Review of Book by John Cooney: "A Dawn Unforeseen, Journey from the West of Ireland to the Barrios of Peru," Luke Waldron, Liffey Press,

"A cottage industry has grown up on the historiography of the Irish Catholic Church, filled with official reports and misery memoirs relating to clerical child physical and sexual abuse. Yet, it is regretfully rare for churchmen to publish truthful autobiographies. So the publication is to be welcomed of the nomadic story of a former Irish missionary priest who left the Society of St. Columban in 1971.
In his early thirties Luke Waldron left the priesthood because of his growing unease with the Catholic Church’s blanket imposition of celibacy on all priests and with the clerical institution’s apartness from Peruvian people struggling to be free from poverty and to live with dignity.
A Dawn Unforeseen is an important memoir in which Luke Waldron, who grew up in the 1940s at Ballyroe near Knock, County Mayo and trained for the priesthood at the junior seminary of St Jarlath’s in Tuam, Co Galway, and spent seven elite years at the Columban formation centre at Dalgan Park near Navan in County Meath, reflects seriously and publicly on 50 years of hopes and frustrations with Mother Church.

He is convinced that the issues which his book highlights are relevant not just for Catholics today and people of all faiths as well as for everybody who dreams of a better world.

For Waldron the reformist Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 opened a period of great hope, but that regrettably this mammoth assembly’s agreed proposals to bring some democracy into the Church’s governance and update its approach to culture and the modern world were shelved by the Vatican elite.

In this riveting book Luke Waldron puts flesh and blood to the unprecedented numbers of clerics who left the priesthood including his own of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 clerics from the priesthood since the Council ended. He gives a credible explanation of how a changed understanding of the nature of the priesthood occurred in the second half of the twentieth century remains unresolved today by the institutional church.

Waldron’s youth coincided with the height of the authoritarian clericalist church embodied by the imperial Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and he insists that a window was shut after the Council as the Church retreated more and more from accountability into its own world of autocracy, control and secrecy.
Of the formidable McQuaid, Waldron writes: “One could hardly overstate the church’s power which reached far beyond the silent pews in church, to education, health and the political sphere.”

According to Waldron, one of the most blatant cases of clerical interference in politics came when the hierarchy led by McQuaid “toppled probably the finest Minister for Health the new Republic has seen” - Dr Noel Browne.
Such was the lasting impression on the deferential young Waldron of Browne’s marginalisation in the 1950-1 Mother and Child Scheme as a result of the secretive machinations by Maynooth against John A. Costello’s Government he visited his hero in his Connemara cottage years later after his return from Peru.
‘As we drove up to the neatly-kept thatched cottage, we saw a tall, slender figure in muffled coat and cap at the reek of turf,’ he writes. ‘It was indeed the great man himself! We were welcomed into their cottage by his wife Phyllis and over a glass of whiskey first, and later tea and scones, we chatted freely for a couple of hours. Driving away one couldn’t help but be refreshed and uplifted. At the evening time of his life, this frail man and his faithful partner lived tuned-in to the events in Ireland and beyond. They were content in simplicity, and surrounded by none of the trappings available to a government minister.’
This brief personal reminiscence tells volumes more than do many academic tomes of how Browne’s stature continues to rise in direct contrast to McQuaid’s fall following the Murphy Commission’s Report into abuse and cover-ups in the archdiocese of Dublin.
Waldron’s own revelation moment came when he was administering the last rites to a teenage boy with tuberculosis in a shanty town in the suburbs of Lima - the boy's fixed stare stayed with him for years. ‘It seemed to say, “Padre, look at these conditions, look at what they have done to me”’.
This spurred Waldron, who already felt uneasy about his vocation, into realising that his training at St Jarlath’s and at Dalgan Park was grounded in evangelizing the heathen and was not fit for purpose in a culture defined by oppressive poverty. His faith was to be rocked to the core.
‘Sent to convert, he was now the converted’ to the belief that the Catholic message of saving souls could do nothing to help the thousands of people living in grinding poverty.
With some like-minded colleagues, he pushed for reform. This entailed a new pastoral approach inspired by liberation theology which taught that aid was no good if it just patched over the misery. It questioned the building of big churches and the ethics of playing golf with the elite.
Five chance encounters illuminate his growing disenchantment with both clericalism and celibacy.
The lofty Dermot Ryan, McQuaid’s successor as Archbishop of Dublin, on a visit to Peru as the guest of the Columbans, was given a tour of the mission which included a mothers' club in the suburbs of Lima, where he was perturbed to find a calendar with scantily clad ladies next to a picture of the Sacred Heart. The mothers were indifferent to Ryan’s discomfort: ‘What's the problem, Padre? What planet do you live on?’

When BBC Panorama’s James Mossman, ‘a special person’ who had covered the Cuban missile crisis, came to the parish of El Menton to film a documentary on the Latin America-wide struggle between Christian reform and communist revolution, he asked Luke to say what exactly he was he trying to do. ‘Well, James, the short answer is, we are trying to empower the poor. This is a process. Firstly, we try to help them break free of a mindset that tells them they are of little worth and that cruel poverty is their lot. and allow them to think for themselves.’

The then archbishop of Lima, Juan Landazuri Rickets, was no radical but realised that the wheels of change were already in motion, and though he hated conflict, he appointed Gustavo Gutierrez, the proponent of liberation theology, as his theological adviser at meetings of the Conference of Latin American Bishops, CELAM,.

Luke also cherishes an ‘engrossing conversation’ with the American writer, poet and anti-Vietnam war protester, Daniel Berrigan S.J, on a rainy night in El Menton around 1968 when he was on the run from the FBI.
Engrossed in the empowering process, Luke contended that past generations of Catholic missionaries had underestimated their ‘flock’ as talented, intelligent people with a rich culture who needed education and facilities, not more churches and sacraments. He and his colleagues learned too late that the deep divisions had opened up in the Columban ranks as the older clerics saw the new approach as being disloyal to their sacramental mission and moved to defend the old ways.
The Columban top brass instructed a weak local superior to dismantle the team. His crack-down was ‘ruthless and dictatorial’ delivering a serious blow to the new participatory approach to pastoral action. Luke was moved to a new parish built entirely on the city's former dump on the other side of the river Rimac.
Luke left the clerical state and married Carmen, a fellow social worker of Peruvian nationality with whom he had fallen in love. His apprehension that he would be seen as a “spoiled priest'” at home proved unfounded when his parents respected his decision.
What shook him, however, was the ‘coldness and lack of humanity’ from his religious superiors who regarded him as ‘a walking source of grave scandal, whose future activity in the church had to be drastically curtailed.’

On their return to Peru, Luke and Carmen earned their living as community development workers and they diversified to make 40 film documentaries, including one about the people who were ‘disappeared’ during the political violence there in the 1980s. When the situation deteriorated at the end of the eighties, Luke and Carmen moved back to Ireland.
In line with his commitment to dialogue, Luke justifies the publication of his story with the admonition that ‘an understanding of recent church history is vital if we are to comprehend and face the burning issues of the moment.’
I second this insight from my period as Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times in reporting extensively a dispute between the Columban Society and a member of its governing body, Fr Frank Purcell, an Australian. This was about the lack of recognition in canon law of human rights. Long-standing attempts at a resolution involving Archbishop Ryan ended with Rome backing the superiors in the Society. Purcell resigned from both the religious order and the priesthood. Purcell, who had served in the Philippines, returned to Melbourne. 1. ‘Challenge of legal justice within mission order’, The Irish Times, Monday March 2, 1975.

In my archive I have an Irish Times editorial from 1975 which remains worth quoting for its relevance today:
‘Father Purcell’s departure means that the rights and wrongs of his case against the Society, in which he claimed the Society had violated human rights, will not be independently assessed. It is therefore a sad moment both in the history of that illustrious Irish missionary society and in the Irish Catholic Church. A Church that preaches reconciliation and love must find it difficult – indeed painful – to realise that the necessary procedures to see that justice is done are lacking in its organisation framework.
‘However, as Fr Purcell himself remarked, “if the case serves to arouse Catholics to a realisation of ‘the urgent need for adequate procedures for settling disputes promptly and fairly”, it will have been worth the effort and pain’.
‘Whatever the hopes of future procedural development in the Catholic Church’s jurisprudence, the fact remains that in this holy Year of Reconciliation, the Church in Ireland has shown itself unable to resolve a cause celebre. It has also lost an energetic and idealistic priest.’ 2. Undated cutting of The Irish Times, ‘Father Purcell’.

The Purcell Affair is well worth a revisit in conjunction with Luke’s book. Frank wrote a detailed account of his dispute which was never published. It is not lost to posterity as a friend of Frank the late Una O’Higgins O’Malley gave a copy to the former editor of Doctrine and Life, the late Austin Flannery, who passed it on to me.

Of great interest also is the private opinion of a leading lawyer of the day saying that while Purcell had a solid human rights case, he would not win a legal challenge as canon law did not recognise human rights.

Significantly, Luke notes that divisions between traditionalists and reformers not unique to the Columbans. A search through documents in my archive testify to the truth of this observation. Issues occupying the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) today also preoccupied its predecessor, the Association of Irish Priests (AIP). For instance, in a 1972 report the AIP recommended the urgent creation of an agency to cater for priests, nuns, brothers and other religious personnel in difficulty with their vocations. 3. Priests leaving the active ministry, Report by the Association of Irish Priests, September 1972 gave statistics of departures from active ministry at home and abroad. It found that 15 diocesan priests officially left – laicized – between 1966 and 1970. But the numbers rose steeply sin 1969 and 1970. In Dublin diocese there were 19 departures from1962-1972, 13 of them after 1969 and six since January 1971. Between 1965 and 1970, 72 religious priests left the active ministry and 43 others joined the diocesan clergy. The report was presented by a sub-committee of the Association of Irish Priests, September 1972. It was prepared by Fathers Eugene Kennedy, Padraig McCarthy and Tony McNamara.
Similarly, Catholic publications were preoccupied by priestly departures just as today the concerns are priestly shortages. The Furrow of May 1965 carried an article by Sean Fagan on “The New Approach”, while the ACP debates was news in the Catholic press, as fore instance, in the article, Dissent among priests, The Catholic Standard, May 1, 1973.
In view of today’s shortages there is a lively debate about how the official Church would benefit from the services of ex-clerics, many of whom still regard themselves as priests. Luke Waldron tells of a move to reconnect with all the resigned Columbans aound the world. It traced 200 of which 40 were deceased. A questionnaire received 135 replies. Its two main findings were that the majority of respondents still held dear their bond of friendship with individual Columbans, and most had a positive relationship with the leadership of the Society (though for some it had been a conflictive one). But a major sticking point was the refusal of the leadership to accord basic pension contributions for their average 14 years of service in the Columban ranks.
I consulted the key work on the history of the Columbans but found no information about the internal conflicts involving Purcell and Waldron even tough the author had permission from the Columban Superior General to access internal records and personnel contacts. 4. Neil Collins, The Splendid Cause, Dublin, Columba Press, 2009.

When Luke Waldron completed his 250 page manuscript, he was convinced that his generation would not see any real reform of clericalism in their lifetime, though he lauded recent positive signs of reform in the Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland, Bridget Mary Meehan’s Roman Catholic Women Priests, and the Priests Initiative in Austria.

Unforeseen was that this book’s publication would coincide with the election in March 2013 of the Argentine Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, as the first Latin American Pope. This book should be read in the light of Pope Francis’s convening of the Committee of Eight Cardinals which has the task of drawing up a new constitution for the Curia. 5. Robert Mickens, Reforms “will decentralise, without weakening primacy”, The Tablet, October 14, 2013, and Francis’s convening an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops for October 5-19, 2014, to discuss issues surrounding the family. 6. Robert Mickens and Christa Pongratz-Uippitt, Pope calls family synod as Germans act on divorced and remarried, The Tablet, October 14, 2013.
These developments may fall short of Luke’s reform agenda but he will surely agree that they represent a dawn unforeseen. "
Review written by  John Cooney, a historian and commentator on church affairs, served as religious affairs correspondent of The Irish Times throughout the 1970s.