Act of faith

Dublin, Ireland --

IN THE watery sunshine of a Dublin late afternoon, Father Steve Gilhooley is directing me by mobile phone to the bar where we are to meet. I turn a corner and there it is, a busy sprawl of tables on the pavement outside, chairs scraping on the stone as people come and go. But which is the Catholic priest?

A man in jeans and a denim shirt smiles, waves. Even sitting, he gives an impression of height, of security-guard solidity. A pint of Guinness sits in front of him. He doesn't look like a priest, even one who is poised to resign. But that would imply that you can tell a priest just by looking, which is a dangerous assumption to make.

A black suit, a collar, an air of piety: the uniform requirements of men of the cloth. But a church collar deserves no automatic respect. We have seen them marched through our courts in recent years, the men who used that uniform to hide the empty kernel of their own hearts beneath, men who abused children. As a parish priest in Currie, Balerno and Ratho, in Midlothian, Gilhooley never liked clerical collars. They told you what a man was, not who he was.

Gilhooley is not fooled by priestly uniform. At his junior seminary in Cumbria, the outwardly pious enforced a regime of physical and sexual abuse. For Gilhooley, now 42, the sexual abuse was less serious than for some other students, but it was there and the repercussions were intense. Several of his contemporaries would later attempt, or actually commit, suicide. For Gilhooley, the issue would erupt volcanically, the molten lava of suppressed childhood memories suddenly cascading into adulthood with devastating consequences. He underwent therapy, was advised to write down his experiences, and the result was the publication in 2001 of a searing memoir called The Pyjama Parade. The title was a reference to the weekly caning of young boys in their pyjamas.

When the book was published, it was against a backdrop of worldwide abuse cases involving the Catholic Church. America. Australia. Ireland. Britain. At first, the Church's reaction was to close ranks, attempting to protect its image at the expense of the victims' feelings. But Steve Gilhooley was an insider, a priest. That, though, didn't prevent vitriolic attacks for daring to bring the Church into disrepute. "One of the reasons I stood up and published was because I was listening to all these poor people saying they had been abused and then been called gold-diggers. One of the reasons I came out was to stand beside these people and say, 'No, they are telling the truth.' And then they went for me too."

There are few so self-righteous as the religiously self-righteous. Or so vicious. While Gilhooley's family and most of his parishioners offered support, there was a vocal section of the Church and its hierarchy that called him a liar and attacked him for disloyalty. Gilhooley believed honesty would cleanse Catholicism of the canker that had poisoned the Church for many years.

Read the article at Scotsman.com Dated July 17, 2005

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