Nurturing a Dominican future

As Dominicans celebrate 800 years, there are reasons to be hopeful in Ireland the provincial tells Greg Daly

If it seems fitting that Ireland’s Dominican province will see eight new priests ordained next month during a year in which the Dominicans are celebrating eight centuries since their foundation, Prior Provincial Gregory Carroll OP isn’t getting carried away. A shortage of vocations in previous decades is coming home to roost.

“We’ve talked about manpower almost since Noah came off the Ark, in a sense, because everybody could see that our manpower was dropping and we were becoming an aging community and we had very few entering,” he says, explaining that “having 13 enter seven years ago was a godsend, but in many ways it probably camouflaged things a wee bit too. We’ll probably be back to reality with the ordinations this year as we’ll only be left with four students and four novices, and hopefully we’ll get two or three or four next year into the novitiate as well.“

435-strong when Naas-born Fr Gregory entered the order in 1966, the Irish province had about 20 communities in Ireland as well as missions abroad in Australia, India, Trinidad, and Argentina, as well as its historical communities in Lisbon and Rome. Now, though, with fewer than 150 brothers – five have died in the last year – just 50 of whom are under the age of 65, with many of these still in training, it’s obvious that the province’s historical infrastructure is no longer sustainable.

It was against this background that the controversial decision was made in 2014 to withdraw the friars from their old 13th-Century bases in Limerick, Drogheda and Athy, as well as Dublin’s Leeson Park and Ballybeg parish in Co. Waterford.

“The decision in 2014 was to withdraw from five places – it wasn’t to close, it was to withdraw the friars and take it from there, and they’ve all worked out in different ways,” says Fr Gregory. 

Painful

“It was painful to be part of the final process, even though one was just a community without a church. It was very painful for us. It was painful being part of the final process. 

“I know as provincial you have to hold it together there and then, but when I got to my room the enormity of what we had done hit me, and yet it was a critical thing to do in terms of going forward, particularly for our younger men.”

The necessity of that difficult decision was clear at the time, he explains, hinting at how there’s a recognition in the province that further withdrawals may prove necessary. 

He recalls how one brother said on the day of the 2014 decision that “we have to make decisions, even if they’re wrong decisions – we’ve put off making decisions for far too long in this province”, while another remarked, “well, that’s the first of the haircuts”. The implication in that friar’s comment, he observes, is that it would not be the last.

“In other words,” he says, “we’ll have to revisit that, maybe not at the chapter coming up, but maybe at the next mid-term council.”

To those not familiar with Dominican life it might seem ludicrous that an order with 145 brothers might struggle to maintain fewer than 20 churches in Ireland, given how many of the country’s parish churches are run by just one or two priests, but this is to miss not merely the breadth of Irish Dominican activity but also the centrality of community life to the Dominican charism.

“The minimum number in a community according to the Constitutions is six, because if there’s six in a community, at least five of whom are actually resident, then that community has the right to elect its own superior – its own prior,” Fr Gregory explains, pointing out how that kind of low-level democracy, though of medieval vintage for the Dominicans, is rare in the Church.

Communities of fewer than six have appointed priors, picked by the provincial, he says, which is far from an ideal situation as the Master General Fr Bruno Cadoré OP pointed out when he visited Ireland in 2013, commenting on how the Irish province has a lot of appointed superiors.

Small communities also offer less scope for interaction  between friars and the transmission of wisdom and experience from one generation to the next, he says. He cites how as a young friar at St Mary’s on Cork’s Pope’s Quay he found that living in a large community he spent time with “very experienced pastoral men”, from whom he could “learn from them how to be a priest, and hopefully they learned from me at times too”.

This is something that doesn’t change with the generations, he explains, citing how the student brothers in the Dominican student house of St Saviour’s in Dublin would say of the older men there that they love talking to them, and talk about the wisdom they draw from them. 

Such intergenerational formation doesn’t stop with ordination, and to foster this, communities need to be of a viable size. “You need an interaction, and the reality is that if we’re dropping in numbers we can’t keep going with all the commitments we have,” he says.

With the province having been stretched thinly, older brothers have paid a heavy price.

“We had a lot of small communities being staffed by older men,” he says, continuing, “Take Athy: we had in John Walsh a young prior, but he had two men in nursing homes, and then three men – the backbone of the community – who were all in their late 80s when we withdrew.

“On the one hand,” he continues, “you could say they were happy and they were active – while their health wasn’t that great in many cases – but I look at it that if people support a priory by coming to the services there, they deserve a good pastoral service, and maybe at times they weren’t getting that because you had men putting themselves around the altar and saying Mass, at great service to the people, at great suffering, trying to get up and down steps, trying to give out Communion, the pressure of having to go down and say Mass and – being Dominicans – maybe trying to put a short homily together. 

“The way the Master put it to me was, ‘you’re not allowing the older brothers the space and the dignity to prepare for the next life’. I said, ‘but they’re happy’. ‘That’s a different thing,’ he said, but he said, at the same time, there are probably a lot of men doing things where they would prefer to have the space to say their prayers.

“They’d be very happy to be doing bits and pieces, but not to be carrying houses as many of the older men were doing,” he explains.

Hopeful future

All of this may sound gloomy, a bleak recognition of a harsh reality, but Fr Gregory is at pains to point out that the Irish province is very much alive; while this year’s jubilee celebrations naturally commemorate the Dominicans’ illustrious history in Ireland, they also point to a hopeful future.

“It’s the 800th anniversary of the granting of the bull of recognition of the order by Pope Innocent III to Dominic Guzman, the founder of the order, giving permission to have a band of preaching brothers, itinerant preachers who could go around preaching the Word,” he says.

“The jubilee was to start on November 7, which is the feast of all the saints of the order,” he says, “and the official opening of the year took place in Santa Sabina, the head house in Rome, presided over by the Master.”

The Irish province began its formal celebrations on Thursday, November 5 last, with lectures in the province’s principal house at St Mary’s Priory, Tallaght, on the history of the province and the biblical notion of the jubilee; a solemn procession into the church followed by evening prayer where a jubilee candle was blessed and lit, with smaller jubilee candles being lit in turn and passed to representatives of each of the communities present so the celebrations could be carried throughout the country.

Different communities have celebrated the jubilee in different ways, as is fitting for an order so radically decentralised as the Dominicans, and while hopes for a broadcast Mass, perhaps from the 13th-Century ‘Black Abbey’ in Kilkenny, came to nothing, there have been no shortage of other commemorations, ranging from the publication of a Dominican prayerbook to a televised studio Mass on August 21 and a late September concert in the National Concert Hall.

The composer Patrick Cassidy and his brother and manager Frank are friends with Bro. Kevin O’Reilly OP, one of the deacons to be ordained next month, Fr Gregory explains, and they approached the province expressing an interest in mounting a concert in the Dominicans’ honour.

“Their original idea for what they wanted to do didn’t work out – there was a piece I think they were hoping to do but there were copyright issues – so they’re going to do the Children of Lir in late September, I think September 29, in the concert hall. That’ll be the big public event to mark the eighth centenary,” he says.

October’s annual Dominican Sunday at Knock should be an especially big occasion this year, he adds, as should the arrival in Limerick this August of four young women from the Nashville Dominican sisters to take charge of the Dominican priory while the brothers are withdrawn. 

Highlight

The obvious highlight for the year, however, will be next month’s ordination of eight new priests, most of whom came from a group of 13 novices who joined the province almost seven years ago.

“To have that number ordained is – I was going to say phenomenal, but maybe that’s an exaggeration – certainly unusual,” he says, continuing, “it’s probably our biggest ordination group since my own group in 1973, and there’s a significance in that there’s going to be eight, one for every hundred years.”

There’s no doubt, he admits, that there are differences between the new friars and those from whom they have been learning. “The ordinands come from a different world or society than my generation or the older generation came from, so they probably see things differently,” he says.

“Most of my generation joined straight from school,” he says, “they did their Leaving Cert, and if you wanted to be a priest or a Dominican you gave it a try, and for some it didn’t work out and there’s no shame in that; people do medicine and then give it up because it’s not for them.”

In contrast, he continues, “the younger generation are coming already having had a faith journey, some maybe having gone from the Lord and the Church and then by various ways found themselves back in Church and committed to the Lord, and having a very strong faith again, and heard the call and responded to the call”.

“Their call is a different call to maybe that call that the likes of myself heard,” he says, acknowledging that the less straightforward paths to priesthood common among the province’s newer brothers may be well-suited for speaking to an Ireland where Catholicism is less and less a religion of convention.

Historical roots

When the Dominican order has been renewed in the past, whether by Blessed Raymond of Capua OP in the late 14th Century or by Fr Alexandre Jandel OP in the 19th Century it has done so by returning to its historical roots, and so it’s no accident that the younger Dominicans, as well as embracing the Dominican habit with an eagerness that can seem odd to their older brethren, have been keen to augment modern internet- and technology-savvy methods of preaching with traditional parish preaching missions. 

“The younger friars have started doing a lot of preaching again,” says Fr Gregory, explaining, “we’d probably gone through a phase where there was the odd one doing it, but there are about five or six of them now who intermingle and do parish missions and such.”

In part, he thinks, this may be because the new friars have not felt held back by the abuse crisis as some older friars have been. Explaining how a mixture of shame and hurt can persist in friars who felt responsible for crimes committed by other religious, he says, “It’s probably still there in people. You can be angry at times with some of the brothers or priests and religious in general, and say ‘How can you do those things?’”

At the same time, he says, “we may be hurting and disappointed because of things that were done by our brothers and sisters, but the people of God are hurting as well, and their expectations are the same as they always were – they want us to minister to them.”

Willing to minister to the people, Fr Gregory says, “I think the success of the younger guys is that they’re back doing the basic preaching – they know that maybe gimmicks worked for a while, but people got fed up of gimmicks.”

Preaching, of course, takes a range of forms, and he highlights the work of Dominican Publications, now over 120 years old, the college at Newbridge, the St Martin and Rosary apostolates, hospital ministry, and the Priory Institute in Tallaght. “Unfortunately the Biblical institute didn’t work out,” he says, “but it was worth a try.”

It’s encouraging that Fr Gregory recognises that, because it would be too easy to see the current withdrawals as an instance of managing decline. If anything, however, he explains, it’s about enabling the province to move forward and keep serving God and his people as best it can.

“I remember Timothy Radcliffe as master coming on visitation,” he says, “and just in conversation he said to me, ‘It’s not about closures, Greg. It’s about looking for the green shoots and seeing how they need to be nourished and taken care of’.”

With the new friars being sent out in pairs, in line with the Master’s wishes and in recollection of one of the order’s oldest practices, it’s clear Fr Gregory is determined that the province’s own green shoots should get the fraternal support they need while taking the province into the future.

“I think we’ve made a big contribution over the years,” he says, “and hopefully that will go on.”