Father William Barry: Priest and Novelist

For some Roman Catholic clergymen, the nineteenth century was an exciting age. On its very eve, Cardinal Ruffo led a pious bandit band in a crusade of slaughter through the southern Italian Parthenopean republic. In 1810, another priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, began the revolution in Mexico. Luigi Menichini led the 1830 insurrection in Naples. Father Piotr Sćiegienny’s revolutionary activities in Poland earned him a quarter of a century’s exile in Siberia. Father Patrick Lavelle founded an Irish society which was a front for the revolutionary Fenians. The secular or ecclesiastical politician has a job to do, and in some places, the priesthood was forced into political roles, as in nineteenth-century Italy, Mexico, Poland and Ireland. But in spite of the international conflict between Catholicism and anticlericalism in Europe and South America, the ordinary Catholic priest was not primarily a political animal. Unless he served in the Curia or was a martyr-missionary in the South Seas or Central Africa, the priest’s life was the old hidden life of caring for the souls of the people of his parish and of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. Amid the tumult of the nations, this inner work continued on its quiet path, and in riches and poverty, and beside the allurements and excitements and man-made manipulations of secular and ecclesiastical politics, the priesthood was concerned with the essential tasks of the comfort of the stricken and the salvation of sinners, laid upon them by their Lord and Master.