If Carlsberg did heroes, he would probably be amongst the best. Not that he was a beer drinker. Whiskey would have been Tommy’s drink.
When we buried him a few weeks back there was grief mixed with a fair amount of relief. For a while back he had lost the power of his legs and that wasn’t easy for him. He was glad enough to get away. But his life was an insight into how shallow and self-imposed are some of the problems that the Catholic Church says it faces. If the Church would have had the wit to ask him, Tommy would probably have been a great priest.
Tommy never married. He worked as a ‘cutter’ when shirt factories were still the main employers in Derry. During the years of the troubles he helped out in a youth club in the Bogside. The young ones loved him. It wasn’t that he was very good at football or snooker. He was just very good at being Tommy and having time and feeling for the multitude of faces that humanity presents. It didn’t do any harm that he had a constant twinkle in his eye and a great sense of humour.
My daughter, as a child, thought he was the lion in the Wizard of Oz.
His forte and his real vocation, however, was with street drinkers. He was the heart and soul of an organisation that housed men who had a strong weakness, as they used to say, for the drink. It too was in the heart of the Bogside when the troubles were the norm. With a small band of men and women Tommy created an environment that was as warm and welcoming as such a house can be. Anton-Wallich-Clifford, the founder of the Simon community said that it was the best such hostel that he had ever seen.
I thought of Tommy in the last few days when I saw a headline saying that there was a critical shortage of priests. One story was about a Catholic diocese in Ireland that has 22 or so parishes and in something like 15 years will have roughly twelve priests.
I increasingly find these stories irritating and irrelevant. They are not about the lack of vocations or the lack of people to take up leadership roles in the Church. They are about the unwillingness to break free or to go beyond customs and traditions that are now obscuring the heart and the substance of the issue. If, years ago, I had said to Tommy that he should become a priest, he would have thought that I wanted him to go to Maynooth or some such place and study philosophy and theology for seven years etc.
What I would have meant is that, on top of all the leadership roles that he already undertook, he should be leading the parish in the Eucharist and the other liturgies. He had more organisational skills, more pastoral ability and more theological and spiritual insight than most of the priests that I knew at the time.
I remember one night late, me and him going for a walk through the Bogside. I was in bad form and low on faith. We talked for a long time. What still sticks with me is him talking about Jesus and about the radical nature of his message. That when you thought you had done a lot and given a lot to others, the challenge was to keep giving with as much love as you could muster.
If I did heroes, Tommy would be up in the first division. He was an outstanding man. He would have been a good and holy priest. Like the lion in Oz, the Church needs to find courage to embrace change within the current norms of priesthood. It needs to recognise the strength of its faithful and properly utilise it so that more people can use the gifts, strengths and qualities they have been given, as Tommy did, both to allow them to fulfil the potential God gave them and to enrich the Church and community of which they are a part.
And, thank god, Ireland is full of men and women like Tommy. There is no lack of faith and no lack of people to administer parishes. What is lacking is the wisdom to know that old customs have hardened into regulations and the courage to admit just how foolish that is.
