Martin O'BrienCorrymeela leader Pádraig Ó Tuama tells Martin O’Brien about the reconciliation and peace-building organisation
“Corrymeela is a space of encounter and welcome where we can hear stories particularly from people who feel excluded, or denied their truth and where we examine power within that, and confess our complicity in the divisions that inhibit our society.”
So says Cork-born Pádraig Ó Tuama (40), poet, theologian, disciple of St Ignatius of Loyola, one time aspirant priest and first Roman Catholic to hold the post of Leader of the Corrymeela Community, the Christian-based internationally recognised organisation committed to reconciliation and peace-building.
It’s been a past winner of the prestigious Japanese Niwano Peace Prize joining laureates including Dom Hélder Câmara and Cardinal Arns. Corrymeela is based in one of the most picturesque locations in Ireland, on the north Antrim coast just outside Ballycastle overlooking the Sea of Moyle – immortalised in the Irish legend Children of Lir – with Rathlin Island a short distance away and the Mull of Kintyre 14 miles to the north east.
Conversations
Looking out the window towards Rathlin Pádraig, Ó Tuama says: “You don’t have to decorate this scene. There is something about this beautiful place that speaks to you. Conversations in this place help people to move towards each other.”
A recurrent theme in our conversation is Corrymeela’s mission to facilitate encounter between those who are different and to heal relationships that are fractured.
Seventeen years after the Good Friday Agreement he says frankly: “I think we have come very far but that isn’t far enough. Peace is going to be painful and requires people to share well with each other.”
With a community of 150 members, thousands of supporters worldwide and 28 staff it works with 11,000 people of varied backgrounds and welcomes 6,000 visitors to its centre each year “a place of gathering, work, faith and discussion”.
Income comes from bookings, private donations and grants from government and foundations “but without 80,000 volunteer hours a year Corrymeela couldn’t breathe”.
Corrymeela pre-dates the Troubles and describes itself as the oldest organisation dedicated to peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
They cherish the international links they’ve forged down the years with the Agape Community in Italy, L’Arche, Focolare and more recently with the One Day At A Time (ODAT) group that combats crime culture in California as well as important long standing connections nearer home with Coventry Cathedral and the Iona Community.
When Mary Robinson, poet Michael Longley and Kathleen Kuehnast of the United States Institute of Peace lead the celebrations marking Corrymeela’s 50th anniversary at a gala reception in Belfast City Hall on Friday, October 30 they will recall with gratitude Rev. Ray Davey, the Presbyterian visionary who founded Corrymeela in 1965.
Davey served as its first Leader until 1980 describing it as “an open village welcoming to all”.
An ecumenical service of thanksgiving in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast on Sunday November 1 will be attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby and the Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin.
Corrymeela is said to mean “hill of harmony” in Irish so it is a fitting place for a peace centre that Pádraig Ó Tuama says “people come away from and feel that I have met myself, I have met my faith, God, each other and I have met something important that I am taking away from here and it’s the experience”.
Pádraig, a gay man, felt that experience for himself the first time Corrymeela registered on his radar, in early 2003 when as a 27-year-old he attended a retreat for gay and lesbian people “looking at faith and spirituality”.
He has written that he had known he was gay from the age of 11 or 12 and of that first Corrymeela encounter: “It was my first time to be in a place where my sexuality and my spiritualty weren’t antithetical to each other.”
Pádraig explains he couldn’t afford to study full-time at university and after several years doing youth work abroad in various countries including the Philippines, Uganda and Lithuania, as a mature student he secured a BA in Divinity from the Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, validated by the Pontifical University, Maynooth and a Masters in Theology from Queen’s University where his dissertation was entitled Jesus and the Marginalised: a narrative analysis of encounters in the Gospel of Mark.
Given his strong ecumenical leanings it was appropriate that his Masters course was run by the Presbyterian Union Theological College, a part of Queen’s.
He recalls that he commenced his Maryvale/Maynooth degree with the firm intention of becoming a seminarian at Maynooth as he felt a strong calling to the priesthood. However, half way through his course, in November 2005, Pope Benedict XVI ordered the publication of an instruction stating that persons “with deep-seated homosexual tendencies” cannot be admitted to seminaries as “such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women”.
A bishop who was giving pastoral support to Pádraig at the time advised him he could, therefore, not proceed towards the priesthood.
He recalls this time, on reflection, as “a desperately painful experience having to read about myself in this way”, as a potential candidate for the priesthood described in a Vatican document as not being capable of forming normal relationships.
“It [the instruction] was inaccurate and factually wrong and unfair to the many priests who are gay, who are great priests and who keep their vows. I think gay people are just as capable of psychological health or ill-health as anybody else.”
Asked if he would still like to be a priest it is evident that he has moved on and is comfortable in his skin as a practising Catholic exercising the common priesthood of the baptised faithful according to their particular vocation.
“Priesthood is a verb and I think I am doing it already,” he says with a little chuckle.
“I have found my vocation. I love the Gospels more than I ever have in my life through my study of them and my love of them and they are challenging me. I have to look to the horizon because today is so rich with the possibility of finding ways in which we can be better towards and with each other.”
How does it feel to be the first Catholic Leader of Corrymeela? Pádraig calls it “an amazing honour” and points out that he was chosen a year ago after a period of discernment both by himself and Corrymeela.
Corrymeela has, for him “always been a place of ecumenical friendships, so I hadn’t really registered that we hadn’t had a Catholic Leader”.
“I think my Protestant friends in Corrymeela were more aware than I of this in the lead-in to my appointment. As we’ve been celebrating our 50th year this year it has been important to remember that Corrymeela was begun initially as a Presbyterian witness to peace, the thinking being that by remaining under the banner of one denomination that the witness to peace could be more effective”.
But as time went on it “became clear that Corrymeela’s membership was to be open to all, and so that’s how it progressed”.
He reminds me that there has been a Leader from the South before, Trevor Williams, the retired Bishop of Limerick and Killaloe from 1994 to 2003.
He believes that “having a Catholic in this role feels indigenous to what’s always been there – that we are called to be in work, worship, witness and learning with each other in community and faith”.
Pádraig Ó Tuama speaks with a fervour about “my daily companion” St Ignatius of Loyola that would rival that of the most committed Jesuit.
“For me my relationship with faith and the Word was changed when I heard those words that were so central to Ignatius ‘The glory of God is found in a human being fully alive’.”
“There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think of the words ‘fully alive’. I look out for it in the people I meet at Corrymeela. I wonder how we can design our programmes in such a way that participants can experience themselves and others in a fully alive way, and I look for the unexpected moments of surprise and delight.”
Perhaps only St Ignatius knows what surprises await during Pádraig Ó Tuama’s leadership in Corrymeela.