Essays: It seems impossible now to imagine that Ireland was so innocent and optimistic, so easily thrilled and consoled as it was when the Pope visited Ireland for three days in 1979.
So much brackish water has passed under the bridge since then. As the vaunting tiger economy prepares to reprise the 1990s boom it's easy to forget that our hurtling national journey has taken us past the graves of the Kerry babies, Ann Lovett and the Magdalenes, through abusive religious-run orphanages and industrial schools, and beyond the discredited figures of Bishop Casey and Fathers Cleary, Fortune and Smyth. Liberal legislation and its secularising effect on Irish society is as naught compared to the self-inflicted damage wrought by a dissembling, self-serving, Rome-inspired agenda to get the Church off the hook when it came to the matter of apologies and compensation.
So, reading 3 Days in September: When the Pope Visited Ireland, most particularly when one personally recalls that period in our recent history, is like looking at a time petrified in amber, a tiny, still picture of us all frozen, prelapsarian, on the cusp of realisation. It is a genuine surprise too when one finds that this anthology of many authors' recollections of that September is not just a dull trudge through easy pieties, sunny weather, folding stools and curly "sangwiches". There's plenty of that here but, sitting alongside the school-essayish 'When I saw the Pope' pieces are some very fine, thought-provoking, often funny, well-written contributions by the likes of Patsy McGarry, John Breen, Margaret McCurtain, Keith Ridgway, Aenghus Fanning, Vincent Browne, Tom Dunne, Matt Cooper, Frank McGuinness, Stephen Murphy, Nell McCafferty and Con Houlihan.
Vincent Browne depicts his 1970s self as a vaguely schoolboyish figure who, in an attempt to miss nothing, ends up meeting an increasingly bewildered and irritable Pope in two different welcoming lines at the Papal Nunciature. In Browne's recollection people read speeches "at" the Pope and, depressingly, in the TV coverage Brian Farrell's commentary identifies Browne as Bobby Molloy (they were separated at birth, though, weren't they?).
Matt Cooper, at 13, was officially too young to sign up to see the Pope, but he lied about his age and managed to get on a "yoof" bus trip from Cork to see the pontiff in Galway. Once there he spent quite a bit of time watching other "yong peepul" going "well beyond a handshake as a sign of peace" and combined this sentimental education with eating a bellyful of rubbish and vomiting all over the bus on the way home.
John Breen, at Limerick's Green Park Racecourse, waited for the Pope from 3 a.m. whilst a couple made love in their sleeping bag beside him. It was, he writes, "My first real sexual experience, only I didn't have it".
Keith Ridgway, who as a 13-year-old lived close to the Phoenix Park, managed to write his name on the top-plate of the Papal Cross before it was raised and takes no little pleasure in this since, as a gay man, under the Doctrine of the Faith he is considered "objectively disordered" and "evil".
There are also some great pen pictures of scenes away from the Papal masses: Aenghus Fanning's eerie, empty train stations as a trainload of journalists speeds through the rural night, or Tom Dunne's empty streets of Kilmainham as a "rumble of mumbling" rises from the Phoenix Park beyond. Then there's the wise guy, Monsignor Casimir Marcinkus from Chicago, known as "the Pope's bodyguard", who, seeing a reference to nuns on the plans for the Pope's visit to Maynooth, brusquely says: "No broads on the altar!" Indeed, according to Margaret McCurtain's account, "broads" were having trouble elsewhere. She and some other women waited for the Pope in the rain outside the Dominican Convent in Cabra. When the Pope did emerge, he said, "You should be in your beds", and one of his monsignors grabbed a woman's umbrella to guide him, unmolested by the elements, to his waiting car. McCurtain sees the encounter as metaphorical, writing: "That was where women in the Irish Church were in 1979: on the periphery."
For its thoughtfulness and honesty, one of the best contributions in the book is written by The Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent, Patsy McGarry, who charts the curve of his own relationship with the Church and his philosophical journey towards secular humanism, all of which culminate in the repair of a broken friendship at the Papal Mass in Galway. But last word goes to Keith Ridgway's closing thoughts from the Phoenix Park in 1979: "It made me realise that God is what we become when we gather together. And that against that crowd, against the backdrop of just a million of us, a Pope like this one looks very grey, very small. Like a man who has missed the point."
3 Days in September: When the Pope Came to Ireland, Various authors, with an introduction by Mary Kenny, Liberties Press, 239pp. €29.95
Author royalties from this book go to Simon Communities Ireland
Yvonne Nolan is a freelance journalist, critic and TV producer