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	The Sad and Loveless Life of Brian Sunday Independent [Ireland] October 22, 2006 http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1710644&issue_id=14796 Someday, with the benefit of hindsight, someone will succeed in unravelling one of the great mysteries of the age - the sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful, relationship between the Irish people and the Catholic Church. But on Friday night on the Late Late Show we perhaps got a glimpse of what it was all about. It came from the most unlikely source - none other than the prototype trendy Irish priest, Fr Brian D'Arcy, or just Brian as he prefers to be known now. Did poor Brian D'Arcy, chaplain to the Irish music industry for years, get a lump in his throat listening to Kenny Rogers preceding him on the Late Late : The Gambler and all that talk of knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep? "Know when to walk away, know when to run." He probably should have walked away from the institution of priesthood having been twice sexually abused by his colleagues. But he stayed. And he is still clearly trying to come to terms with that. Brian talked about the full life he has had thus far but what echoed around it all was the emptiness of a life lived without intimacy. Here was a man confessing again to the nation, perhaps partly because he has no one at home to confess to. He talked of friends and family but can anyone really truly know themselves or be said to have lived a real life if they have never had a normal loving intimate partner? Friends and family are all very well but a man needs someone to go home to. And Fr Brian confessed that the only intimacy he ever experienced was a botched twisted intimacy at the hands of men who were, in Brian's words, squeezed into being priests. "If you try to squeeze a guy into being a priest you're going to get an abuser." If you try to be a celibate or a priest or other things not reachable, he said, humanity disappears with it. Brian's humanity hasn't disappeared. He was human for us on Friday night when he exemplified everything about our ambivalent, painful relationship with clericalism, the disease that he effectively admitted has destroyed the Catholic Church in Ireland and our relationship with it. He seemed nervous and nervy and close to laughing or crying or breaking down. Clearly he has admitted to himself the things he was saying; but to confess them to the nation, and to know that everybody would understand, must have been even more painful. Because everybody does understand and everybody shares his sadness about the last few decades of the priesthood. He wouldn't take a vow of celibacy if he had his time over again. Indeed, given that his only experience of sexuality was being, as he put it, lunchtime recreation for one cleric and assistant in masturbation for another, he realises that it was unhealthy for him to take the vow. He thinks there is no rational explanation for mandatory celibacy. What he was saying was what we all feel about clericalism. It didn't have to be this way. Irish people loved and respected the church; it was the centre of the community, the keeper of the spirit of the Irish people. But by denying the men who ran it their humanity it hurt them and they in turn hurt those who loved the church the most. It didn't have to be that way. Brian D'Arcy was ordained in 1969, the year of the summer of love. But he was never free to love. Instead, pain was at the heart of his decision to love and serve his God. It was an honest and a sad, sad moment.
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