29: Prayer gives a very strong cutting edge

Episode 29: Fr Gerry shares how his views of the priesthood have changed over the years. He describes something of how being close to terrible violence has affected him. In exploring Fr Gerry's work supporting people in prison, their struggles are held up to the light too.



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Irish Chaplaincy
Voices Unheard
Pact Prison Advice and Care Trust
Catholic Worker Movement

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Transcript

 You are listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways, we're living our faith today. Pope Francis has used the image of a caravan. A diverse group of people travelling together, on a sometimes chaotic journey together. That's an image that has helped to shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations.

Thank you for joining us, listeners. This is the week before Christmas, and I'm delighted to be joined by Gerry, who is actually the first priest that we've had on and we were just discussing how he still counts as an ordinary Catholic because he's not really an ordinary priest. We'll find out more in a minute.

So welcome, Gerry. Thank you. So tell us a little, Gerry, then. You're not from England originally. Tell us a little bit about your childhood, would you?

No.  I'm native of, the north of Ireland. Born in County Derry, but I lived most of my life in County Down, near Newcastle, about 30 miles south of Belfast. And went to school there in Downpatrick nearby. Went to the De La Salle school as it was then. Then went to Queen's University where I took a degree in English and philosophy. And then went to Maynooth, the National Seminary in 1969 to ‘73. I was ordained in 1973 in Belfast for the Diocese of Down and Connor, which is the 2nd largest diocese in Ireland, I think, after Dublin in terms of, population and straddles Antrim, the counties of Antrim and Down, and, of course, the city of Belfast bang in the middle. 

When you were a child, were you very committed to the faith from a young age, or was it something that you didn't really notice so much until you're a bit older? 

No. We noticed it very much. We're a very devout family, and in the sense our parents were very devout people. And we were the sort of family that said the rosary most nights of the week as a family, and, so religion was always very important. Sunday Masses, Sundays and feast days. And it was always very important. And I think we had very good role models and many of the people we met as family friends, and also the priests and the parishes that we lived in. But I was very fortunate to have some very, very fine people as priests who were certainly very good role models, which is something I think is important to say in this day and age. I learned a lot from them. I think I began to think about the priesthood when I went to university. It was an interesting time to be there because that was the time of the troubles beginning, just round about 1969. It was a time of great ferment at the university. That's for sure. And you were very conscious of what was beginning to happen in the place. And it seems a long time ago now, and you would have to explain it to people what it was really like, but I remember very vividly indeed. So I got on with my studies anyway and went to the seminary after for 4 years theology in Maynooth College. I had a very happy experience of the college life at the time in spite of a lot of what has been said about it since. It was also an interesting period to be studying theology because it was just in the aftermath of the Vatican Council, and lots of the things that had been talked about at the council were being talked about again in a very practical way at parish level as to how these things might be implemented and what the future of the church might be. So it was a very exciting time to be studying theology. And when I was ordained in 1973, it was an exciting time to be, I thought anyway, to be a priest. 

Great. And I'm guessing as your family took their faith seriously, I'm guessing it was a source of great joy for them when you were ordained. 

It was. Yeah. I'm the eldest of 8, 4 boys and 4 girls, and no family is perfect. But, yes, it was. It's been an interesting experience for me anyway because I suppose what I thought about the priesthood back in 1973 I’d have a very different view about it today. 51 years later. Yeah. Very different in many ways. When I was ordained in 1973, I was sent to a parish in the north of Belfast, and the troubles were all around me. It was a large suburban area. Lots of families were moving out of inner city Belfast. Young people who were getting married and settling down with families, wanting to get away from the centre of the troubles - as they thought, to new housing estates on the outskirts of the city. It was a huge parish with about 11,000 people that we had on our record. And it was a baptism of fire, the 5 years I spent there, because there were some horrific killings in the parish, a couple of which I was summoned to attend the aftermath and deal with. And some of them have left lasting scars in the sense that I carry some of the memories I've had there to my grave. The seventies was the worst decade of the troubles. There were more killings in that decade than in the other decades put together. So it was a really terrible time to be around. I quickly realised that my theological studies at Maynooth didn't really prepare me very much for what I was experiencing as a young priest in a parish surrounded by so much trouble, so much violence. I even lost a close friend, one of the people who was killed in the parish, a 21 year old. Going to work one morning just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It certainly sharpened my views on peace and justice issues. That's for sure. And politicised me quite radically. 

Yeah. I was gonna ask you that, whether it's made you look at violence differently from how you might have if you hadn't been up so close to it then. 

Yeah. Exactly. Because I'd had no experience of anything remotely like that in the past. I mean, where we grew up and went to school, it was a very quiet little place, in the south of County Down, and, we didn't have anything like that at all. The city experience was something very, very different, and you sort of learned very, very quickly on your feet, basically, how to deal with situations. Again, I was helped by the parish priest who was very, very good, and another curate was there too. It was also during that time that the republican and loyalist prisoners were imprisoned at the Maze or Long Kesh prison outside Belfast and Lisburn.  And on Sundays, I used to visit Long Kesh little knowing that I would end up visiting prisons later in life. But the prison at Long Kesh was a very different experience. It was the only prison I'd ever heard of where the officers had to get permission of the prisoners to go in. It was like a university for activists, republican, and loyalist prisoners. It was an interesting experience. Not every priest wanted to go there, and we had a sort of a rota for different Sundays to visit. I'd say Mass for the prisoners, but also to engage with them and listen, to talk to them and hear how they saw the situation and maybe rearrange ignorance a little bit in respect of what was happening and why it was happening. It was an interesting experience. It really was. Met some very, very talented, very strong individuals, very bright guys as well, but we had many an argument about, you know, the efficacy of what they were engaged in and the armed struggle and all the rest. And, of course, I didn't have a lot of time for that, but it was interesting to expose yourself to another perspective of things, another point of view.

Okay. And just to fast forward a little bit, as you hinted, a big chunk of your life as a priest has been now involved in supporting prisoners. Tell us a bit about that. I'm interested in how that experience maybe has changed you or enriched your faith, as well as how you're trying to support those prisoners in their faith. 

Well, I came to work with the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas about 31 years ago. I had just finished a stint as a chaplain to a teacher training college in Southampton, La Sainte Union. Before that, I was chaplain to Pax Christi, after Bruce Kent had been there before me. I happened to be living in a parish, also staying, and it was a priest friend up in the parish, North London. And I was having breakfast one morning. I remember very well, just paying attention to my scrambled egg and toast. And I got a phone call from someone in Dublin asking me would I be interested in doing prison work. Before I'd finished my scrambled egg and toast, I'd probably say, I think I had said yes, but I wanted to know a lot more about it anyway. The Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas was a project that had been set up in 1985 to provide an outreach service to Irish prisoners and their families in England and Wales, but it also worked worldwide as well. The majority of the prisoners, Irish prisoners, were in England and Wales because of the strong ties, family ties, and the movement of people over the generations between the islands. It was a matter of visiting the prisoners and seeing what their needs were and helping in any practical way we could. And then that became under the umbrella of the Irish chaplaincy because I thought that that offered the ICPO a bit more security. They're under the umbrella of the Irish chaplaincy which has 3 projects, Irish prisoners, travellers, and elderly Irish. So it provides a direct service to all Irish nationals, that's people born on the island of Ireland, because the Irish bishops don't recognise the border, so they regard anybody on the island of Ireland as Irish. The sort of work we did was to visit them as many as we could, build up our working relationship with chaplains in the prisons, because chaplains are very important, and we nearly always made and still do make our visits via the chaplaincy, but also making contact with the families back here, and also back in Ireland, seeing what needs the prisoners had. We suddenly discovered that, you know, a good 40 to 5 percent of them were from a traveller background. They had often times, it was accompanied by drug addiction and drink addiction. Their experience as travellers used to living life on the outside, the idea of being locked up in a cell, prison cell, for 23 hours a day was something that they find many of them couldn't cope with. But we liaised with their families both here and in Ireland helped them out financially with a little bit of money for phone credit and toiletries and stuff like that. Liaise with their solicitors, probation officers, maybe attended parole hearings for them, court appearances if we got to know about their cases. And no two cases were ever the same. We always dealt with them as we find them. We did an interesting report back in 2011 into the plight of Irish travellers. It was such a good academic piece of work. Voices Unheard. The prison service took it up and gave it a very, very good write up. 

What kind of thing do you think would surprise people who never thought about what it's like inside prison? What do you think would surprise people listening, Gerry?

I think what would surprise people now would be overcrowding for a start. I think the fact there’s such overcrowding and it’s talked about a lot, but it's very obvious when you go into a prison. The noise, the smell, the, the whole atmosphere of the place, and the noise in particular in many of the prisons, especially the older London prisons. But the more modern prisons up and down the country and more modern buildings that are spread out and better laid out and better planned and everything else. I think too the sense of hopelessness with some of the prisoners, you know, they just feel that they're just lost souls. You know? They're living lives of quiet desperation, many of them. You do what you can to help them and to give them a little bit of hope, and that's where the chaplaincy is very important for them. And I always encourage prisoners to make good use of the chaplaincy. And I always ask them to - you have a chance here to make something of your life in a way. You can ask yourself 3 very important questions. What set of circumstances brought me here? Secondly, what am I doing with the time I spend here? And if I've come into this prison, and I can't read or write, maybe it'd be a good idea after two and a half years to be able to leave here, able to read and write. And thirdly, what are you gonna do when you leave here? Are you going to go back to the same environment again? Will you have benefitted in any way from the time you spent here? For many prisoners, it's the first opportunity they've had in their lives to come to a sort of a, if not a full stop, it's certainly a semicolon in the sense that they can take time to think about their lives, so they could use that time. And I keep telling them to use it as constructively as you can, so that you're a different person when you leave the prison from the one that went in. Also, I think too the fact that people would find that it's a different world inside the prison. What goes on and behind the walls of the prison is very, very different. It's a different feel, a different atmosphere, a different experience altogether. And I think it's not easily described to people as something you nearly have to be inside. You go along for a day and spend a day in a prison just to see what it's like. And even doing that, you would get a sense of what a prison is all about.

Okay. And what about your own faith then, Gerry? You mentioned at the beginning of this conversation that you feel very differently about the priesthood now than back when you were ordained in the early seventies. Has this work in prison changed you?

I think it did. Most, to some extent, it changed back in, during my time even in Belfast. It was beginning to change anyway because I was friendly with a number of fairly, for want of a better word, radical priests who were much older than me, but were very good role models in the sense that they made you think about what you were doing and why you were doing it. And these were people who were, who had wonderful commitment, great energy, and a very deep spirituality at the same time. It was that marriage, if you like, of contemplation and action. I think that meant a lot to me. And I had read when I was in Maynooth, apart from reading the theology books that we were supposed to read, I was reading an awful lot about what was happening across the pond, reading books by Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. I was very much impressed by the work and the activities of the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel Berrigan. Again, how they were able to, why they were able to do what they did, where it came from. It came from a very strong and a very deep prayer life. And I began to see prayer in a different sense. I began to see the Eucharist in a different sense. And if you ask me what do I mean by that, I would say I began to see them both as very subversive activities, and I began to see them as very political. I understand prayer is a very political activity because in prayer, you're talking to God, but the only way we understand God was through his son, Jesus. We're praying to someone who had a different outlook in life, a different mindset, a different set of values. So there's something very strictly subversive for what of a better word in praying. And, certainly, the Eucharist is a subversive activity. You're pledging allegiance to a person who had a different way of looking at life, a different outlook in life, a different mindset, basically, just a different way of living. I find that prayer gives a very strong cutting edge to any kind of understanding of the political and social reality around me. I know those are strange terms to be using, political, with a small p, but I can't think of any other term that accurately describes it for me. I keep going back to the Catholic Worker ethos. I keep going back to reading Merton and the Berrigans. Even yet, I derive an awful lot of sustenance from what they say because I find that what they said back 50, 60 years ago. It's not just something that's relevant now. It's always been relevant. There's always been something subversive about the Christian way of life. It's always been at variance with social norms of society. We have a different outlook on life, and that's part of the mystery of the Christian faith. From the point of view of the priesthood, I see it as someone not who had all the answers. I didn't even have all the questions, as I soon found out. And then, you just saw the role of the priest, in any given parish as one of an enabler, someone who helped all the people to realise their full potential as Christians. Not somebody who had all the answers to tell them what to do because I didn't. I couldn't tell them what to do. So to cut long story short and answer your question, I don't have a clerical understanding of the of the priesthood. My understanding of the priesthood is just someone within the Christian community who tries to enable other people to realise their full potential as Christians.

Thank you, Gerry. I think that's really interesting. As you know, I've visited prison a little bit when I was working with Pact, and it was an environment I didn't know at all before, really. And I think it's really interesting that you're meeting these prisoners and coming from a place of wanting to share faith with them, but not in a kind of cuddly, caring, everything's gonna be fine kind of way, but more you are calling them to something even though they're in this very difficult hopeless-seeming place. You are nevertheless calling them to something better, to realise their potential. There's a way in which that's quite challenging, isn't it? But at the same time, I, when I visited people in prison or was in that environment, I certainly felt that the fripperies of life are stripped away, aren't they? And there are just people here, just basically trying to get along together in this environment at possibly their lowest ebb ever. It is challenging, I'm sure, to nevertheless call them to do something better with their life. I mean, you're right, they have an opportunity there, as we all do to conform ourselves more closely to Christ. I think there's something very powerful. For me, it always looked like chaplaincy work just was absolutely at the front line of Christianity for people working in prison. 

Yeah. You're dealing with people who are very vulnerable, being on the lowest rung of the ladder socially. I think Christians, in particular, have always had a certain ambivalence about how to deal with prisoners, with people who break the law, and who don't conform easily to the norms of society and fit in with society so easily. The prison system, as we know it, for the last 200 years, was when you think of the 17th/18th century reformers, they were mostly from a Christian background. And I remember a priest friend telling me that, you know, it was interesting to see how the prisons, the physical layout of prisons almost mirrored the physical layout of monasteries. The whole, like, concept of cells, for example, everything regimented, everything run by a rule. There's a very good essay to be written on the subject of the prisoner's monastery because it's sort of emanated from that sort of, almost physical architectural design. So Christians, we're not too sure about how we actually deal with people who break the law, makes us feel a bit uncomfortable. And yet it's such an important issue to deal with, you know.

And what would you say now for people listening who might never see the inside of a prison? Some people listening may have seen the inside of a prison very closely. What would you say to people in a parish where, I know there are people leaving prison, wanting to practice their faith, wanting to feel welcome in a church? What would you say to people in parishes stressing about that? 

Well, parishes need to need to educate themselves about becoming more welcoming places for people coming out of prison. I know that's a big ask in many ways, and not an easy subject to deal with. But people who have maybe paid their price to society need to be given a second chance. Everybody in life deserves a second chance. And I have had experience of people coming back into parishes and people welcoming them back, in particular, the parish priest welcoming them back, trying to make them feel that they belong in the parish. This is their Christian home. And there's times in the year liturgically such as Prisoners’ Sunday when you can actually focus attention on prisoners and remind people of the fact, especially if you're in a parish in a town or a city where there are prisons. You know, pray for them during the bidding prayers. Talk about prisons but talk about the experience of prisoners insofar as you can. Maybe invite somebody, maybe invite a chaplain from a prison to come along and speak on prisoners or maybe somebody who works in a prison,  a prison governor, probation officer, or whatever. And try to give people an understanding of what life may actually be like and why it's important that maybe prisoners should be welcomed back into parishes. For people to not just be slaves of the propaganda about prison life and not believe all of it, just be a little bit more critical of all of that, and it's a much more complex issue.

Thank you. I think that's great. Brings me a little bit to, I was thinking before we met whether there was any connection between the Jubilee year next year, Pilgrims of Hope that Pope Francis announced a theme, seems in some ways a thousand miles away from people in prison struggling to get through their sentence. But there is a sense in which they are the people on the margins that Pope Francis invites us to encounter and confirms for us that they are, you know, a key part of the church. And so I suppose the sorts of things you're talking about that parishioners can do to make sure that they just hesitate to accept, as you say, a view of people who've committed crime that is very narrow, and an opportunity to encounter people who've served a sentence in some situations. That actually, that is meeting people on the margins. 

Yeah. It is. And it's also the sort of work that I think parish Pax Christi groups, or justice and peace groups should take much more seriously, I think, and, have a lot more to say about. It's all to do with education. We're all the time educating ourselves. We're all the time learning. For me, it's been the story of my life anyway. There are no clear cut answers or easy answers to a lot of these difficult issues, but we do need to talk about them. We need to pray about them. We need to realise that the people on the margins of society are the people that Jesus spent a lot of time with. The first followers of Jesus were known as People of the Way. They were people who tried to make sense of the large print of his words about going the extra mile with someone, giving your coat to someone, visiting someone in prison. It's like the reading recently, one of the gospel readings about Not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, is going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It's about being active at the same time. It's about putting those the large print of the words of Jesus into practice, living them out in an honest and sincere way in our lives. Whether or not we're successful is neither here nor there. Jesus never asked us to be successful. He just asked us to follow. I think Dan Berrigan once famously said, the good is to be done simply because it is good, not because it leads somewhere. Another comment that he or Merton made, How do you make the future different? You make the future different by living the present differently. And that's a phrase, that comment that has meant a lot to me in recent years because that's exactly what -  there's a wealth of theology in that. It's all tied in with hope. We're asked to be hopeful in the sense that we follow the teaching of Jesus and that if we do that in as sincere a way as we can, then we leave the rest in his hands.

Thank you, Gerry. Yeah. That's giving us all a lot to think about. I would just say just with my modern world head on, we are being real about the challenges of supporting people leaving prison. And just to say, all parishes have a safeguarding team now, and this is somebody who can help you. We're not saying be starry eyed and - there are proper processes to support people these days. 

And rightly so.

Listeners will be hearing this episode perhaps coming up to Christmas, and I just thought, would you give us a flavour of what it's like for people in prison at Christmas time? 

It's a very difficult experience at Christmas. It's a difficult experience right throughout the year, but Christmas is particularly difficult. The separation of people from their families and loved ones at Christmas at a time which is sold to us as a great family occasion. Everybody wants to be together and be jolly and be happy, and all the razzamatazz that goes with it. If you want to get anything counter to that, go  into a prison on Christmas day, you get a very different experience. There's a great sadness about that. That's another way of getting through to some of the guys and sort of telling them that, you know, you're here. Your family are doing time too, and we often forget that the families do time. And you'd know from your work in Pact, how important that is, being away from their partners and their children and everything else. It's just compounds the prison experience. It makes it very, very difficult. And I suppose it's probably the one time of the year when prisoners are probably at their lowest. New Year's Day, by contrast, is a different time because New Year's Day is starting another year, so they can chalk up another year. And I've often seen guys think that New Year's Day is a good day because it's the start of another year of the sentence gone. But Christmas Day is a different thing. That is the biggest problem with imprisonment, just being away from their families and loved ones. That's the biggest punishment, and, indeed, the only punishment that imprisonment should impose. 

I did find when I was working at Pact, I discovered something that I didn't know before that lots of our bishops will go and say Mass in prisons at Christmas time. I think that's a great example for us.

That's right. They do. Yeah. It is a good example. That's been the case for many years, a tradition of doing that in different dioceses, which is good. And that is very important for the prisoners. It's very important that they see someone, like a bishop coming in for to take Mass on Christmas day for them. It makes them feel important. It makes them feel wanted. It makes them feel too that there's somebody actually out there that cares about them.

Not forgotten. 

Not forgotten. That's hugely important, you know? 

Well, listen. Thank you, Gerry. It's wonderful to hear you speak about that work. What's about you yourself, Gerry? What will you be doing for Christmas?

I'll be with my family back home back in Belfast, some are in Belfast and some in Dublin. It'll not be the same Christmas this year because we lost my mother back in January of this year, at 98. So, she'd had a good innings, but, it'll be a different Christmas. We'll remember last Christmas with her, but it'll be a bit different this time. But, anyway, it'll be just nice to be with the family anyway. 

Well, despite that element of sadness, I do wish you a happy Christmas, Gerry, with your family. It's been really lovely talking to you. It's been really interesting to hear about your journey as a priest, your thoughts about the priesthood, and the theology and writers who influence you in the work you do. So thanks so much for making time to talk. And for listeners, I'll put some links to some of the organisations you mentioned and the work that you mentioned, in the episode notes so people can follow-up. 

Thanks very much for the opportunity to say a few words. 

And listeners do tune in next week from Christmas day onwards for a wonderful Christmas episode, which is a good conversation and includes some church Christmas music. And there's also a fantastic New Year's Day episode coming up with a focus on working for peace. So thanks ever so much for making the time, Gerry. 

Thank you very much, Theresa. 

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.