'That was the moment when the dream of a liberal church died'

Making an order to cut down cherry trees that another man had cultivated with love; that’s a real story

I GOT BACK from hospital last week, barely able to walk beneath the cherry trees, which are now in bloom, and then I caught a cold, so it was back to the bed for another week. I tried to get up on Wednesday but someone was on the radio talking about priests being silenced by the Pope, and I feared I might be delirious, so I hid under the blankets for another day.

If the Pope was on Facebook he might be upset by the things people say about him. But I doubt if he’s on Facebook, so we can conclude that he’s not lonely, because according to the Medical Wallah, Facebook users are invariably lonely people.

“People on Facebook,” the Wallah said, “are isolated, and trapped inside their own images. They curate exhibitions of their public self with narcissistic abandon; do you know what I mean?” I did. But I didn’t want a lecture. And he probably read all that in the Guardian anyway. All I wanted was his lettuce, because he’s got the best heads in Leitrim. So I said, “Are you on Facebook?” He said, “In fact I am, but that’s different.” He gave me the lettuce and I came home by Fenagh, a village I can never pass without remembering John McGahern.

The first time I saw McGahern was in Maynooth where he was delivering a lecture. He never took off his overcoat and looked like a farmer on the stage as he bowed very grandly towards the illustrious clerics who sat on chairs behind him. A professor introduced him, speaking with impeccable diction and clarity, but when McGahern approached the microphone he spoke in a rustic whisper that suggested he might be terrified of waking the dead if he spoke too loud. Of course no one listened to the introduction but you could hear a pin dropping when McGahern started speaking.

The first time we actually met he referred to that night in Maynooth. He said he was brought up to the professor’s apartment afterwards for drinks and noticed, as he was using the toilet, that the taps on the bathtub were gold. “They looked lovely,” he said, without smiling.

I know some people associate McGahern with Proust, whom he loved, but I associate him with Tolstoy, because sometimes a single image in McGahern is like an entire novel. Like the sound of a spade heard across the fields in the still air, or the image of a man sitting on a bench eating oranges, or an old clock in a child’s arms, as he sits in a field marking the hour of his mother’s burial in a far away graveyard.

On Saturday I lay in bed listening to Marian Finucane. I can tolerate Marian in bed but not when I’m up and about. There’s something relaxed about Saturday mornings when her voice wafts from the iPhone on the pillow as she’s going through the newspapers.

But her interview with Brian D’Arcy saddened me, especially when he described his obedient nature years ago as a novice in the monastery, cutting down all the cherry trees because the boss man didn’t like them. No wonder the old gardener chastised him so severely at the time. “What lunatic did that?” the gardener wondered. “What lunatic gave the order?” I wondered.

Himself and Marian were talking about the Pope and the silencing of dissident priests, and I was reminded of the day I first heard the mahogany voice of John Paul II blowing across the Phoenix Park from loudspeakers that didn’t allow for much subtlety in the pontiff’s sermon. The voice sounded harsh, with a military ring to it. And for me that was the moment it all changed. That was when the dream of a liberal church died and I knew it was only a matter of a few decades before the Italian leather shoes whispered again on the carpeted corridors of Ireland’s clerical palaces, with lists of troublesome priests that required censure.

But it was the boss man in Brian D’Arcy’s story that fascinated me. Making an order to cut down cherry trees that another man had cultivated with love; that’s a real story.

The funny thing is that I actually found a Facebook page for the Pope. It says he works at the Vatican, and there’s a photo of a man in white that looks exactly like the Pope. But, as Thomas Aquinas might say, you can never trust appearances. Even cherry trees can sometimes appear beautiful.

I didn’t want a lecture. All I wanted was his lettuce, because he’s got the best heads in Leitrim