In the unsavoury company of Father Brendan Smyth, Father Sean Fortune is remembered as a rotten apple in modern Irish Catholicism's overbrimming barrel of scandals. Behind his shiny priest's collar and flashy cassock, his pulpit zeal and radio trendiness, his preoccupation with faith healing and his enthusiasm for State-financed community development, Fortune, as revealed by Alison O'Connor in this explosive book, was an ugly thug and conman.
"Flapper" Fortune specialised in bullying, money-grabbing, cheating, dividing parishioners and buggering boys. A control freak, he took his own life rather than face trial and imprisonment, arrogantly and unrepentantly leaving " a message from heaven" to be read out at his funeral mass. Fortune's total unsuitability for the priesthood is traced by O'Connor to his own sexual molestation at the age of eight by unidentified abusers in his Co Wexford hometown of Gorey; and to an unstable and troubled mother, whose death by overdose in 1976 had a devastating effect on him when he was midway through his studies at what a contemporary called "an academy of debauchery" - St Peter's College, Wexford.
O'Connor's technique is to tell the story of Fortune's career as curate in Poulfur and Ballymurn from interviews with the priest's accusers (some of them anonymously), as well as from grief-stricken but Church-loyal relatives and concerned parishioners such as the late Sean Cloney. Further details emerge from psychiatric reports, Garda investigations and newspaper reports. A major restriction on the author is the litigation in trail by some of Fortune's accusers against the Bishop of Ferns, Brendan Comiskey, and the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Luciano Storero. In a landmark testcase in Church-State relations the Nuncio has claimed diplomatic immunity from the Irish courts even though a predecessor, Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, was informed of allegations. Recently Luciano Storero announced his early retirement for health reasons. O'Connor, the winner of a National Media Award for her coverage in The Irish Times of Fortune's story, assembles a reporter's case against the dead priest. Skilfully, she does this by giving a voice to the accusers, cheated of justice by the priest's suicide.
Regrettably, however, Brendan Comiskey declined to co-operate on legal advice from the diocesan solicitor, who felt that an interview would benefit only "those who may profit from the publication". Worldly advice, indeed! But advice that runs contrary to Bishop Comiskey's public commitment to "an open church". At his famous press conference in Wexford on February 28th, 1996, 10 days after his return from treatment of his alcohol abuse in the US, he courageously said, with the benefit of hindsight:
"The greatest single mistake I made was my failure to go immediately to those who were hurt and suffering. I went to the lawyers and not to the children and their parents. In later cases, I did this but not soon enough." Ultimately, Bishop Comiskey, not Fortune, is the central figure in this well-researched and tightly-written book. It was on his desk in Summerhill that the buck stopped; it is he who is still on trial by media. It is Brendan Comiskey who has been left to explain a message from hell. By taking his cue from lawyers he is allowing legal niceties to take precedence over gospel imperatives of love, trust, forgiveness and reconciliation. Over to you, Brendan, the self-styled "wounded healer".
John Cooney, a religious affairs commentator, is the author of John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland