It’s 40 years since Pope John Paul II set foot in Ireland. And it’s 40 years since I first left Ireland to set foot in Spain. And it’s been some journey since!

This day 40 years ago I was on my way to Dublin to collect my first passport at the Passport Office. The photo for it was taken two days earlier in a photo booth in Woolworths in Cork an hour or so after Bishop Cornelius Lucey told me he was sending me to Spain to continue studies for the priesthood and that he’d “like me to go on Sunday”!

When I told him I didn’t have a passport, he had his secretary phone the passport office and they duly told him it would be ready by Friday at 1pm if I handed in the photo and the forms before 12noon that day. (Whenever I hear of people waiting for passports these days I smile and thing of that week!)

The bishop then told me that he had arranged for the students who were transiting to Spain to be able to stay in Maynooth on Friday and Saturday night so that we could see the Pope in the Phoenix Park on Saturday and fly out to Spain on Sunday. And so it was! I took a day off from my summer job in the creamery on Wednesday and told John Joe Collins that I’d be back on Thursday (The next bag of ration I handed out was in the following June.). I met the bishop in Cork on Wednesday, got the news, was given a plane ticket, took the photo and bought new pyjamas and other essentials in Woolworths, and took the bus back to Drimoleague to break the news to my parents. They and I must have been in a spin.

On Thursday I went to the Garda Station to get the passport form signed after I picked it up at the Post Office from Kathleen Kingston. She wasn’t used to handing out too many of them then. Back home to pack a case and get a spin from my father back into the village to get the bus to Cork.

Dad was a great talker among friends and neighbours but he was mostly a worker and quiet at home. “Sure if it doesn’t work out, tell us, and you can always come home.” That ‘visa’ to return was more important than the state’s passport to go.

My next visit home would be in June the following year, 1980, when I arrived back with chorizo sausage and a bottle of red wine from La Mancha and a lot of impressions to share with my siblings who had grown a year in my absence.

Outside the diocesan seminary in Badajoz, Spain, in 1979.
Outside the diocesan seminary in Badajoz, Spain, in 1979.

It seems so strange now that I hadn’t a chance to talk to my people at home about the Papal Visit for almost a whole year! Letters were our principal form of contact in between. But it took three weeks for my “airmail” letter to get home and another three weeks for the reply to get back to me. The letters back has updates about the German cow’s new calf, the neighbours who had died, the relations who had come to visit Granny, and the ups and downs of life at home.

Above: the new part of the seminary in Badajoz as it was in 1980. Below: my classmates in their favourite pose!

My updates were less interesting. College life didn’t vary much from week to week. The first three months were about getting a grip on the language, getting to know my fellow seminarians and faculty as well as adjusting to completely strange food and timetables not to mind a whole new culture. The main meal of the day was served at 9pm! Almost everyone went to bed between 1.30 and 3pm for a siesta. (I mostly went for a walk so my room-mate could sleep!)

When we had weekends off, one of the classmates would take me to his own home and cause of a bit of a stir in the town or village akin to the arrival of a yank in Drimoleague when I was a child! My first taste of good Jamón Serrano was at Nemesio’s house. Kiko showed me up and down his down as we delivered drinks from his family business to the local bars. Justo showed me around Madrid and filled me with his appreciation of its history.

These were some of the many gestures of real kindness shown to me by the people of Badajoz over my two years there. There is something fundamentally Christlike about showing kindness to a stranger. And the people of Spain taught me the best way how to do this.

There is an irony here. The province of Badajoz was poor then by today’s standards. So was West Cork. Yet, hospitality and and open doors seem to come more naturally to those who have much less to share than we have today.

The Ireland visited by Pope John Paul is gone — long gone. It had started to morph away before his visit but we deluded ourselves in an emotional indulgence that spun from his visit.

Coincidentally, I got a letter in the post today from Maynooth College. Their newsletter to past pupils headlines with an “optimism” ring from a marginal increase in the number of seminarians now enrolled at Maynooth this year.

When I got off the 66 Bus from Dublin for my first ever sleep in Maynooth this time in 1979,  the corridors of Maynooth were packed with young men and boys getting their long black soutanes and white surplices ready for their special role as Ministers of the Eucharist at the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park the day after. (I wasn’t included as I didn’t yet have a soutane!)

On the Saturday morning of the Papal Mass, it took a fleet of double-decker buses to take all of Maynooth’s hundreds of seminarians to the Mass. Today’s Maynooth newsletter tells me that just one bus would be needed today — and the faculty could fit on it as well. Maynooth’s seminary population for the coming year is 33 — and they are spread over seven years of study and formation.

There were six priests ordained in Ireland in 2018.

The faith landscape in Ireland is changed almost beyond recognition. I can now stay in touch with some of my former classmates from Badajoz who are in Spain and in Zimbabwe as priests at the click of a button on a keyboard or a phone.

So much has happened in the 40 years since I walked into Molesworth Street and collected my first passport. I have an awful lot to be grateful to God, family and friends for.

Would I board that plane again?

Yes, I would.

Pues, sí.