as if it were the last word. Also one came to realise that no belief could be so eccentric and disastrous that it could not find some semblance of backing in Scripture. So that even in being guided by the Holy Book one needed large draughts of the Holy Spirit (St. Paul does speak somewhere of drinking the Holy Spirit). 

One influence seems to have disappeared as a result of biblical scholarship and that is the great lives of Jesus Christ. They had a huge influence on me and I'm sure on many thousands of others: Grandmaison, Prat, Lebreton, Lagrange, Guardini, Goodier, etc. I read them all; and without ever claiming expertise in scripture, I'm sure they gave me a great basic understanding of the Gospels, and helped life to become Christ-centred. Devotion to the Sacred Heart also helped in that. 

The Laity 

In recent orgies of self-criticism clerics are inclined to blame themselves for their supposed domination of the laity in the past. This coming era is foretold as the era of the Laity, so this is a serious self-accusation. There is one important area where they did not dominate, that was in the literary field. Here the men and women of influence were, if not predominantly lay, certainly noticeably so. The present laity are not so prominent here. Think of Chesterton and Belloc, Sheed and Ward, O'Rahilly, Maritain, Guitton, Mauriac, D. Day; also C.S. Lewis, Allison-Peers, and Chambers who were not Roman Catholics, S. Undset and the Russian novelists. The list could be endless. These were all hugely effective apologists and exposers of the Christian thing (as Belloc might have described it). 

Bishops were externally deferred to, but, with exceptions they did not make a notable contribution to the witness of living faith. Their frequent denunciations and deploring of modern trends was often seen as ridiculous and impotent. Skirts rose and fell in length, quite impervious to annual comments in Lenten Pastorals. Rome itself often seemed finicky and petty, concerned with the rubrics in liturgy and life rather than with the substance. The obligation of clerical celibacy was child's play compared to the obligation of saying the Divine Office and performing the liturgy without serious fault The professional anti-clericals developed their own rigid dogmas, their own predictable cliches and conventions, and produced, surely by artificial insemination, their own smug and closed establishment. 

Sociology 

One of the social changes that I have noticed through contact with many admirable social workers and theorists is the presumption that the care of the deprived, the sick, the old, and all the disadvantaged, should be undertaken on ,principle, and by preference, by the State, rather than by individuals and groups of inspired people. The defects of this latter system, which largely held until the coming of the Welfare State, are seen to be that the poor receive benefits out of charity from those who think themselves superior, and not out of justice and of right. This was rightly seen as humiliating to the recipient, and ego-inflationary to the donor. 

That is a good reason for the shift. But it should be noted that the system more in vogue now has its own glaring defects. Recipients of their rights from the State have usually to find their way through a bewildering entanglement of red tape, and are quite often the victims of arbitrary prejudices and caprice on the part of minor officials in the bureaucracy. There is no clear reason why individual kindness and care should degenerate into condescending `charity'; nor that the dispensing of civil and human rights to people by the State should invariably involve prolonged investigation and circular passing of the buck. Here in Ireland, where no ideology is completely dominant, there remains the hope that a fair balance between voluntary and statutory aid could be maintained; and the arrogance of the professional expert and the smugness of the voluntary do-gooder could both be kept in check.

New Classes 

It was pointed out to me for the first time, by Garret FitzGerald at the Kilkenny Conference on Poverty in 1972, that when the poor cease to be the majority in a democratic society by that very fact they lose political clout. That has happened during the life time of Studies. The fundamental class division is no longer between workers and bosses, the former being usually poorly paid and more or less exploited, but still a majority in the nation, but between all who have a secure, earned income, and those who are unemployed and dependent on welfare. These are now a minority, though unfortunately a large one, and so lack clout in our society. 

Education 

Here inequality, or variety, remains. As a boy I experienced boarding school in Mount St. Benedict's, Gorey, and Clongowes Wood College. Later, as a priest, I had many contacts with boys who were in Daingean Reformatory or one of the Industrial Schools. When I described some of my experiences, and they turned out to be quite similar to theirs, I remember the astonishment with which they would say: 'And you paid to go there!' Schools of all kinds were places, largely, of authoritarian attempts to impose, or even beat, knowledge into unwilling heads, and to teach manners to wayward or resistant bodies and hearts. Now schools seem to be predominantly places of co-operation and a good deal of happiness, where, if a child is badly treated, it is usually by his or her peers and not by the teachers. This seems to me to be a development along the lines of truly Christ like respect for children and away from the Biblical, Old Testament, theory of 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. 

Hopes for the Future 

When asked would I not write reminiscences, I have said that I would entitle them 'Between Two Stools'. I feel very conscious of not being single-minded, yet not exactly indecisive. I waver constantly between desiring to be fully where I am, and hankering for another seat. If I am slightly schizophrenic that, I flatter myself, keeps me more or less sane. In this present context I sometimes hanker after the certainties and fears of the 30s, relishing the drama of the absolutes, but I am in fact far more happy with the vaguer ideals of the 80s and the wider liberties. 

What then are the peculiar hopes that I would have for Ireland in the 90s Certainly I would like to see a vast increase of the influence of the Green People. Not, obviously, in the sense of super-nationalism but in respect for nature and the environment of all our people. That way lies health and happiness and an atmosphere favourable to belief in God, in ourselves and in everything beautiful. This would. require a curb to be put on the worship of money, for it is violent greed that is nearly always responsible for the threats to the environment and even to the very existence of mankind. The people I would like to see in charge of the preservation and development of the natural beauty of our country would be the Parks Department of the Dublin Corporation I have waited all these years to pay tribute to their consistent good taste, imagination and organized hard work. 

Two groups I think need special care. I would be happy to see our authorities and residents' associations listening to and co-operating with the Travellers, to see that they are given a chance of a decent human life. Equally important is the treatment of deprived and disturbed young people. Faith might well be shown in the wisdom of two reports: The Task Force Report on Child Welfare, and the Whitaker Report on Prisons. 

Finally I would be glad to see an increase in respect for and confidence in people in public life of proven integrity and compassion and less readiness to be impressed by the chancer and the glib manipulator. 

BUT FATHER SWEETMAN THE SNOB? (1949)

This is the beginning of an article in the Jesuit publication "The Irish Monthly" March 1949. Fr Sweetman is somewhat annoyed with the less than spiritual behavior of visitors to the monastic ruins of Glendalough in the Wicklow mountains south of Dublin. It was founded by St Kevin in the 6th century and its Abbot at the time of the Norman Conquest (1169) was St Laurence O'Toole who was also the first Irish Archbishop of Dublin. His predecessors had been Norseman or English and St Laurence was a somewhat premature symbol of the union of Irish, Norman and indeed European culture. In 1949 Fr Sweetman was a very highly educated young Jesuit and perhaps a bit snobbish about the religious practices of the laity. He was to become a symbol of union - between different social classes - himself but his hopes for the future proved to be vain. Perhaps like St Laurence O'Toole, his hopes will bear fruit at some time in the future!


 Why Go To Glendalough? by Michael Sweetman, SJ. (March 1949)

THIS valley must surely be a place of pilgrimage; it is the spiritual home of Dublin's Patrons, Saints Kevin and Laurence, receptacle of their sacrifices, engraved with the seven symbols  of their love. Certainly the crowds are here, see them streaming  down the road this Sunday, Feast of Kevin, in June, a long progression of buses, cars and cyclists. Then they take to the boats, cross the lake and climb precariously to the little hole in the cliff?  St. Kevin's Bed. Is this an ancient ritual to honour the Saint? Do  they pray there? Well, perhaps under cover of the " three wishes "  you are told to have while crouching in the narrow smooth-rocked  cave, some romantic boy or girl may ask for victory or vocation, to  be a Saint like Kevin or to die a martyr for Ireland and the Faith. Maybe. All that appears is vulgarity, very close to mockery. No,  even to-day no one is thinking of Kevin; even on this one day you  will not hear the solemn intonation of the Rosary wafted from the  boats gliding quietly across the lake in the evening; nor will you find  any of the Seven Churches filled with worshippers to honour his  work or seeking inspiration in his memory.


To-day, like every other day of the tourist season, there is a kind  of dance-hall happiness in the air, restless and self-centred; this crowd  would be more at home in Bray, with concrete esplanade and  saxophone blaring nonsense from the hill. This fastidious valley  really adds nothing to their self-conscious merriment, their joy is not  in it but in themselves, so it seems to withdraw its secrets from  their unsympathetic approach, to frown resentfully on their unconscious insults and to rebuff their well-meant but undiscerning heartiness. They could enjoy themselves as well elsewhere. I wish they would.....

I recall from my days in De La Salle Novitiate that ,at Christmas 1966, the novices attended Mass in the local Church in Castletown and we - budding experts in post Vatican II liturgy - were mildly shocked to see the local farmers praying their rosary beads during Mass! Our novitiate lasted 15 months. Fr Sweetman joined the Jesuits in 1931, aged 17 and was ordained priest in 1945 after a 14 YEAR period of spiritual and intellectual formation. He can be forgiven a little snobbery vs a vs the laity in 1949!

The Reason Why: Brother Maurice Kirk and I [Part 1]

Brother Maurice Kirk, De La Salle Novice Master and Provincial 1966-74

Introduction

I have written about Brother Maurice before in the "About Me" section of my old website www.IrishSalem.com and what follows in this article is an edited version. Some months ago I came across a second hand copy of a book by the late Brother John Towey F.S.C. "Irish De La Salle Brothers in Christian Education" (Dublin, De La Salle, 1980) that includes a longish section on Brother Maurice when he was head of the Irish Province of the De La Salle Brothers from 1968 until his death in a car accident in 1974.I will quote extracts from this book in a second article - and especially the tributes paid to Brother Maurice by the then Minister for Education Mr Richard Burke and the then Provincial of the Irish Jesuits (from 1968-75), Very Rev. Cecil McGarry. I have a feeling that Brother Maurice was not an uncritical admirer of Fr. McGarry!

It is interesting that Brother John barely mentions Brother Maurice role as Novice Master from 1966 to 68 - the role in which he had such a huge influence on my life - and concentrates on his period as head of the Irish Province. But that's how History operates!

Also I note that, after his death, the executive of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors decided to establish a burse to provide educational opportunity for De La Salle pupils but were unable to decide exactly how the money should be used. Perhaps that was symptomatic of the end of an era for the Brothers, the Catholic Church  and a great deal more. 

I think of Brother Maurice as one of the last figures in a line of educators that began with Thomas Arnold headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, where he introduced a number of reforms that were widely copied by other prestigious public schools. As per Wikipedia "His reforms redefined standards of masculinity and achievement." Arnold was made famous posthumously by one of his pupils Thomas Hughes whose semi-autobiographical novel Tom Browne's Schooldays  [1] was based on his own time at Rugby. I am no Thomas Hughes but then I am writing about the end of that age! . 

[ The founder of the modern Olympic Games Baron de Coubertin [2] visited English public schools, including Rugby in 1886. When looking at Arnold's tomb in the school chapel he recalled he felt, suddenly, as if he were looking upon "the very cornerstone of the British empire". We are living in an era of endings! ]

Rory Connor
21 September 2019. 

[1]  The novel was not primarily written as an entertainment. As Hughes said:
Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great fault of it is 'too much preaching'; but they hope I shall amend in this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn't do so myself.

[2] As per Wikipedia, "Coubertin is thought to have exaggerated the importance of sport to Thomas Arnold, whom he viewed as "one of the founders of athletic chivalry". The character-reforming influence of sport, with which Coubertin was so impressed, is more likely to have originated in the novel Tom Brown's School Days than exclusively in the ideas of Arnold himself." 
Thomas Hughes himself was a first class cricketer rather than a great scholar, so the enduring myth of Rugby may be as much his creation as Arnold's BUT Arnold was his inspiration! However, I believe that the "character-forming influence of sport" was a central idea for Brother Maurice.

A) Letter to Lady who Asked Me About My Motives

22 April 2003

Dear Ms ......

Thank you very much. The questions are a little difficult to answer by E mail. I have been pursuing this kind of issue for some years now and what seems obvious to me, may be difficult for a "newcomer" to grasp because I may be unconsciously assuming that other people know things with which I am very familiar. For example did you even hear of Nora Wall before and if not have I supplied sufficient background data?(The key factor is that she is a former nun - if  people don't realise that, then I must appear to be speaking in riddles).

My Background and Reasons for Action

I was a member of the De La Salle Brothers from about September 1966  to about March 1969: I was aged 16 to 19 and spent most of my time in training though I taught for several months in 3 schools (mainly filling in for absent teachers). The training period in the Novitiate in Castletown  was the formative experience of my life and the Novice master,  the late Br. Maurice Kirk influenced me as much as my parents, if not more so. I doubt if he regarded me as one of his most promising students and I think he would be very surprised by my metamorphosis (He became Provincial of the Brothers and was killed in a car crash about 1974).

I would say that this is by far the most important factor in my present Crusade - if you want to call it that. I was always annoyed at the tone of sneering abuse which our "liberal" intellectuals adopt when referring to the Catholic Church. Over the past several years their blood libels and false allegations of child abuse have driven me to distraction (I am perfectly well aware that there are true allegations of abuse as well - but by the same token, not everything Julius Streicher ** wrote about the Jews is false.)

The second reason for my actions is that around Christmas 1994 (? I think) I came across a boy whom I thought might be the victim of child abuse (by his step-father). I helped him to some extent but then became afraid that I would be the target of a bogus allegation myself. So I dropped him though he was lonely and expected to see me again. In normal circumstances I would have had no problem in approaching the Social Services and asking for a discreet investigation. However hysteria was already in the air and I thought I could not possibly make an accusation on the very limited evidence I had. (Remember what Dr. Moira Woods did to Eddie Hernon?). Also because of the hysteria, I felt I could not investigate further. It was a vicious circle. I spoke to a number of friends about this at the time and everyone told me not to get involved.

Finally for 6 months or so in 1995 I was involved in an extremely ugly confrontation at work with a female member of staff who ended up by accusing me of sexual harassment. I fought this issue all the way to the top and became a delegate to the Annual Delegate Conference of the Public Service Executive Union (April 1996?) for the specific purpose of moving a Motion on bogus allegations of sexual harassment (i.e. no-one else wanted that job). The full time officials of the Union opposed my Motion but I got it passed anyway. In my speech to the ADC I insisted on referring to a bogus allegation of child abuse made against an Irish Bishop. This probably hindered my case rather than helped it but I was making certain connections (for example where did that lady get her ideas from?).

Oddly enough I believe that this last issue is the least important and I believe I would have pursued my current campaign even if it never happened. (I had a half reconciliation with the lady afterwards but do not anticipate any with the likes of Patsy McGarry and Co).

This is getting too long and I will answer your other queries separately.

Regards

Rory Connor

** Nazi editor of Der Sturmer who accused the Jews of being sexual perverts who murdered Christian boys. (He also said that there were Jews in the Mafia and among Stalin's hencemen - that part is true).

(B) Extract from a Discussion on the Website www.reason.com

[ I recently copied this discussion into my blog article on Father Michael Sweetman. ]

Dear SR

You are absolutely right: The Black Internationale has got Tim! I was a De La Salle Brother from 1966 to 69 and it was the formative experience of my life. My novice master Brother Maurice Kirk was as important as my parents if not more so. (He became head of the De La Salle Order in Ireland and was killed in a car crash on 10 April 1974.)

In September 1967 at the end of our training a Jesuit priest Father Michael Sweetman gave us a 9 day Retreat (spiritual conference for you pagans). It's true what the Jesuits say: when they control a child's education they have him for life!

Rory

Comment by: Rory Connor at February 23, 2005 05:25 PM

[Actually this discussion to which this comment relates is HERE: The Reason Why - The Catholic Church and I (and Fr Paul Shanley) ]

(C) FATHER MICHEAL SWEETMAN SJ: Extract from Letter to Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) 16 Feb 2004

For the record, I will say a last word about my own motivation. I already mentioned Brother Maurice Kirk who was my Novice Master in the De La Salle Brothers from about September 1966 to November 1967 (I entered outside the normal stream of candidates so the dates are unusual). I also recall with great affection the late Father Michael Sweetman S.J. who gave us an 8 day retreat in early September 1967. He told us a lot about his corresponence with an Irish criminal in England who knew he was destroying himself but could see no way out. However the message Fr. Sweetman was giving us was one of optimism and hope. Even if that man died a criminal he would still not be a failure as a human being. I went to see Fr. Sweetman in Ballymun not long before his death. He spoke of young drug addicts there and said that they were doomed. I had not heard a priest talk in that way before and I was upset by his despair. 

I am not capable of inspiring people or helping them in the way that Brother Maurice and Father Sweetman did, or tried to do. However I am very strong minded (largely thanks to them) and I will defend their legacy in my own way.

(D) Brother Maurice Kirk FSC and Father Michael Sweetman S.J.

This is from an article on the website of Alliance Support (which supported victims of child abuse) dated September 2006
http://www.alliancesupport.org/news/archives/001460.html

[ Explanatory Note: I was a novice in the De La Salle Brothers in Castletown, Co. Laois, Ireland in the year 1966/1967. It was the peak experience of my life and the main reason why I have been engaged in the fight against false allegations of child abuse directed against Catholic clergy .

My novice master was Brother Maurice Kirk. In August/September 1967 a Jesuit priest Father Michael Sweetman gave us our final Retreat" (spiritual conference) before we were professed as De La Salle Brothers.

I left the Brothers in March 1969. Recently I deposited some material in archives and the following is part of a covering note.

Rory Connor]

As to the wider significance of these events, I was in the [De La Salle] Novitiate in 1966-67 at the time when vocations to the Catholic Church were at their height. This was immediately after Vatican 11 and just before the student revolts of 1968. Brother Maurice was, I suppose, a modernising conservative. Among the main texts we studied were A Map of Life which was a classic from the 1930s and also the Grail Simplified Documents of Vatican 11. I'm sure that Brother Maurice was trying to forge a link between tradition and the modern world. Father Michael Sweetman was something of a "radical priest" so inviting him to preach the Retreat before our profession would have been a daring act.

Obviously Brother Maurice did not succeed. I briefly met with a former fellow novice years later - Brother ..... I think who left like most of us. He told me he thought that Brother Maurice had been an "intellectual bully". Maybe that is true and maybe most leaders have to be. Maybe the increasing secularisation (and increasing viciousness) of society could not be overcome by any means. I think that Father Sweetman felt that at the end of his life - although I did not know him at all as well.

Another historical point. I recently read a review of a book about Pope Pius X11 and the Nazis which was written by a Jewish Rabbi. The Rabbi said that the lies about Pius as "Hitler's Pope" came from 3 separate sources [1]

• Stalinist propaganda during the Cold War (1940s and 50s)
• The "New Left" in the 1960s
• "Liberal" Catholics after the Vatican Council who saw Pius X11 as the hero of "reactionary" Catholics and demonised him as a way of demonising them.

I think that our child abuse hysteria originated in somewhat the same way. Pat Rabbitte and Judge Pat McCartan are former members of the Workers Party that was Stalinist in the most literal sense - party officials went on cosy visits to Kim Il Sung's North Korea. Doctor Moira Woods (who slandered Eddie Hernon) was also a member of this Party. I think that Mary Raftery was a member (though I can't swear to it). Doctor Noel Browne was not in the Workers Party but his hatred of the Catholic Church really took off in the late 1960s. John Horgan mentions in his biography of Browne that a savage article by Browne in the Irish Times in 1970 drew criticism from Father Michael Sweetman [2]! The late 1960s really do seem to be a critical time.

Regarding "liberal" Catholics I know that the National Catholic Reporter in the USA has thrown its full weight behind the child abuse witch-hunt. It even sees nothing wrong with convictions on the basis of "Recovered Memory Syndrome". This is voodoo brain science and is almost unknown in Ireland. The NCR sees the scandal as a useful way of gutting the traditional church and advancing its own "liberal" agenda. - in relation to women priests, gay priests, the laity etc. I don't know if there is an equivalent group in Ireland - I am concentrating my fire on journalists.

Maybe I am exaggerating the importance of my time in the De La Salle Novitiate. But then again maybe not!


Rory Connor
September 2006

Notes:
[1] The book is "The Myth of Hitler's Pope" by Rabbi David G. Dalin

[2] The date should be 1968 not 1970 which tends to prove my point! In "Noel Browne, Passionate Outsider" John Horgan writes:

" In 1968 [Browne] had written a speech for a meeting in Trinity College which contained a number of harsh criticisms of the Church, but had thought better of it and deleted them from the remarks he eventually delivered. The original speech, however, was published in the Irish Times, and for this he was mildly chastised by another speaker at the meeting, the radical Jesuit Fr Michael Sweetman". [The Irish Times, 6 December 1968].

This seems to be the last time that Noel Browne entertained any doubts about the Catholic Church. After that, it was shrieking denunciation all the way, with the Church being blamed for every evil in Irish society. I think that 1968 was the year our Irish "liberals" started to go crazy!

Father Michael Sweetman SJ - declining to Baptise the Spirit of the Age

Homily by Michael Sweetman SJ (1983) on 50th anniversary of death of Fr John Sullivan

The above is a talk by Father Michael Sweetman SJ in St Francis Xavier Church in Dublin during a Mass to commemorate his former teacher and then colleague Fr John Sullivan a well-known saintly Jesuit who died on 19 February 1933. The date is February 1983 - the 50th anniversary of the death of Father Sullivan.
 [Michael Joseph Sweetman was born in Dublin on 20 March 1914 and encountered Fr Sullivan when he was a late adolescent studying at Clongowes Wood College in Co. Kildare. He himself joined the Jesuits in 1931 and was ordained a priest in 1945.]

I was a novice in the De La Salle Brothers in Castletown, Co. Laois (diocese of Ossory) in 1966/67. At the end of the year of training in late August 1967, our novice master Br Maurice Kirk invited the well known Jesuit Fr Michael Sweetman to give us an eight-day retreat. I took copious notes of his talks that I wrote up in my diary in the evenings. A few years ago I photocopied the relevant pages and left copies in the National Archives and Jesuit archives. Due to the collapse of all our hopes of that time, I have never been able to reread the notes or the rest of my diary - but hopefully I will get around to it now - or my notes of Fr Sweetman's talks anyway! [ I have written about Fr Sweetman and Br Maurice in the About Me section of my old website IrishSalem.com ]

What follows are (or will be) excerpts from articles by Fr Sweetman from the 1940s to the 1980s - mainly in The Furrow - for which he was film reviewer from  1965 to 67 - and in Studies Quarterly Review, a publication of the Irish Jesuits. It may well have been his articles in The Furrow that helped bring him to the attention of Brother Maurice. I have described Brother Maurice elsewhere as a "liberal Conservative" (with emphasis on the noun!) and Fr Sweetman as something of a "radical priest". However the latter phrase has definitely changed its meaning from Ireland in the 1960s to today. Fr Sweetman's attitude was quite different from that of Fr Gabriel Daly OSA of whom I have written previously.

This essay is definitely a Work-in-Progress and will continue that way for a while. I propose to organise it in themes rather than chronologically. Curiously enough the first film review of Fr Sweetmans's that I came across in the Furrow (November 1965) concerns the issue of false sexual allegations made by a child against adult teachers! 

NOTES:

• I should stress that the various topic headings in blue are my own invention - not those of Fr Sweetman!
• I have followed this with a second post "Father Michael Sweetman S.J. His Story [2]

Dublin Youth of 1965, Sex and False Allegations

(The Furrow, November 1965)
In discussing, and judging, what is suitable in films presented for indiscriminate public consumption, the statement is often made that something will shock the young and uneducated. This is a possibility that deserves every consideration. But if by un-educated one means particularly city youngsters who have been unable to obtain more than a primary education, the notion of what is likely to shock them needs imaginative investigation. They are not uneducated in the realities of life; they, of necessity, have become immune to many of its shocks. Certainly the use of obscene and even blasphemous language would be no shock, in the sense of being something new, to them; nor would the sight of raw passion, violent emotion, scurrilous abuse, drunkenness, dishonesty or squalid lust. Those who are likely to be shocked by these things, or entertained as the case may be, are the educated and sheltered minority. But as they are surrounded by counteracting influences antagonistic to this kind of behaviour, they also are partly protected.

 What really does everyone harm are false values attractively displayed; omission of all concern for religious and ultimate standards; cynical or sentimental contempt for people.

 When a film like The Loudest Whisper (Academy) is restricted to those over eighteen, it is not because the subject or treatment is shocking, but rather because it would be puzzling to the very young and might create morbid suspicions among adolescents. 

The subject here might be said to be lesbianism, but the film gets its excitement not from this, but from the power of malicious whispering about it. ......

Here, as in Lord of the Flies, there is an indication of the zest for evil that can possess a child. The bold girl is a clever, malicious, subtle, cruel little viper, but she is not inhuman, she is no caricature. For spite, using phrases she has overheard from a silly adult, she tells her grandmother that there is an unnatural relationship between the two young teachers who run the school. In the orgy of, mainly, feminine emotion which follows on this, the parts of the teachers are sensitively played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine; the grandmother is superbly done by Eileen Hopkins; the children are excellent. The poisonous whisper is tipped into the ear of the grandmother in a most effective dialogue in the back of a car. ....

 It is a film worth seeing for all educationalists and that, in some sense, includes nearly all adults. 

Effect of Film Sex Scenes on Irish Girls (1966)

The Furrow June 1966 - [This follows his review of a film version of Hamlet by Grigori Kozintsev]

 From the sublime to [Vittirio] de Sica. Marriage Italian Style (Academy) is bored de Sica, following his own too well tried formula: a golden hearted prostitute, a few orphans, a sly cleric, a glamorous play-boy ready to harvest an unlikely domestic peace once he has sown the very last possible wild oat. . . and so on. Sophia Loren affronts me; I can't take her; and I must say I don't much want to. Though in fairness it should be said that when her characteristics are toned, honed down, as she is supposed to grow older, she becomes far more beautiful and appealing. The comedy is very predictable and seldom warms up. Except for the intellectual effort which might be demanded of parents in explaining to children how Filomena's three children came into the world, there does not seem very much reason to restrict this film to adults. It is certainly not adult fare.......

In almost all of these kind of films there is a scene or so of the glossy magazine type, where female bodies are displayed in an impersonal, provocative, artificial way. These are of the same category as that group of writings which Richard Hoggart well labelled "sensation-without-commitment". If I may at all trust my intuition, these scenes generally break the interest of the audience in the cinema, and are received with more embarrassment than fascination. Certainly they reveal minds behind them whose sense of humour has deserted them, whose good taste never existed, and whose inventiveness and imagination has been choked by desire for easy money. But the very fact that they leave nothing to a more sensitive imagination - one's own - makes them that amount less harmful than the static picture or the suggestive passage in a book. But though they may be less successful they must be stigmatised as of the same intention as the type of picture that is pushed into a drawer when an unexpected knock comes to your office door. Their contented lovelessness, and chinkless in sincerity, are perhaps their most objectionable qualities. 

I have been wondering what effect these scenes have on girls. A very limited research suggests that they mostly view this kind of performance as silly, something no girl, bad or good, would want to put on in any conceivable circumstances. This may be tinged with slight envy of the mere physical talents of the sirens. Some feel that this kind of stuff is clearly what purveyors of "immature emotional satisfactions" (Hoggart) want their frightened clients to believe is the way they would like girls to behave. It all begins, and ends, in solitary fantasy. 

It reminds one again that many authors or artists, even of genius, never knew sexual normality. So many were warped in their own experience or suffered from egoistical inability to control their im pulses. Anyhow, the evidence goes to suggest that there are some very stunted, and not a few sick minds behind the production of mass entertainment. But when all is said and done the misfit sections do not make these films totally objectionable; no more than occasional tactless insult altogether destroys a friendship.

Censorship, "Liberals" and 'Room at the Top'

(The Furrow, January 1966)
 Room at the Top (Corinthian) is one of the best of the films previously banned, and now cut and passed for adult audiences.  They keep before our minds the question of censorship and the  deeper one of the moral influence of art and literature. The days of  banning merely because of the theme, or subject, seem to be over  everywhere; there is more attention given now to the method of presentation and the intent behind it. If this film was originally  banned because of the love scenes, judicious cutting has removed  such ground for objection without in any way clouding the issues  at stake. To contend that one needs a more prolonged and detailed  indication of the sexual relationship of the central character (Lawrence Harvey) with the two women, if one is to follow their story,  seems to me stupid if not dishonest. Just as well complain that you  don't know what happened to Karin in the Virgin Spring, because  the rape is not shown. (This beautiful, elemental film was shown in the Fine Arts theatre; I hope it will appear every now and again forever.) The way, the spirit, in which the double attachment is  dealt with seems to me reasonably adequate, given a completely non  religious environment. One leads to a pre-married pregnancy and  shot-gun wedding with the boss's daughter, the other, with an unhappily married woman, to her too timely death. Granted, by our or almost any standards the immorality of the two liaisons, there is nothing in the way the story is told to make one believe that this is  an attractive or acceptable way to live. The hopelessness of such a  situation is really effectively conveyed by the sensitive acting of  Simone Signoret; and if the great settler of knotty problems, death, is used a bit too glibly, still on the other hand he has always been  a legitimate means of emphasis of any vital point. 

But the sexual emotions are not the only or perhaps the most  important ones touched here. The exacerbated resentment of the  clever, ambitious, young man from the provinces and working-class, in the face of his social "superiors" is well set out. Suave manners, name dropping, initiated behaviour are all used as weapons to  humiliate and exclude him.The resultant emotions are well worth dramatic exploitation, for they are among the most explosive in the world.

 To return for a brief moment to the question of banning and  morality; the reason why this film does not seem to me likely to have  bad effects is principally because the women are never here treated in an impersonal, and so most deeply degrading way. The relationships are intensely, painfully personal. In so many other films which  seem to have no trouble gaining entrance, human flesh is paraded for  the amusement or provocation of anonymous Man. These arrogant, beedy-eyed inspectors look the girls up and down with cool appraisal,  intended to glorify an attitude of disenchanted experience coupled  with unflagging lust. This is immoral, and almost as unpleasant as  the slavish praise meted out by mis-named liberals, to any production  that is smutty, blasphemous and debunking.

The Insecure Offenders: Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State (1961 book)

Review of book ( by T. R. Fyvel ) in Studies Quarterly Review, Winter 1962 
THE first of these books might take its place in the worthy company of The Uses of Literacy, The Hidden Persuaders and The Affluent Society. It is, with them, a study of the vital under-currents of modern society; here there is particular stress on the influences which are producing delinquents in such alarming numbers. Statistics are used; but the book is a study of people not numbers. It deals principally with Britain, but has interesting sections also on the problem in U.S.S.R., U.S.A. and Europe. The statistical size of the problem may be indicated by the figures for Britain: in 1938 indictible offences in the 17-21 age group were 10,131, in 1959 they were 30,086; violence against the person rose from 163 to 2,366. Similar trends have appeared almost everywhere. 

An examination of the social soil encouraging such luxuriant growth shows it to be one where the moral law is openly derided, its very notion being denied validity even in learned circles; where the idea of there being a transcendental purpose in human life is presumed away; where the working philosophy of life is explicitly materialist and hedonist. In such a society commercial interests rule, almost absolutely. These interests are in themselves amoral and ruthless; their one purpose-production, of any thing. Desires are created and satisfied with this end alone in view. Now, the teenage spending power has increased to an enormous extent- unmarried young people spent £900 million in Britain in 1959 - so the commercial pressure is turned on it. The desires created in them are, for the most part, not for the essentials of life;

 'The economy is geared to the least urgent set of human wants' (Galbraith: The Affluent Society); stress is on drinks, smokes, entertainment, decorative clothing, body culture (cosmetics, etc.), betting, cars and scooters, sensational reading. This is the area where advertising and high-pressure salesmanship is concentrated. Desire is not only aroused but made rabid. 'In the U.S. it is already harder than almost anywhere else for those who cannot follow the advice of the advertisers . . . to lead any life which is psychologically secure.' 

It might not surprise a contemplative: it may at first seem rather unexpected to most others, that the result of all this, or at least what goes along with it, is a pervasive boredom. Time may be short and all that but one of the great problems is to put it in, how to kill it! The crime peak is reached in England at 4.0 pm on Sundays.This is one way of relieving boredom. Whether the long hours spent in coffee bars is to be taken as a way of relieving it, or of showing it, is an open question. They may possibly be included under the heading 'Doing Nothing' which was the way 23% of youths, in another survey, described their leisure time activities.

 Little enough interest is taken, and comparatively small sums spent in providing housing, sports facilities, education for the submerged tenth and where their fundamental needs are neglected their energies and resentments break out in violence, restlessness and a search for 'kicks'.

The great advertising media plug sex, sensation, crime and other get rich-quick activities. Is it to be wondered at that this 'arouses morbid and synthetic emotions' amounting at times to hysteria. Two popular Sunday papers were condemned by the British Press Council 'as grossly lewd and salacious . . . debased to a level which is a disgrace to British journalism'. They have of course a loud enough voice to set up a heart-rending cry of 'Inquisition' or 'Puritanism' or prudery if there is any attempt to censor them. Some one apparently calculated that United States television showed 6.2 acts of violence per hour; while their 'comic' literature was described by a Senate sub-committee as 'Short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and of all crimes, bestiality and horror'. Well, a lot of this may well leave the normal child unaffected, but it can certainly topple the unstable. ......

This simply tots up to a false, unsettling set of values which makes sheep of the majority but also a nice proportion of wolves to prey upon them. .....

When these mass-produced sheep in wolves' clothing, interspersed with genuine wolves as a by-product, get into the clutches of society's penal system, what happens Some rather peculiar things to start with: one is that many of these apparently untameable beasts have their first experience of an ordered, secure and reasonably healthy life; they thrive on it, and secretly rather regret certain aspects of it when it is over e.g. the companionship, the sense of belonging, the loyalties and solidarity of the group. This is so of the more enlightened juvenile institutions. Lady Wootton is here quoted as saying that 'Penal experiences create a delinquent culture based on these experiences'. This has its disadvantages when they are plunged back into the society which was largely responsible for deforming them and still repudiates them; they begin to hate it. Battle is joined and may be waged through many a raid and 'job' on one side and many a sentence on the other, till a type is developed which can live no other way and is stamped indelibly as criminal.

Sean O'Casey, Prostitution, Anti-Clericalism and the film "Young Cassidy"

(The Furrow, April 1965)
The most interesting show recently, for extrinsic reasons, was Young Cassidy (Adelphi). This is a story based on the life of Sean O'Casey; it scarcely adheres to its base at any point. It is cinema entertainment untrammeled by much reality. Rod Taylor in the lead is unconvincing. He is lusty, burly, blustering, an extrovert, quite unlike what O'Casey was or could have been. Perhaps this is the kind of "boyo" he would like to have been, instead of the scraggy, under-nourished, petulant misfit of genius which he was. There are some exciting, vigorous riots and street fighting to set ......

The encounter with the prostitute, and to a lesser extent with a slum siren, was in poor taste. Here was glamorised immorality at its most obvious and artistically inexcusable. One doesn't need to be as staunchly blind as the good lady who announces as she strides out of the Abbey Theatre: "There is not a prostitute to be found in the length and breadth of Ireland", to object to this scene. (This remark was, by the way, greeted with the derisive jeers it so clearly invited, by the cinema audience.) The prostitutes of Dublin, at least such as a young, impecunious literary agitator could afford, in the city of Buck Mulligan, Bloom and Young Cassidy, were unfortunates whose moral squalor and misery would have been well matched by external grime and stench. Here you have a beautiful, happy girl (Julie Christie) well bathed and laundered, looking as if she had come straight from the caresses of a Mediterranean sun. This is insincere, bogus, false; untrue to life and trebly untrue of Dublin slum life in 1913. 

This, coupled with the speech by Yeats implying that the most contemptible thing that could be said of a man would be to call him "a God-fearing young Irishman" all this lacks integrity. A further false impression is created when Cassidy leaves Ireland with the pompous encouragement of Yeats booming in his ears, whereas O'Casey left with fury in his heart at Yeats's refusal of the Silver Tassie. 

But when all is said and done it's not to be taken too seriously; the scenery is beautiful; all the women act well. Nora (Maggie Smith) is easy to watch, though indeed the love scenes are oppressively "filmy" with conventional posturings and manoeuvring for position on the canal bank, from amorous clich to clinch. This is a film of parts; the good parts do not redeem the bad but neither do the bad corrupt the whole. There is no whole. 

Sean O'Casey, Matt Talbot and Marxism

Extract from review of two books on Matt Talbot in The Irish Monthly, July 1949

Another book that makes passing mention of Matt Talbot is the autobiography of the emigre Dubliner, Sean O'Casey. He sneers. It seems rather strange that an artist, one of the sensitive high-priests of the true and beautiful, should fail to admire beauty flowering even by a cess-pool; it is somewhat disgusting to find him going out of his way to spit upon it. Is it because Matt Talbot purified himself completely of a ravening vice, cauterising it ruthlessly out of his soul, that he is " Mutt Talbot "? Is it ever contemptible for a man to free his spirit from almost all the claims of mortal flesh in order to seek Truth and Beauty with unshrinking sacrifice, with undiminishing fidelity? Is he a fit object for ridicule because he gave from his scant possessions to a good cause more than he could spare? Perhaps the Marxist in Mr. O'Casey got the better of the artist. 

 Your Marxist is a determinist. These omniscient planners of a perfect world, these humourless betterers of the human race, think they can plan men, infallibly. How then can they admit that something far better than the best they have planned has grown up strong and tall and fair out of conditions that should breed inevitably depravity, meanness and ugliness? It would never do for a doctrinaire Marxist to admit that the highest form of human activity could grow out of the soil Matt Talbot was rooted in. Above all he could not admit to be a hero an addict of the "opium of the people ". Now if Matt had only remained a drunkard he might have served his purpose as an obscure but useful little figure in their statistics : the hundred and first case of crime inevitably due to liquor, or the fifth, perhaps, of suicide due inevitably to hopeless poverty, or of lunacy predetermined by victorious environment. But he evaded their clutches. He had a will of his own, that forbidden article of private property; he had a strong, free will, and by God's grace he used it. That is the rub; that is the accursed scandal for the Marxist. "The weak things of this world has God chosen to confound the strong." Matt Talbot confounds the Materialists: "Confound him!"

 Is there just a little danger that he might be a stumbling-block to "progressive" Catholics? They might ask: Is he a fit ideal for the social movements in the Church, with their present stress on self-development, education, good housekeeping and in general the raising of the workers' standard of living? Not that you expect a man to be ahead of his time - you don't blame St. Louis for accepting the feudal system - but you do not want him to be notably behind or to seem even opposed to the progressive movements of his time. And Matt Talbot? What did he care about the standard of living? A cup of cold tea and cocoa mixed, and a few bits of bread kept body and soul as close together as served his purpose; there was not much use in dressing too respectably if he was going to slit his trousers at the knees, in order to kneel on the bare ground : a hard bed, too, served better for praying on that a soft mattress. Then what about the Social and National revolution that took place in his time? What was his record; " Where was he in 1916?" Probably kneeling on his plank bed, praying.

 But, as the bus-conductors say : " Hold tight a moment, please." Are we to get so obsessed with procuring good things that we can no longer admire better? There is no need to get huffy because a quiet, independent, courageous little man walks out absent-mindedly far beyond our furthest goal, brushing aside somewhat gruffly the proffered hands of the uplifters, and ignoring all their most cherished maxims. " Matt went on his way, and maybe it was a good way, too." He was not against social improvements, he just got where he was going without them. He might have spent his life, and spent it well, in fighting for improved labour conditions and national freedom, with Pearse and Connolly; he might have joined Big Jim Larkin in his fight against drunkenness among the dockers; but, forced to a judgment, would you not say that he spent it better in fighting the long, glorious, lonesome battle for better spiritual conditions in his own and other souls, all-absorbed in the movements stirred by the incalculable action of the Holy Spirit? He went " a more excellent way ". 

Brendan Behan's Dublin

(The Furrow, December 1966)
A small film that deserves mention at least because of its subject is Brendan Behan's Dublin. It follows all too predictable a course, and while much of this course is pleasant and humorous and worth while, there are always the same unchallenged assumptions. They do Brendan Behan's memory no credit. I never met him, and am in no position to say anything about his character or personality, but I have read much of the publicity about him and some of his works. The reiterated charge that the Irish neglected and harassed this lovable genius needs to be rebutted. The people who destroyed Behan were those who encouraged in him a sick adulation for the poison that was killing him - alcohol; who for the sake of publicity put on display his weakness and then proceeded to vilify anyone who happened not to like his performance. Another point that I think is unworthy of him is the repeated suggestion that he suffered from an acute form of inverted snobbery. Anyone who respects his memory should drop these themes from any further tributes to him. 

"Of Human Bondage", Somerset Maughan and Meaninglessness

(The Furrow, May 1965)
Of Human Bondage (Adelphi) has the particular interest to us of  having been made at Ardmore. It is well made, and well cut, only  once did I feel a jolt as regards sequence of events. But it is not a  very good story. The character of Philip (Lawrence Harvey) is sympatica. He is club-footed, sensitive, insecure and sentimental.  Admit it or not, many will easily identify with Philip ; Philip mooning romantically over a saucy little waitress, longing for her physically, and longing to be her saviour as she sinks from sauciness into the  soup. It is touching in parts, due to Harvey's sincere, anxious,  portrayal of a man cornered by his own disguised greediness into  altruistic concern for the girl. He speaks clearly, which adds  immensely to the enjoyment of viewing him; Kim Novak doesn't,  and it irritates. 

The story evokes only a minor pity, where there  could have been tragic sorrow. The great issues are not raised. When  the now wasted prostitute asks for a fine funeral as her dying request, one feels that the author is showing not merely how pitifully  mean her values always were, but that he himself believes that there was nothing else at all that Philip or anyone could have done for  her at that time but promise to fulfill her paltry wish. Religion is  thrown in with vague gestures over the remains, the words of prayer  sounding as meaningless as the trimmings on the hearse, the whole  performance something tacked on to life or something that happens  at a distance from reality. This was suggested to me by the great  space between the watching Philip and the burial. 

I wonder am I  wrong in thinking that it was Maugham as much as Philip who  could not think of anything to say that might conceivably console  or give hope to a degraded, desperate, dying girl. One wasn't left  in sorrow that the girl was beggared of all values and failed to  reach the only hand that could have saved her; there never was the  slightest suggestion that such a hand existed. Deep things are treated  shallowly and tragedy reduced to insignificance.

"The Trial" Orson Welles as Franz Kafka  

(The Furrow, December 1965)
Another intriguing, or worrying, film is Orson Welles's The Trial (Astor), based on Kafka's book. Where the book might very well bore you - at least in translation - this spectacular show holds you almost continuously in its firm, chill grip. It is impressionistic, nightmarish; it is clear and illogical, true and unrealistic. The sight of the waiting, hopeless, obsequious, anonymous victims of the system, the law, society, is horribly memorable. The vast office, too, efficient and impersonal, with its serried ranks of typists clapping their keys in a kind of theatrical applause as the young boss glides down the aisles; the sudden emergence of Mr. K. (Anthony Perkins) before the masses in the people's court; the lame woman dragging the heavy trunk, for no apparent reason, across a waste dominated by fortress-flats; the glimpses of the corridors of power, terrifying narrow passages between cliffs of menacing files, the "records" dread of every little man; this is all immensely effective. The scenes with Block and the Advocat (Orson Welles) tend to sap one's energy; perhaps that is intended. Hints of fetishism in the references to physical defect as a sexual attraction; more than a hint of morbidity in the love of the girl (Romy Schneider) for all accused men; some thing cruel and menacing about the kisses of another girl - this all conveyed the unhealthy depths beneath the surface of consciousness.

From the dramatic opening shots one easily identifies with the citizen caught at a fearful disadvantage by the uniformed official; he is the "naked" man off-balance, accused by authority and feeling irrationally guilty within himself; of what? He never knows, we never know, no one ever knows. "It has been established that a man who appears naked before an examiner and is unexpectedly addressed by his first name will, during a brief conversation, reveal essential traits of his personality and things which otherwise might come out only in many hours of history-taking. ... Try to conjure up a society in which such a rapid testing of the personality would be a typical scene" (Karl Stern in The Third Revolution). 

This is the kind of society that Orson Welles conjures up in his nightmare Trial for us.

Hitler, Stalin and Ireland

(The Furrow, December 1966)

Deadly-serious Russian matter was to be seen in Common Fascist (O'Connell Bridge Centre). It is a documentary on Hitler. The interesting thing about it is the nature of many of the pictures; they seem to have been taken when he was unaware or unconcerned that he was being photographed. It brings out the insignificance of this kind of man, how clumsy, childish, vulnerable he looks. All the more terrible the power that his magnified voice and inflated image could generate. His performance should be shown every now and again as a warning to educators to encourage independence of mind as the all-important protection of human dignity. There is an obvious irony about this plea for the dignity of the individual coming from this source; it is impossible not to remember that during the Hitler regime Stalin was liquidating millions of kulaks and all political enemies he could lay his many hands on. Being a small, neutral country, whose ultimate loyalty is not to any of the kingdoms of this world, gives us an excellent vantage point from which to discern the lovers and enemies of the truth. 

Doctor Zhivago

 (The Furrow, October 1966)

Fr. Sweetman prefaced his comments of Dr Zhivago with a reference to his preceding review of Four in the Morning which he praised despite describing is as "bitterly pessimistic, inconclusive and depressing."
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Director Anthony Simmons has here produced a document with much truth in it; "if we think ourselves to be something whereas we are nothing, we deceive ourselves". But it is nihilistic in a more than Pauline sense. The literati and arbiters of taste seem to demand a theme and treatment like this before they give unqualified praise, or at least sympathetic excuses, to any work. Uncharitably, one has a vision of film critics studiously raising their delicate noses and sniffing the winds of change for a fashionable scent. If the vogue happens to be for the aroma of sewers and the sour effluvia of the low tide of life, then in that direction will the hymns of praise be sung, while these same sensitive organs will be jacked-up to be looked down on anything that is noble, normal, non-post-Christian. 

Doctor Zhivago (Metropole) faces criticism, faint praise and some misunderstanding, precisely because it is on a large scale, it is noble in conception, poetic, ante rather than post-Christian, not sympathetic to nihilism, never exulting in despair. Those who express disappointment with Lean's film might well have felt the same towards Pasternak's novel. Perhaps neither produced the work that others think they should have produced. Neither sets out to give a dramatic, sensational description of the Russian Revolution; neither sets out to reveal exclusively the emotions and interactions of a family within, but somehow detached from, the Revolution. Rather it seems here we have people whose aspirations Pasternak would consider as of superior importance and value than politics and history, yet who are almost totally submerged and lost in this vast, impersonal, mythological event. The fact then that we find ourselves at times incapable of being deeply involved in the fates of the individual persons, is not a failure on anyone's part to hold  our attention, it is the result intended. The fact that we do not get a clear idea as to what the revolution is all about is not a failure in precision on anyone's part, it is the result intended; we are experiencing it from the point of view of a group who are pushed about by it, who never see it as a whole, and who, like the vast majority of people in any war or upheaval that ever was, are concerned primarily with survival and simply holding out.

The effort to forget what Omar Sharif was like in other films and to believe in him as a doctor-poet requires a good deal of detachment. To say that he is miscast may be only to admit that one did not succeed in making that effort. To complain that Geraldine Chaplin is a bit wishy-washy in the part of the wife is only to say that she interpreted the character correctly. The contrast with the vital, passionate Lara (Julie Christie) is of the essence of the situation. The anglophile Alexander (R. Richardson) was intended as an in effectual member of a disappearing class and another age; the type for whom "another purge" would seem as serious a crisis as, but no more so than an unpleasant domestic disturbance. For author and director, if one may be so presumptuous as to state their intentions, the fate and value of the individual may be of more importance than the events in which they are involved, but they make no impact whatever on the events; the tramp of history deafens us to the pounding of the human heart. 

This mass menace, bigger than, but inferior to, the workings of the human spirit, is well suggested in scene after scene: the early demonstration brutally suppressed, the first mutiny of the soldiers returning from the front, the beautiful charge of cavalry over a frozen lake, the mowing down of white recruits in a golden corn-field, the sack of a village by the thin lipped fanatic Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay). To say, as has been said, that the scenic effects are only picture post-card pretty is a more than usually unfair cliche. They are simply as beautiful as the cinema can produce, and here as significant as can be desired. They are totally in tune with the events and add to our understanding of them. The vastness, the bleakness are overwhelming; the snow, the forest, the isolated homesteads, the chilling howls of the wolves; the monotonous, ominous, infinite stretches of country, are at once passive and tense. This is the land, Mother Russia. The aggressive action that takes place upon her is perhaps best symbolised by the train. The train, in a way, is the most thoroughly delineated character in the film. It makes a huge impact, it is the elemental, active force, penetrating the waiting, absorbing world, giving life to it, bringing  death to it, disturbing its peace, awakening it to hope. If only for this epic train-journey to the Urals, this is a great film. After it, like a symphony of Beethoven's, you know a great deal more about man's isolated yet shared, guided yet mysterious, dull and exciting journey through this life. There is a unity of sound and sight to produce the effect; the steady rail-rhythm topped by a variety of rappings, tappings, hangings, hissings, there is the swaying and the jogging, the sudden leaps and purposeful swings, the silence and the smoke; smoke that is at once poetic and dead, leaden and light. When you are almost worn out by the drudgery, the monotony, of it, it brings you to a climax of frenzied achievement in a tunnel, then on and on and on.

One little waifish girl (Rita Tushingham), born not of the hero's marriage, but of his union with the briar-wild, ever-surviving, life loving woman Lara, is all that is left at the end of it all to care about or hope in; the child of the obliterated generations rations facing, pitiably alone in a vast crowd, her veiled future.