Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Being Irish, however, they were charming and cordial. The abbot threw a stick for Fiona, apparently the price of admission, and then wrestled with her when she brought it back. The other monk and the woman admired her, petted her, informed her that she was a very good dog.

  Which Fiona knew anyway but liked to hear again.

  The abbot said it was fine to let her run in the fields and bark at the cattle and the sheep.

  Abbot Fabian and Brother Killian showed us into a small parlor; Maureen, the woman in charge of the recording and herself the principal singer, told me wife several times how grateful they all were that she had come to sing some Marian motets.

  “Och, and meself never singing chant before,” Nuala said, opting for her shy country lass image.

  We were served tea and scones, the latter very fresh, while the abbot told us about the monastery.

  “We earn our living here by running a boys’ school, a first-rate one, we like to think. We also try to be an ecumenical and liturgical center and have a special interest in relations with the Russian Orthodox Church. We have a collection of icons that we’d like to show you. Our recordings have been quite successful. They help us to pay some of the bills for the conferences we convene, and they say something about the new and the old in Irish religious music.”

  “We were really excited that you agreed to stop by,” Maureen said again. “After we saw you on the telly the other night, we knew that you understood religious music and Irish music better than any of us did, so we’re doubly grateful for your visit.”

  “You’d almost think she was Irish, wouldn’t you now?” says I.

  “Me ma,” Nuala said shyly, “says I have a Yank brogue.”

  More laughter.

  “Wasn’t it terrible that they let that awful woman say such horrible things about your wife?” Maureen said with a shake of her pretty curls. “Everyone knows she’s a bitter failure, but they still let her sound off against the rest of us!”

  Obviously she meant Maeve Doyle.

  “Failure, is it?” I said, slipping into the local pattern of speech again.

  “An awful failure. Doesn’t her husband, who is her business manager, think he’s a marketing genius? And didn’t he produce her latest disk? And wasn’t it a disaster? And herself becoming so precious in her style that she puts people to sleep.”

  No punches pulled there.

  “Poor woman,” said our shy lass from Carraroe.

  “You’re right, dear,” Maureen agreed. “I’m sure she’s heartbroken. But she’s good enough to make a great comeback if she’d leave off complaining about the rest of us, and the Irish people not liking moaners.”

  Well, they did a lot of moaning for a people who didn’t like moaners. It was all right to moan, so long as you did it with a certain style.

  “And hasn’t the poor woman had an awful problem with her credit card?”

  “Oh?”

  “Isn’t she one of them that can’t stop buying as long as she has the card in her purse? Didn’t she run up an awful bill?”

  “Poor woman,” Nuala said again.

  We finished off the tea and scones. I was disappointed that there was no apple crunch with heavy cream.

  We were then conducted into another and much larger room where a cluster of monks waited for us. I felt like Brother Cadfael coming home after solving a mystery. As one man they stood. My wife stopped, taken aback by this sign of respect. She hesitated shyly again and then began to sing.

  “Salva Regina!”

  The monks promptly joined in the hymn to the Mother of Jesus with which compline—their night prayers—usually ended:

  “ ‘Salve Regina, mater misericordiae:

  Vita, ducedo, et spes nostra, salve

  Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evae.

  Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes,

  in hac lacrimarum valle.

  “ Eja ergo, Advocata nostra,

  illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converter

  Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,

  nobis post hoc exilium ostende.

  O clemens, 0 pia, 0 dulcis Virgo Maria.’ “

  (Hail Holy Queen, mother of mercy:

  Our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

  To you we cry, banished children of Eve.

  To you we send our sighs, mourning and weeping,

  in this valley of tears.

  Turn then, O most gracious advocate,

  your eyes of mercy towards us.

  And after this exile show us

  the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus

  O clement, O merciful, O sweet Virgin Mary.)

  Nuala did not try to project her soprano voice over the monks. Rather, she blended in with them, providing another and richer color without violating their monastic tones.

  Time stood still for a moment when they were finished.

  Then the monks burst into applause.

  “That’s one we won’t have to practice,” Maureen said with a sigh. “I’m sure we can do that again over at the university tomorrow.”

  My wife blushed modestly and shook hands with each of the monks who came up to be introduced. Not a chance she would forget a single name.

  The Eucharist was next and lunch would follow. We were ushered into a chapel. It was plain, as Benedictine chapels are supposed to be, but no one would have confused it with a Quaker meetinghouse. The upper walls were painted tastefully in rich and dark colors—simplicity and brilliance combined. The liturgy itself was also simple, brisk, and restrained. Father Benedict would doubtless have been pleased.

  The Dominicans had taught me in high school; the Holy Cross Fathers and the Jesuits were in evidence if only rarely actually in the classrooms at Notre Dame and Marquette. All three orders had despaired of my “laziness.” I had never encountered the Benedictines before, but I was impressed with their wit and warmth and hospitality.

  “God,” George the Priest had told me once, “respects all orders equally. But God is, in fact, a diocesan priest.”

  It had seemed reasonable to me.

  1 Irish Gold

  —29—

  AS THE Mass progressed, an ominous pounding assailed the roof and the walls of the chapel—wind and rain. I wondered how poor dear Fiona was faring. Then I told myself that she was, after all, a hound dog and could take care of herself no matter what the weather.

  I prayed fervently for wisdom in my relationship with my priceless wife—who, next to me, was softly singing along with the monks.

  And she once thought that she had to be an accountant. Perhaps she still did.

  I noticed that Inspector Murphy went up to Communion with us, as did a woman who had been in the chase car, obviously a woman cop,

  After Mass, he stopped me in the vestibule of the chapel.

  “More news from the boss, Mr. Coyne. It seems that Father Placid or one of his gombeen advisers took out an insurance policy on the concert. If it didn’t take place, they made a lot of money. Moreover, their contract with the Point required only a small fee if they canceled the concert. They would have had enough money left from the insurance to cover all their bad investments.”

  “Yeah!”

  “It is not absolutely clear that Father Placid knew about this arrangement.”

  “If they had to cancel it, they would have had to return the money, wouldn’t they?”

  “Certainly, to whoever asked for it. But I’m sure they figured that many Irish people would not mind the money going to the poor overseas. Don’t we have a long memory in this country when it comes to famines?”

  “So, if there’s no concert, they pay off their debts and earn some money for their organization, too?”

  “That’s what the boss thinks.”

  “Why not just cancel? Cite ‘artistic differences’ with me wife?”

  My wife, damn it all!

  “Wouldn’t the insurance company have been a bit suspicious?”

  “Wouldn’t the kidnap
ping have made them suspicious, too?”

  “We’re not dealing, Mr. Coyne, with master criminals, are we now?”

  “Dermot,” I said for perhaps the fifth time.

  Outside, the squall had passed through and was now rushing towards London and Warsaw and points east. A sharp gash of blue cut the sky as low clouds scudded past us, as if trying to catch up with the rain. Waiting for us outside the chapel was one very wet and very unhappy wolfhound. I grabbed her just before she jumped on Nuala and destroyed altogether, as the locals would have said, her black suit.

  “Did you think we were going to desert you, darlin’ girl?” I asked as I struggled to keep Fiona off my wife. “No, Fiona!” I said firmly.

  Having been given her instructions, she relaxed and slobbered all over me.

  We were led back to the room where we had scones and tea for our lunch. Fiona accepted several large bones and settled down just outside the door.

  ‘That was a very lovely liturgy, Father Abbot,” Nuala said diffidently. “Prayer slipping up to Heaven to God and catching him unawares.”

  “Her,” I said.

  She gave me one of her “Shush, Dermot” looks.

  “Both male and female,” Brother Killian said briskly, “and neither male nor female. So, sure, can’t God be imagined either way?”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Nuala said respectfully—as if she hadn’t heard the same thing in almost the same words from the little bishop.

  “I hope I didn’t offend you, Dermot, with my remarks about Maeve Doyle’s manager?” Maureen said uneasily.

  Under the circumstances, herself was not likely to deny that I was her manager. Obviously, however, I was supposed to.

  “I’m not herself’s manager, Maureen. She manages herself. By profession she’s an accountant. So she manages the two of us.”

  The persona she was wearing forced Nuala Anne to ride to my rescue. “Sure, isn’t me husband a very successful commodity trader as well as a best-selling author? Isn’t it easier for me to keep the books because I’ve had a couple of courses in bookkeeping and he hasn’t?”

  Yeah, sure, and we’d worked this arrangement out in careful conversation, hadn’t we?

  In fact, she had simply taken over the bank statements when they came into the house.

  We then went on a tour of the school, inspected the plans for a conference and residence center (for scholars in residence), and visited the dazzling Russian icon museum in a basement room converted into a cavelike structure, almost a catacomb. The icons were so beautiful that my wife wept softly.

  With the return of good weather, faithless Fiona had deserted us and was doubtless out chasing cows and sheep and perhaps other dogs—or perhaps pursuing local children from whom she would demand attention and affection.

  Then we returned to the chapel to practice the motets Nuala would sing. All four were brief hymns to the Mother of Jesus, normally sung by the monks at the end of the day. What a young woman’s voice was doing in the cloister might be open to question. However, as Maureen pointed out to us, Ireland at one time had monasteries of men and women, though in separate enclosures. Hadn’t St. Brigid herself presided over one such?

  That certainly made it legitimate, did it not?

  “They weren’t Benedictine monasteries,” the abbot cautioned us. “Benedict was an Italian. If he knew about the Irish practice—and there’s no reason to think he did—he certainly would not have approved. Our idea, however, is to show that chant is a much more flexible musical rhetoric than most people, including many priests, think it is. One can combine male and female voices without doing it any violence. Indeed, when congregations sang chant—and some of them did, though we don’t know how many—men and women obviously sang together.”

  “Nuala Anne seems to understand,” Maureen added, “exactly how to do it. She does not try to overwhelm the male chorus, as many sopranos would … not that she couldn’t do it if she wanted to.”

  “Och,” my wife replied, “wouldn’t that be a terrible thing to do?”

  Still the pious, innocent Galway lass.

  I had whispered to her during our tour the information from our cop.

  “Maybe,” she had replied skeptically.

  “The chant,” said the abbot, “is called Gregorian after Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 640 and was a Benedictine of a sort He had been Prefect of Rome, Lord Mayor, I suppose, then went off to a monastery but was soon called back into the service of the papacy. Justinian had reconquered North Africa and part of Italy in his campaign to restore the old empire. Gregory became the Pope’s Ambassador to the Emperor in Constantinople. His charm, intelligence, and piety made him a success, and it was not surprising that he became Pope, though he himself much preferred the contemplative life.”

  “It would be like Rich Daley becoming Cardinal Archbishop,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” the abbot said, not quite understanding the metaphor. “He certainly supported church music, though there is no reason which we know why his name became identified with the plain song we now call Gregorian. He lived in a time of chaos. Germanic barbarians dominated what was left of the Western German Empire—Angles and Saxons in England; Goths and Franks in Germany, France, and Spain; Vandals in North Africa; Lombards in Italy. Most likely these invaders were only a veneer over earlier and perhaps Celtic populations. However, there was not much left of Roman political authority. The Church was gradually stepping into the vacuum because no one else was available. The tribes fought among themselves and with the Emperor. Plague swept the world, particularly Italy. The rural populations were drastically reduced. Famine was endemic. The Lombards periodically raided what was left of Rome. The Imperial legation from Constantinople withdrew to Ravenna, which replaced Rome as the civil capital of the Western Empire. Gregory, a member of an old Roman family, one of the last, sat there calmly among the disease and death and confusion and tried to act as leader of the Catholic world. He was the last one for half a millennium who could do so and the last one ever to preside over a theoretically united Christian Church.”

  “Such chaos,” I commented, “is hard to imagine today.”

  “It was hard for Gregory to accept, too. The old lines of communication were breaking down. It took a long time for the letters he diligently wrote to reach the bishops among the Franks and the Angles to whom he was trying to write. He soldiered on, however, halfsuspecting that the monasteries would be the Church for hundreds of years. Incidentally, he had a fight with our Columbanus, who demanded that the Pope enforce our dating of Easter, which Columbanus believed was the only correct one. Gregory seemed to have agreed, but he said he could not change a custom of long standing. Eventually the Romans imposed their standard on us.”

  “Can we change it back now?” Nuala asked, the shy Galway lass becoming the Irish nationalist.

  “I don’t think so,” the abbot said, smiling—and realizing for the first time how many different masks lurked in my wife. “The most important thing to remember about Gregory is not the music, though that’s part of it. He was what we would call a pluralist. He believed that there was room in the Church for diversity. He reversed the policy of his predecessor Innocent I, who three hundred years before said that everything had to be like the way it was in Rome.”

  “He wouldn’t be elected Pope today,” I said.

  “I don’t think so either,” the abbot said with a shrug. “Gregory told Augustine of Canterbury to take over the wooden houses of worship of the Angles and turn them into Christian churches. He advised Augustine to adapt every custom that was not opposed to Christianity. The missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons even took over the name of the feast of their goddess of spring and the dawn, whose name was Eoster, for the celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection, complete with the bunnies and lilies and eggs which were Eoster’s symbols of fertility and new life. That was Catholicism at its most open and most generous. We’ve not always been that way, much to our shame.”

&n
bsp; “And that’s what we’re trying to do in Ireland today,” Maureen added. “We’re rediscovering the Celt in each of us and marrying it to modern post-Vatican Council Catholicism.”

  “As your man said, Here Comes Everyone.”

  “Couldn’t you imagine that Gregory and Columbanus and Augustine are here in the abbey with us today?” Nuala remarked, her eyes wide and solemn.

  I almost looked around to see if the three sainted monks had entered the chapel.

  “Columbanus,” said Brother Killian, “would be furious that we were celebrating Easter on the wrong date. Not all the Irish have been pluralists.

  “Gregory,” Brother Killian added, concluding our little lesson in things Gregorian, “was either the last of the Roman popes or the first of the medieval popes, depending on your point of view. Soon the Pope would be the Bishop of a ruined city, cut off from Africa by Islam and from Byzantium by increasingly acrimonious theological and political conflicts. All he had left were the Germanic tribes in northern and western Europe.”

  “And Ireland,” I added.

  The four real Irish laughed.

  “Sure, there’s always been Ireland, hasn’t there now?” the abbot agreed. “But on its own terms.”

  Nuala insisted that she needed fifteen minutes of practice with Maureen before the monks joined us. Alone.

  The abbot, Brother Killian, and I wandered outside.

  “Dairy country,” the abbot said, gesturing at the rolling fields. “West Tip and Limerick have always been dairy country, Kerry too. The famine didn’t hit as hard here as up by Connacht, where they lived off the potatoes planted high up in the hills or on the edge of bogs in land that the English didn’t want.”

  “During the Troubles everyone burned down the creameries, the Black and Tans and then the Irregulars,” Brother Killian continued. “You destroy the centers to where the dairy farmers bring their milk, you destroy the economy of much of Munster.”

  “Killian is a native of Limerick,” the abbot explained. “His father owns a creamery—a very modern one, I might add.”