"A Priest in the Family" by Colm Toibin

"A Priest in the Family" by Colm Toibin (2007, 18 pages)

Irish Short Story Week

March 11 to May 1

April 1 to April 6-Priest Stories

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, now open until at least May 1.  All you are asked to do is post on one Irish Short Story or a related matter and let  me know about it.   There are lots of ideas and links to stories in the resources page.    If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment.   I welcome guest post also, just contact me.  

"A Priest in the Family"  by Colm Toibin- (Wexford Ireland, 1955), from Mothers and Son, 2007,  is a story of the human side of the terrible scandal in the Irish Catholic Church involving sexual abuse of young boys, often alter boys.   Today's lead article in the online edition of the Sydney Morning Herald informs us that the Vatican has now mandated that all those in training to be priests in Ireland must undergo extensive training in ways to combat child abuse and deal with the urges they may have.   Priests have been directed to report cases of abuse they know of not to their local bishops but directly to the Vatican for fear of more cover ups.   I am a Catholic, not the best of ones, as are 80 percent of the people in the Philippines.   After the mass all the children go up to the priest to be blessed.   You can see the happiness in their faces and it makes the parents feel good also.  Sadly people are now reluctant for their sons to be alter boys, where it once was an source of family pride.    

"A Priest in the Family" is, as we could expect, a perfect gem of a story.   It is about the consequences for the family of a priest, a man well into middle years,wen he is exposed as a child molester.   The story is coming out in the paper and it will have to be announced in the Mass why the priest is being removed from his position.  The priest has come home to talk to his mother and tell her what is going to happen.   The siblings of the priest also are there.   They talk about how they will explain this to their children, who were always so proud to have a priest for an uncle.   It gave them special status.   

The siblings want there mother, now a widow and there are remarks in passing that it is good their father passed away before this happened, to go on a long trip out of the country until the scandal blows over.  The mother asks her son what will happen to him.   In a very sad moment in a very sad story she asks him if he will  be able to say Mass in prison.  

Join Us-Carmilla

I am going to have a week dedicated the stories in this collection soon.  I have already posted on a beautiful story from the collection, "The Song" and provided a link in that post where you could hear Toibin read the story.   I have also read and posted on his  great novel based on the London years of Henry James, The Master.   I have a Kindle edition of his novel Brooklyn and hope to read it soon.

This is the last Irish Short Story I will post on for the stories about priests segment.   We will next have stories by Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov.   In The Lonely Voice it seems Frank O'Connor favors the stories of Turgenev over Chekhov though it is clear he regards them as the best two short story writers that ever lived.   I will post latter in the event on stories by James Stephens, George Moore and William Carleton that center on priests.

Julian Barnes in his great book, The Best of Frank O'Connor says the next story in "Stories About Priests" is the most Irish of Chekhov's stories.


Mel u

"News For The Church" by Frank O'Connor

"News For the Church" by Frank O'Connor (1958, 11 pages)

Irish Short Story Week

March 11 to May 1

April 1 to April 6

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 31.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or and email and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge.  

I listened to Galway Bay F.M. 95.8 Radio, playing tradition Irish music while writing this post.   I recommend it if you like background music with your Irish Short Stories.    

James Joyce called Frank O'Connor "The Chekhov of Ireland".   Born as Michael O'Donovan in 1903 in Cork City, Ireland, Frank O'Connor was a very prolific writer with about 150 works to his credit.   I think it is for his short stories that he is most loved now.   


O'Connor in 1918 joined the Irish Republican Army, during the Irish War for Independence.  At the end of the war he was imprisoned by the new government for about a year because of his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that ended the war.   

After getting out of prison, O'Connors worked as a librarian, teacher and was named as a director of the famous Abbey Theater founded  by William Butler Yeats.   In 1950 he moved to the USA to accept a teaching position.   He began to publish short stories in The New Yorker to great acclaim.   He died in 1966, he had three children and an ex-wife.   The most prestigious prize in the world for Short Stories is the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for a collection of works by one author.   It is hosted in 

"Join Us"

Frank O'Connor is the author of the only book on short stories worth reading, The Lonely Voice:  A Study in the Short Story (1962).   I have read parts of it numerous times.   There are some maddening things in the book, O'Connor was a man of strong opinions from a time before "political correctness" took over in the universities and some of the things in the book that he says about Gays, Jews, and Women will put people off but I do not think he meant anything malicious by them.   I think a very good course in the short story could be devised by reading all the public domain short stories mentioned by O'Connor with him as our first look.   (There is more on The Lonely Voice in my post on it.   If you love the short story, you will love it more after you read this book, or at least I did).


I posted earlier during Irish Short Story week on two of the short stories of Frank O'Connor, "Guests of the Nation" and "The Majesty of the Law".   I did a search of the Kindle edition of The Best of Frank O'Connor selected and introduced by Julius Barnes on the term "priest" and got over 100 results.   


"News from the Church" gives us an intimate look at what goes on inside a confessional when a nineteen year old girl confesses she has had sex with a man she barely knew, as seen from the point of view of a sixty year old priest.   The priest had a reputation as a liberal easy confessor, often to take to task by the other priests as to easy.   The priest is not a perfect man.   He hates the English, the Irish government and the middle class.

"The last priest that heard my
confession, left the church the next day"-Carmella

As the woman enters the confessional he asks her when her last confession was and she tells him last week.   He wonders why such a young woman would feel she had to confess so often.   He asks her what her sins are since her last confession and he lectures her when she confesses to bad language and he gives her some good advise when she tells him she got drunk.   He tells her a bit of a drink is OK, he likes it himself but to much can cloud the judgment.  Then he is shocked when he says "what else" and he says "I had carnal intercourse with a man, father".  Here is the ensuing conversation.




"You what?"  he cried incredulously.  You had carnal intercourse with a man?  At your age?   


"I know", she said with a look of distress. "It's awful".


"It is awful" he replied slowly and solemnly, "And how often did it take place?"


The priest cannot get over his shock.   He is very offended that this strange to him woman has come in to his confessional and put the burden of thinking about this on him.    He begins to go out of his way to humiliate the woman.  He makes her give him a detailed description of exactly what she and the man did, he is himself a virgin.   The priest does all he can think of to degrade the woman and destroy her self respect.   


There is little good to be said about the priest in this story.   As the story ends the priest sees  the young woman walking out with her head held low and he gets an ugly moment of pleasure from it.   I wondered what the woman thought and how many other people the priest had abused while hiding behind his collar.   


The next story I will post on for The Stories about Priests Mini-Event will be "The Priest" by Colum Toiban.

Mel u

"Death In Jerusalem" by William Trevor

"Death in Jerusalem" by William Trevor (1978, 16 pages)

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

March 12 to May 1

April 1 to April 6

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two (yes it is a long week!).   There are lots of ideas and links to stories in the resources page.   All you are asked to do is to post on Irish Short Story (or a work related to this area such as a biography of one of the writers or a historical work with some good background information) and let me know about it.   You are welcome to guest post on my blog if you like.   If you have any questions, concerns, complaints, just let me know.

As I began to post consider posting on Irish short stories centering on priests, I previously posted on Daniel Crockery's very well done story, "The Priest" I did a Google news search on "Priests in Ireland".  A picture of a priesthood in moral crisis quickly emerged with the many stories of  sexual abuse of children by priests and cover ups by church officials.  Of  course this is only the small minority of priests but it seems to have made it harder for the priests in Ireland to be moral leaders.

I think if you surveyed readers of the genre and asked them who the best living short story writer was you would get close to a split vote between Alice Munro and William Trevor.   Both are now in their eighties and both are very prolific writers.   Trevor's collected short stories comes to over 1200 pages.   His stories are normally shorter than Munro's.   Munro's are set in Canada, Trevor's in Ireland.   Both are very much cold weather writers.  

William Trevor (1928, County Cork, Ireland)  included "Death in Jerusalem"  as his contribution to his collection of short stories, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.  I hope we can take that as his endorsing it as a good representation of his work.   I posted on two of his short stories during Irish Short Story Week Year One, "Men of Ireland" and "The Woman of the House".   For sure Irish Short Story Week would not be complete without at least one post on William Trevor.   

"I can't wait for Gothic Week"
Carmilla

"Death in Jerusalem" centers on a priest and his brother, both well into middle age and their mother.  One of the themes found in as lot of the short stories I and others have posted on this year is the clash of moral obligations and the anxiety the inability to be a fully moral person causes.   I will just briefly state the outlines of the plot here in order to illustrate what I mean.   For sure this story fits Frank O'Connors conception of a short story that deals centrally with loneliness.   The priest and his brother have been planning a joint trip to Jerusalem for a long time.   They are conflicted when it comes time to go because there very elderly mother is very sick.  They both really want to go and they know it may be now or never.  (I am going to tell more of the plot now than I normally do.) Just as they arrive in Jerusalem the priest gets notified that their  mother has passed away.   He ponders what should he do, should he tell his brother who he knows will insist they go home at once.  There is nothing, of course they can do for their mother, there are other family members perfectly able and willing to handle all the arrangements.   I will stop here but you can see their is no "right decision" he can make.   

Do you have a favorite Trevor story?

I have a small collection of his short stories, maybe 40, and will, I am hoping, post more on his stories during Irish Short Story Week Year Three in March 2013.

I will next post on a short story by Frank O'Connor.

Mel u

"The Priest" by Daniel Corkery

"The Priest" by Daniel Corkery (1929, 11 pages)

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

March 12 to May 1

Stories about Priests

April 1 to April 7

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, now  set to run until May 1.   To participate all you need do is to post on one Irish Short story or a related matter and let me know about it.   You are also welcome to guest post.  You need not follow my schedule at all.  I am updating all posts by participants periodically and at the end of the event I will do a master post spotlighting the blogs or writings of each participant and it will have  permanent place on the fixed pages below my header picture.


There is a strong cultural link between the Philippines and Ireland in that both are predominately Catholic countries which have been for long periods been exploited colonies of largely Protestant countries.   In both cases English became the language of the ruling class and in time of most literature.  Priests also play a big part in the day to day lives of the people, especially those in smaller towns. 

"This event has hit a new low, a week
about priests?, I will be back when it
is over"- Carmilla

I have decided in observation of Holy Week to post on four stories about priests, written by Irish Authors.   We will also have our first guest this week.   I will be posting on what Julian Barnes said Frank O'Connor regarded as Anton Chekhov's most Irish of short stories, "The Bishop".  I read this story twice and if you asked me to guess where it was written for sure I would say Ireland.   Chekhov will be traveling to Dublin via schooner, departing in 1902 from St. Petersburg,and will spend the rest of Irish Short Story week in Dublin as the guest of Lord Dunsany.  Our next guest, representing the Irish Americans, will be the very Catholic   Flannery O'Connor.

Daniel Corkery

Daniel Corkery (1878 to 1964-Cork, Ireland) was a teacher at several schools. At the close of his career he was Professor of English at University College Cork where Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain were among his students.  He was active in the Irish language revival movement.   He was also a playwright, wrote a novel, and some cultural works but he is mostly read now for the short stories he wrote about the lives of people in Cork.   He published several collections of short stories in his life.  (I read this story in William Trevor's anthology The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.  His work is not yet in the public domain but will, under the laws of Australia at least, soon be.)


"The Priest" is a first rate story about a sixty-two year old priest with a small mostly rural parish.   He somehow feels he never really connected with the people of his parish.   I really could relate to the opening few lines of this story

"Ok Carmilla, Ruprect is
coming back soon"-Rory

"Because Father Reen had been reading all day the rain had meant little for him.   Since breakfast time he had not been disturbed, his housekeeper had not even entered, and he had reached an age-he was sixty-two, when a day of unbroken quiet was the best kind of holiday".

This story has an abundance of references to the beauty of the country side and the priests real love for it.   He likes peace and quiet and solitude.   His parish is a pretty good size one so he spends a lot of time on his horse, doing his priestly duties.    His two most important duties after conducting masses are hearing confessions and preforming  last rites.   

An Irish Breakfast

Father Keen has been informed that one of his parishioners is near death.   The man lives ten miles away, a long horse ride, so he has a lot of time to think about his life and his role as a community priest while on his way.   Father Reen arrives at the home of the dying man.   All of his children, adults now, and his wife are there waiting for him.   Corkery does a very good job of showing us how this feels to the priest, who has done the exact same thing many times before and lets is see how the family acts.   They are in sorrow over their father, a less than perfect man, but their father nevertheless, and they are also concerned over how the property he leaves will be divided up.  They do not want to fight in front of the priest.


"The Priest" lets us see how it might feel to be a 62 year old priest in rural Ireland in 1929.  For sure it took a lot of faith and determination and it was a very lonely life for the very educated priest among the country people.   It lets us see the great sadness in the heart of the priest as he wonders whether or not he has really made a difference in the lives of the people he tends to.  


There is another story by Corkery in Frank O'Connor's Classic Irish Short Stories and I hope to post on that during during Irish Short Story Week Year Three which I plan to begin on March 1, 2013.  


The next priest story I will post on will be "Death in Jerusalem"  by William Trevor.


Mel u