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'A History of Loneliness' Priests as Pariahs
A quarter of the way through John Boyne’s novel A History of Loneliness, we find the book’s narrator and main character looking for a seat on the train. Fr. Odran Yates is a young Irish priest on his way to visit a friend. The packed train confronts him with the dismaying possibility of having to stand for the next two and a half hours, but he quickly sees the advantage and disadvantage of being a priest in Ireland in 1980. The advantage is the deference his collar summons: several passengers, including a pregnant woman, offer him their seats, and one man insists on buying him lunch. The disadvantage is unwelcome attention: he’s not hungry, and watching eyes keep him from speaking freely with the woman across from him.
How times change! Later in the novel, we find the same Fr. Yates being interrogated in a police station in 2011—his reward for having tried to help a lost child in a department store. Thirty years on, in the era of the sexual-abuse crisis, his collar calls up doubt and hostility as quickly as reverence. In this changing environment, Fr. Yates struggles to make sense of his own calling.
Boyne’s attention to the circumstances of priestly life in real-world Catholic Ireland was what drew me to this latest book by the author of the best-selling novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I’ve often wondered how it is to be a good priest in the age of suspicion. How does one bear it and keep courage? A History of Loneliness, drawing in part on Boyne’s consultation with priests in Dublin, gives us an inside view of the struggle. In the acknowledgments, Boyne addresses himself to the direct victims of clergy sexual abuse, but also to those “dedicated and honest priests who have seen their lives and vocations tarnished by the actions of their colleagues.”
That said, the main question in Loneliness is just how “dedicated and honest” Fr. Yates has been. Decades of scandal have shown that the abuse crisis cannot be reduced to the deeds of individual offenders acting in isolation. Others have aided and abetted the abusers, from fellow priests and parishioners who looked the other way, to bishops who reassigned predators without holding them accountable. In this extended examination of conscience, Fr. Yates looks back on his own life and wonders if he is as innocent as he has presumed himself to be.