Greg Daly
Former professional footballer Philip Mulryne was ordained a priest for the Dominican Order.
Photo: Philip McShane Vocations Sunday Supplement 2019
A former soccer international is set to form Ireland’s next generation of Dominican priests, writes Greg Daly
Every vocation story is special – God calls each of us as unique individuals with distinct tasks unique to us, after all – but among Ireland’s more recent vocation stories, that of Fr Philip Mulryne OP stands out.
Born in Belfast in 1978, the now Dominican priest was spotted playing football for his local parish team in the mid-1990s and recruited to the then all-conquering Manchester United. After a few years with Alex Ferguson’s side he moved to Norwich City, where he played over 150 times and was part of the Championship-winning side that saw the Canaries win promotion to the Premier League. Subsequent years saw him playing for Cardiff City, Leyton Orient, and others, along with 27 senior appearances for Northern Ireland before he returned to Belfast and – in 2009 – began formation for the priesthood.
Ordained in 2017, Fr Philip celebrated his first Mass at his home Church of St Oliver Plunkett, and over the last two years has worked at Newbridge College in Co. Kildare, where he teaches and acts as college chaplain.
For all Fr Philip’s story has been an unusual one, prayer has been a constant in his life, with the foundations of this habit having been put in place in his childhood home, where he grew up as the only boy with three older sisters.
“My mum taught me how to pray, and she insisted on prayers each night and things like that, so it was kind of a given, the Catholic Faith as part of your identity,” he says. “That’s not to say that I would have been going to Mass every week, but the foundations were laid there.”
Habit
The habit of prayer is, he thinks, the most important thing in learning what God wants of us in life.
“I think the most the most essential thing is prayer-life,” he says. “If somebody is not living a life of prayer, if prayer is not part of their daily life, and if they’re not setting aside time to hear what God is trying to communicate to them, and therefore it’s much harder to hear that call and perceive it.”
Even as a footballer in his 20s this habit, and the sense of gratitude it helped instill, never left him.
“No matter what I did, every night I prayed. Even in the years in my 20s when I wasn’t going to Mass, it was still very much there, and I prayed in a way that was very natural. It wasn’t kind of rehearsed prayers, in a sense; I just spoke, so God was someone real,” he says.
“A lot of that time was thanksgiving for what I had already and what God had done for me already. It was just a conversation really, and I suppose that kept the door open, that kept the communication going on the spiritual side because I was continuing to pray,” he continues, adding: “The foundation really does come from there.”
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Christian values instilled in him by his parents were key too, he says, such that when he started to read his way back into the Faith in his late 20s, it was as though something was being revived that had never really gone away.
One of his sisters and her husband played a key role in helping fan those flames of Faith, he continues, explaining that though reading about Christianity was an important education, it was “still nowhere near it having an impact on how I lived my life or how I saw the world or whatever”.
Back in Belfast, his sister invited him to join a prayer group she attended, while his brother-in-law introduced him to the Legion of Mary.
“Those two things, volunteering in the homeless shelter and joining the Legion and also going to the prayer group every week, led me back slowly over the course of the next few months to regular practice, going to Mass again, learning to pray the Rosary,” he says. “Really that’s what it took – it was only six months after that, six months down the line, that I started to feel the stirrings of a vocation.”
He spent two years at St Malachy’s College in Belfast in formation for the diocesan priesthood, studying philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, but it was while he was in Rome in his third year of formation that a pull towards religious life came to a head.
“My whole time, even in seminary, there was always the question of religious life there, and at the same time I felt a strong vocation to priesthood,” he says, relating how he had looked at a few religious communities before Rome brought him into close contact with the Dominicans.
“Everything seemed to fit with what I was looking for in a religious order,” he says, relating how he contacted Bishop Noel Treanor about withdrawing from seminary then in order to discern properly about joining the Dominicans. Within a few months he was a novice friar in the order’s Cork community where he will soon return as Master of Novices, tasked with introducing younger men to the Dominican way of life.
“When I started I didn’t know much about the Dominican charism and the Dominican order,” he admits. “I knew individual friars, but until I read about it, until I started reading the life of St Dominic, reading about the history of the order and what it stands for…the charism captured me to the point that all the elements that I was looking for were present in it.
“I was looking for a very deep prayer life, but not so deep that I would be completely withdrawn in a monastic setting,” he continues. “There was still some sort of apostolic outreach, and preaching and teaching the Gospel and it seemed to me a charism that encapsulated those two realities, the apostolic way of life. That for me was exactly what I was looking for.”
In addition, he says, the Dominicans seemed like an order with a promising future. “I wanted to remain in Ireland because of what’s happening and I wanted to be part of the future of the Church here,” he says.
The draw towards a particular religious vocation isn’t a simple thing, he explains, but has both natural and supernatural elements.
“I think there’s the call itself which is a supernatural reality: that’s God’s grace coming and drawing you towards a way of life,” he says, continuing, “then there’s the very human element of your own personal experience and interaction in the context of religious life with different people that you’ve encountered, and basically looking at a charism and if it captures you.”
Willingness
Describing the willingness to try a vocation as an act of trust in God, Fr Philip says there’s a real danger in waiting for absolute certainty in these things.
“I think a lot of young men now, if they’re contemplating religious life, a lot of people come towards vocation with a kind of mindset that’s looking for signs everywhere, unmistakeable signs before they take the step,” he says. “And I think sometimes that can make discernment a little bit mechanical with a forensic kind of attitude, looking for everything, where for St Thomas and the medievals it was a lot easier: ‘This is a good that I want to pursue, and I give myself to it’.”
His own calling
Inability and unwillingness to make binding commitments are, of course, other factors in this, he adds, before pointing out that once he became aware of his own calling, with it filling his thoughts, it didn’t feel confining at all
“It’s not something I can sit on for years: this is calling me to a response,” he says. “And yet I’m absolutely free. Saying ‘yes’ was the most freeing decision ever.”
Young people who feel such a draw should have the courage to trust in God, he says.
“If God is calling you to this way of life, and you feel in your prayerlife that he’s drawing you towards it, then have the courage and have the trust that he knows you better than anyone else and he knows that this is where you’ll fully flourish as a human being and at the same time be doing his work,” he says. “This is where you’ll thrive, because he knows you.”