Fr Tierney’s reflections put in print

A BOOK written by a former Liscannor-based priest and Irish Catholic columnist has been published just five weeks after he lost his battle with cancer.
Fr Martin Tierney tackles some of the mysteries of the Irish Catholic Church’s recent past in No Second Chance: Reflections of a Dublin Priest.
The short book is a candid and passionate reflection of his priestly life in Dublin from the 1960s until his retirement in 2005. He didn’t live to see the fruits of his latest endeavours.
In the book, Fr Martin questions why was the inordinate emphasis on obedience driven to the extremes of physical violence and why was a system of physical and psychological coercion used to deprive people of their unwillingness and ability to think.
He offers the book to the men who courageously left the priesthood or abandoned their studies having seen the light of the gospel of Jesus. They left seminaries when it was an act of extreme courage.
Stating that they have been ignored by the church for so long, he insists it is time to thank them and invite them to join with the Church in taking part in a renewal that will be much more than a return to the past.
He says that real questions were seldom asked about acts in which priests willingly participated. He says priestly allowed a system to diminish others without ever shouting stop.
“Why was authority abused? Authority is an act of service and Jesus gave us so many examples in his own life of going out to serve people. One could hardly compare the Church of the 1950s with the Jesus of the gospels. I lived through this period and most of my life was engulfed by the Church, its words and its influences and yet I did little.
“This book is a very small attempt to set the record straight. It is my effort in saying sorry, not just for all those of my age group who were in positions of authority but for quietly acquiescing in what every right thinking person must have known was wrong,” he states.
His second-last book, Battling the Storm, a Cancer Patient’s Diary, was published last May.
Although Fr Tierney was a priest of the Dublin Archdiocese, he was well known in Clare, having worked as an assistant priest to his friend Fr Harry Bohan in Sixmilebridge for two years. Both were members of the board of Céifin.
His father, Martin, who married Jean Russell from Dublin, was a native of Kilshanny and Fr Tierney holidayed regularly in North Clare.
In his latest book, Fr Martin describes his entry to Clonliffe College on September 11, 1959 and said that when the gate was closed behind him, what was called “the world” was consigned to a reservoir of memories.
“We straddled two worlds. We counted the days on our calendars until the next holiday, just as I had done in boarding school. We were hardly seeking that ‘chastity of the mind’ that demanded a cutting of former ties like the severing the umbilical cord of a newly born baby.
“As we entered Clonliffe, the interior battle in the desert of the mind, that is a prelude to holiness, was well below the horizon of our consciousness. We knew nothing of doing battle with our interior demons. All that would came later, I suspect that for most of us, it came well after ordination,” he stated.
“I don’t think I was ever really happy, I could never live up to my own idealism. By constantly falling short of the goals I set, I became a bit dispirited.
“We all adopted a new clerical garb. A long black serge dress like garment called a soutane. I felt uneasy, like a person who had been asked to accept a part in a play with which he is totally unfamiliar.
“I was wearing a costume not of my own choosing. We had left the ‘world’ behind. The world was a contaminated place. Toxic. The Church has always fallen to the temptation to define boundaries between itself and the world,” he added.
In the book, he recalls, surprisingly, that celibacy was seldom a topic of chat or debate among seminarians. He says it was like there was a suspected ghost that clerics couldn’t admit caused inner fear and apprehension. He describes the topic as a proverbial elephant in the kitchen that no one mentions. In his six years in Clonliffe, he only recalls two talks on celibacy.
Apart from the sentence, “even an elephant sleeps after intercourse,” the content of each deserted his memory completely. He knew several student clerics developed an obsessive fear of sexuality.
“Sex was like a nuclear cauldron, within which lay explosive possibilities for sinning, thereby making us unsuitable to be priests. Bad thoughts, masturbation, forbidden fantasies, burrowed into the mind.
“On one occasion, I now embarrassingly recall tearing pages from a book lest they continue to fuel fantasies of forbidden pleasures. Weekly confession was always a painful experience. Its healing effects were never more than transitory,” he states.
On one occasion, the archbishop advised him if he ever found himself alone in a room with a woman to make sure the door remained opened. This left Martin puzzled. Was it that women were a source of temptation to be kept strictly at arms’ length?
He says clerical students were aware that the type of stress involved in accepting a life of celibacy looks quite different from within the walls of a community of congenial fellow celibates and from the point of view of a solitary bachelor in a parish of families. He says a cold shower was never enough to reconcile the differences.
No Second Chance: Reflections of a Dublin Priest is now available in bookshops.