Crossing the Line. Martin Dillon

about European art and spent hours upon hours gazing at them. This hardly surprised me since the only time we ever saw the opposite sex, aside from nuns, was when a small number of locals, one of them an attractive young lady, attended our Sunday Mass to hear us singing Plain Chant or visited our small chapel when we sang monthly Compline and Vespers. I joined the choir when Fr O’Haire took charge because he made choir practice entertaining. He was a tall, lively man with a wonderful bass voice and an ability to draw others into his love of religious music. Sadly, he died of kidney failure in 1998.

      One of the things I had to overcome was making my weekly confession face-to-face with a priest I might later see in the classroom and playground. I was uncomfortable going to the priest’s room. I had only known the confession boxes in St Peter’s and Clonard Monastery where wire mesh and darkness separated me from the priests. After some investigation at Montfort, I settled on my literature teacher, Fr Mackrell, who was gentle and eccentric. He spent most of my confessions discussing the literature assignments he set for me. Nevertheless, the days prior to my weekly confession were often laden with inner conflict. Should I confess the sin of masturbation or should I not, I wondered. I didn’t doubt my contemporaries faced the same dilemma, but it was something we never discussed. I soon found creative ways to describe my transgressions by admitting I had ‘impure thoughts’. This generalization covered a host of venial sins of a sexual nature. Fr Mackrell recognised the deception and saved me embarrassment by never reverting to follow-up questions of the type one might get in St Peter’s or Clonard.

      During my first year, my grandmother, Margaret Clarke died and so too did Uncle Joe. I was unable to attend their funerals because my parents could not afford to pay my travel costs. Joe died alone of heart failure as he had always feared. Aunt Molly took his little Dachshund, Heine, to live with her and her many cats in London. Uncle Joe’s death had a profound impact on his brother, Gerard, who feared he, too, was destined to die young. In memory of Joe, he painted a work entitled, And the Time Passes to memorialise their closeness. It depicted two masked Pierrots, one in a striped costume and the other in a ghostly white outfit. The Pierrot in the striped costume was waving goodbye to the one in white departing. He placed both figures on a shoreline with a backdrop of sea and sky. The surrealistic images conveyed sadness and gentleness but were also reminders of the pain of mortality.

      I saw Uncle Gerard briefly after his brother died, and we talked about Joe’s passing. During our conversation, Uncle Gerard showed an intense interest in my life at Montfort. It amused him to hear about the two Belfast-born priests who dispensed justice. He noted they were definitely admirers of the Irish Catholic teaching method of ‘beating into you what you were unwilling to learn’. When he asked if I was happy living in a seminary, I was somewhat baffled because I had never associated becoming a priest with happiness. Seeing confusion in my silence, he patted me on the shoulder and assured me Montfort was a fine academic place for me to learn the classics.