By John Fitzgerald
Continuing the story of the days when religion ruled in Callan and Fr. Bob (not his real name) patrolled the district with a blackthorn stick in search of courting couples in the ditches. You can read the previous parts on the Observer website.
When the Missioners came to town, they put the fear of God back into anyone who might have gone lukewarm in the expression of his or her faith.
The Devil was mentioned so much that mass-goers, even the most ardent believers, wondered if the preachers were a bit obsessed with Old Nick, or the Prince of Darkness… as he was also called.
Father Bob loved the Mission. Its Zero Tolerance attitude to sin appealed to him. The only dampener for Fr Bob was the occasional anti-drink sermon…it spoiled the feel good factor projected by all the hellfire and damnation talk.
God had changed water into wine, and sure the Good Lord might have changed water into whiskey or beer if that’s what the auld disciples were having on the night, he pleaded, when the Bishop, and visiting Missioners, cautioned him on his attachment to Callan’s pub culture.
He liked one sermon given by a Limerick Redemptrist: The Missioner had fired the collective imagination of his flock with images of blazing cosmic infernos, ghastly demons with red hot pitch forks and long swishing tails gathering all the sinners on the day of Judgment and herding them into boats to convey them to the Sea of Flames.
The visiting cleric enlarged on the relative discomforts and horrors of the Seven Circles of Hell, listing the variety of tortures devised by the Devil to bring horror to a fine art.
Just when parishioners thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, he would pluck even more graphic and mind-blowing images out of his treasury of hard-hitting nouns and adjectives to describe the fate that awaited anyone who even thought about committing a sin.
And he contrasted this awful doom with the blissful state to be enjoyed by people who behaved themselves on this earth. They would be up in Heaven, basking in divine glory, and the lost souls in Hell would forever cast their eyes heavenward, to glimpse with envy the fantastic time being had by all the good people, who sang with angelic voices and were shrouded forever in glowing white robes.
There would be no fire brigades in Hell, he reminded his petrified listeners, and the smoke from the burning pit, billowing upwards through time and space, almost reached the floor of Heaven itself.
Fr. Bob said it was the best description of Hell he had ever heard, and congratulated the priest on his eloquence. The anxious, panicky, and near-trembling congregation filed out of the Big Chapel in a state of pure terror…
Most of them had done penance before the Mission, or half way through it, but the reassuring rattle of that shutter sliding across to reveal a forgiving priest could not come soon enough for them.
Confess today…Tomorrow it may be too late was the catch-cry that sent them post haste to the church. What if a sin had been forgotten? Your memory could fail you, but the Recording Angel would have noted it in the Book of Life and St. Peter would remind you at the Gates. There was no escaping the sword of Divine Justice in those days.
On a lighter note: After one hell-raising sermon about the Last Day, two well-known Callan characters exited the church in Green Street. The Missioner had described a scene of abject misery and devastation wrought by legions of angels and demons, heavenly hosts, dragons, and Beasts of the Apocalypse on the earth as the end of the world devoured all humanity.
Tom was silent for a few minutes, standing in the chapel yard, as he contemplated the doom and gloom that lay in store for the world. Turning to his friend Vincent, he moaned: “Jeepers, the Last Day is going to be a terrible day altogether.”
Vincent chided him: “It’ll be nothing compared to the day after…when they’re cleaning up after all them feckers”. “Right you are, Vincent”, said Tom, “And ‘tis you and me that’ll be given the scrubs and the shovels…like always.”
After serving with distinction in Callan, Father Bob became Parish Priest of a nearby village. He decided against morality patrols in his new parish. The population was too small to warrant a crusade of the kind that proved so efficacious in Callan.
And the times were changing. As the swinging sixties approached, increasing numbers of courting couples objected to being beaten out of ditches on dark nights.
So the Blackthorn Stick was decommissioned. Fewer volunteers answered the call when asked to assist in the enforcement of Catholic morality. They just remained in the pubs, refusing to budge when the call came.
The good old days of Catholic supremacy had begun to fade…
