‘You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown’

The Pope’s representative Archbishop Charles Brown left Ireland this week to take up his new posting in Albania. Soon, a replacement will be appointed and a new archbishop will come to present his credentials to President Michael D. Higgins and act as a visible sign of unity between the Church in Ireland and the Holy Father.

Since his arrival in Ireland in early 2012, Archbishop Brown has been an unconventional Papal Nuncio. He was plucked from the Roman Curia by his old mentor Pope Benedict XVI and thrust into the diplomatic role at a time when relations between the Irish State and the Holy See were at an all-time low.

Just months beforehand, Enda Kenny has delivered a thundering speech in the Dáil in which he heavily criticised the Vatican and misquoted Benedict XVI to give the false impression that the Pope believed civil law should not apply to the Church. The rift deepened when Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore announced that the Irish embassy at the Vatican would be shut.

Mutual Trust

It was an inauspicious and inhospitable start for the new Papal Nuncio. Despite that, Archbishop Brown worked tirelessly to mend fences with the State and work towards a new relationship based on mutual trust. While a lot of people worked behind the scenes to ensure that Ireland would reopen an embassy at the Vatican, that u-turn was due in no small part to Archbishop Brown and his positive and warm leadership.

He also embraced with gusto the need to put a fresh heart into the Church in Ireland. His visits to dioceses, parishes, communities and schools made the Pope’s closeness to the Church in Ireland a reality for many people who hitherto had never even heard of a Papal Nuncio, never mind had the chance to put their hopes and disappointments directly to the Pope’s representative.

You can’t please everyone in life: Pope Benedict certainly didn’t, and Pope Francis doesn’t either. Archbishop Brown had his critics – the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) nurse a hurt that he didn’t organise meetings with the group. That’s not to say he didn’t know the reality for priests on the ground; it’s hard to think of an Irish bishop (outside of, perhaps, Confirmation season) who visited more parishes than Archbishop Brown.

Young Catholics will miss the archbishop – he soon became a regular at youth events and, despite the evident challenges facing the Church here, never tired of trying to encourage young people to embrace their faith.

To my mind, Archbishop Brown was not naïve about the challenges facing Catholicism in Ireland. He could do the sums too, he knows we’re rapidly running out of priests. But, like St John XXIII, he too knew that there is nothing life-giving in repeating the mantras of the “prophets of doom who are always forecasting worse disasters”. His championing of ‘green shoots’ in the Church here was no silly optimism, but a fundamental trust in God’s promise that all will be well.

The Church in Ireland will miss the charismatic American who broke the mould long cast for Papal Nuncios and brought the message of Christ to wherever he found people. We will miss his energy, his enthusiasm, his evident prayerfulness and comfort in his own skin, his words of encouragement and his ‘can do’ attitude.

In the 1967 musical comedy of the same name, the eponymous Charlie Brown sets out to find out what being a ‘good man’ means. In the end he realises that it rests in trying your best and making the most of the things you’ve been given in life. In the final scene, Lucy turns to him and puts out her hand, making him shrink back. As he reaches out, she shakes his hand firmly, then tells him, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”

Albania’s gain is our loss.