The Croppy Boy

I cannot remember my first confession. That does not matter. Nor can I remember what I confessed at my last confession two weeks ago. That doesn’t matter either: God has absolved me of what I confessed, and that’s what really matters. But I remember my first sincere adult confession, at the age of twenty-one. I remember the books that I read which convinced me I needed to go. These were not sinful works that needed confessing, but neither were they articles of pious literature that were designed to inflame religious devotion. The first was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, predictably enough, with its hellfire sermon and its gut-wrenching and harrowing confessional scene. The second, which I discovered a few months later in my university library, was the two-volume “authorized” biography by Piaras Béaslaí of Michael Collins, the Irish nationalist who was commander in chief of the Irish Free State forces until he was gunned down on August 22, 1922, at the age of thirty-one.

I remembered my aunt’s having that book in her house, although someone had torn out from the second volume of her copy the haunting color frontispiece of Sir John Lavery’s painting of Collins lying in state, draped in the green, white, and orange flag with a crucifix on his breast, with the ambiguous words “Love of Ireland” to the right. Was love of Ireland a quality of Collins, or was he the one whom Ireland loved? Was love of Ireland the feeling this image was meant to evoke? Having missed it in my aunt’s edition, I was awestruck when I saw it for the first time in the library. I started reading from the end, as one often does with the best of books—the military vehicle on a backwoods road ambushed by gunmen, where Collins’s life was ended and Ireland’s hopes dashed. One of his comrades, whose testimony Béaslaí reproduces word for word, came to the injured Collins on the roadside. He held the dying general’s hand, whispered the Act of Contrition into his ear, and felt the general squeeze his hand in gratitude. That squeeze—that tiny physical act won the mercy of God. I remembered the Act of Contrition that we used to rattle off at school assemblies: “O my God, I thank you for loving me, I am sorry for all my sins, for not loving others and not loving you. Help me to live like Jesus and not sin again.” As a child I thought it was a tall ask, to promise never to sin again, because I did not realize that it was a supplication, rather than a vow. The operative word was “Help!” But this account of Collins’s death showed me that the Act of Contrition was an important prayer. My dad used to refer to a death without the Last Rites as “dying with your boots on,” and the Act of Contrition was God’s way of reaching the men dying in their boots. I learned the old-fashioned version of the Act of Contrition by heart as soon as I could. Soon after, I made my first proper, honest-to-God confession to a Dominican priest.

There were few figures in the Irish independence struggle who were as magnetic as Collins. He succeeded where other Irish patriots failed: He waged a war of independence and won. He also died young. The tragic story of the young man who was adored by children but would never have a family of his own, whose fiancée was to suffer a breakdown before marrying another man in a Free State uniform, is more appealing than are the tales told of the men who lived longer lives—perhaps more appealing that similar tales would have been had Collins himself not died in 1922. He never lived to stain his honor by embarking on a planned bloodbath to annex Northern Ireland. He could not, like his political rival Éamon de Valera, be blamed for the independent state’s financial woes and general backwardness. He did not live long enough to flirt with fascism, as his trusted comrade Generalissimo Eoin O’Duffy did in the 1930s. He did not grow old, bigoted, bitter, and hateful, as did John Mitchel, whose speech from the dock was rather improbably delivered in the electioneering scene of the cheap and tacky biopic of Collins.

There was a dark side to Collins, nevertheless. The quixotic chivalry of the rebellion in 1916 died and was succeeded by a gritty campaign of assassinations, which Collins had ordered against British spies but which were often delivered upon innocent parties. Each assassination brought its own fit of depression upon Collins’s mind. Similar symptoms accompanied his negotiations with the British government during the grim winter of 1921. When the British negotiators asked him what he would like to be done with the Vice Regal Lodge, the fine building in Dublin’s Phoenix Park where the king’s representative resided, a melancholic Collins, through gritted teeth, suggested it be turned into a cancer hospital. Once the treaty was signed, Churchill remarked that Collins looked as if he were about to shoot someone, most likely himself. And yet newsreel footage of him in the summer of 1922 shows him posing smartly in his military uniform, smiling and soaking in the blurry, monochrome sunlight. Perhaps it was the general confession which his fiancée, Kitty Kiernan, insisted he make to a priest that illuminated his soul. One hopes so. Perhaps he gained this joy from his experience of daily Mass at London’s unashamedly baroque Brompton Oratory. (It was on Collins’s account that I visited that church when I lived near London, and I can only assume that the cheerful, uplifting atmosphere there was as unchanged since 1921 as was the rest of the furniture.) Or perhaps it was the fighting spirit within his soul that vied with his depression as he became embroiled in the senseless civil war that would cost him his life. Perhaps his sunny, irrepressible energy needed to drive away the dark cloud of melancholy on that August day when his military vehicle was ambushed, when he had a chance to drive away from the gunfire but instead giddily decided, “No, let’s fight them!” Did he hope that a bullet taken in a war that was deemed just by Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy might be the only sanctified way to put down the black dog? Collins’s pragmatic strategies for victory yielded at last to a joyful impulse for a scrap, and a few minutes later, he lay bleeding on the road.

One can learn from one’s own mistakes and then try again next time, but there is no next time after a bad death. One can only learn how to die from the deaths of others: those who died well and those who died badly. Did Collins die prepared? I read that account of his death and, like a good historian, I learned from someone else’s mistake rather than making my own, and I learned the Act of Contrition and made my confession, all of fourteen years ago. Not long ago, I found another set of those two volumes among a heap of books in our Manchester friary: the familiar green cloth cover, each with a golden portrait of Collins and a facsimile of his signature. At one time, these books must have been enshrined in any Irish house where pride of place had not already been accorded to the family Bible or to The Irish Republic by Dorothy Macardle.

Not long after my discovery, there was a discussion at the friary’s breakfast table about a different book. One of our friars was reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen. Why such an ebullient friar who was so settled, and so priestly, should read a book of that title is anyone’s guess. I think, like me, he wanted to learn from history, from the history of a particular time in the Church’s recent past. This friar was mystified by Balthasar’s comment that at the time the Swiss theologian was writing, sacramental confession had nearly disappeared from everyday life in the Church. The friar, an adult convert, had never known a time in the Church when clergy never shrived and people never sought shriving. He imagined that auricular confession was one of the hills on which a Catholic would be obliged to fight and die. He could not imagine the Catholic landscape Balthasar had surveyed, devoid of hills, the flat wasteland of churches without confessionals, of face-to-face confessions by appointment only, of twice-yearly Rite III of (General) Absolution ceremonies—the wasteland in which I had been raised.

To be fair, it was not as if the Irish Catholic Church had scrapped confession completely. I am sure that, every day, confessions were heard by the Carmelites in Clarendon Street Church in Dublin, by the Dominicans in Pope’s Quay in Cork, and by the Franciscans in the Abbey Church in Galway. There were confessions once a year at my school. But apart from that, it seemed as if confession was at best neglected. I never heard sermons preached on the sacrament of confession—at least not ones that encouraged it. Several parishes held general absolution services, in spite of there being no danger of death or a shortage of priests. (The Irish Episcopal Conference finally ruled in 1988, the year of my birth, that the conditions for general absolution did not prevail.) In those years, the haunting painting of Ireland’s Munster Fusiliers in a muddy field in France receiving general absolution from the padre on horseback before going to their deaths at the Battle of Aubers Ridge was parodied rather cheaply in parishes every Christmas and Lent.

And yet at the time there was an earnest desire to make Rite III of absolution the general norm for the sacrament of penance. Auricular confession, after all, has not always been the norm throughout the history of the Church. In fact, auricular confession to a priest is an Irish invention—or, rather, like spaces between words in the Latin script, it was an Irish monastic adaptation of an existing entity, an adaptation which was universally agreed to be an improvement and implemented everywhere. When the Irish monks brought auricular confession to Europe, it eventually replaced the practice of the primitive Church, “that godly discipline” wherein “at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.” As Miss Prism might have quipped, this could be one reason why the primitive Church has not lasted up to the present day. The paternal–filial bonds of affection that arose between priest and penitent in the early Irish Church were so strong that the confessor was known in the Irish language as anam-chara: soul-friend. In fact, there springs from this yet another Irish innovation that has become near-universal: the convention of calling priests “Father.”

But in Ireland during the mid-twentieth century, confession went from being a well-practiced skill of every Irish Catholic to being a practice neglected by both clergy and laity. The Redemptorists, whose parish missions and hellfire preaching of old were in competition with the traveling circus as the most thrilling form of entertainment in rural areas, tended to become extremely soft on confession. At a parish mission in my youth, the priests would advise congregants to confess just one or two sins on account of the high priest-to-penitent ratio—but of course, no one confesses his major sins until he has confessed at least two venial sins or faults! The Redemptorists, many of whom were excellent priests and brothers, are not entirely to blame; the two-sins-maximum confession was advised at major pilgrimage sites too. That is partly because many priests were sick of being judges and eager to become therapists, but it was also because too many laypeople had been harshly judged by the clergy, inside and outside of the confessional. Alas, both priests and people had merely exchanged the respectability of the Victorian era for the respectable notions of the therapeutic age.

Perhaps Irish people felt they had mastered the penitential rite so well in the centuries since their monastic compatriots had reformed it that they thought they could re-invent it. Had they forgotten that it is confession which was meant to reform them, and not they who were meant to reform confession? Hence why I grudgingly admire the honesty of a certain priest who simply scrapped confession, replaced it with twice-yearly general absolution ceremonies, and, when a woman lamented that Hell was no longer preached as much as before, “obliged” her by reading aloud the fire-and-brimstone sermon from Joyce’s Portrait in lieu of the Sunday homily.

I read that novel at the age of twenty-one, and it made me regret the wasted years of Communion without confession, and of faith without charity. To be precise, it was the confession scene after the harrowing hellfire sermon that moved me. Young Stephen Dedalus has a visceral experience of the confessional that hits him to the bottom of his stomach, and the reader feels the same. Thomas Merton experienced something similar when he read Joyce. How strange it is that even his anti-clerical stuff can serve as a half-decent tool for evangelization. In school, I am sure that my class learned what the seal of confession meant from the Irish ballad “The Croppy Boy” (a favorite of Joyce’s), in which the title character is about to go fight in the rebellion of 1798. The boy goes to confession in a church, saying, “I bear no hate against living thing, / But I love my Country above my King.” Little does he know that the figure behind the grille is not a priest but a British officer, who arrests him forthwith. And by a strange twist, my own return to the sacrament of penance was occasioned by Piaras Béaslaí’s literary memorial of another doomed Irish patriot, not in 1798 but in 1922, not arrested in a confessional but snatched away unshriven on a dirt road.

In 1965, an eyewitness of Collins’s death appeared on Irish television and told the whole story. When Collins was shot, the gunfire was so heavy that no one could cross over and come to Collins’s side for a quarter of an hour. He had no comrade by his side to whisper the prayer into his ear. By the time the ambuscade retreated, it was too late. Collins’s ear could receive no more gracious words, could receive into it nothing but clay. Was the story of the repentant squeeze of the dying general’s hand a tale told to comfort Kitty Kiernan? Was she lied to? Had I been lied to by Béaslaí? Had it been a lie told eighty years before that had inspired me to come to the truth in the sacrament of penance? Had a consoling falsehood about a man dying by the roadside encouraged me to pick myself up after having fallen by the wayside? If a past generation of Irish people needed to hear that Collins died penitent for its own peace of mind, then I needed to read that same account in order to make my peace with God.

Why is it such a dreadful thought to die alone? If there is not a priest at our side to whisper the words of absolution, dare we hope that the last sounds to strike our hammer, anvil, and stirrup might be the words of the Act of Contrition? Yet contrition should not be a sound in our ears but a truth in our heart and on our lips, not whispered in our ears by a friend but poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. No one in the Church truly dies alone. The Church herself says prayers of contrition for those who seem beyond all help. No such prayer is ever in vain, and perhaps even the sincere Act of Contrition made to the false minister by the pikeman of 1798 came to the succor of the fallen gunman of 1922.