On Thursday past I ended a job that I have done for over twenty years and I don’t mind admitting that it caused me to shed a few tears.
It was an ending that should never have been. It was as brutal as it it was inevitable. With a simple phone call lasting just eight minutes and forty three seconds John McAreavey told me he was going to resign as Bishop of Dromore.
I tried half heartedly to convince him to stay but I could sense it was in vain - his mind was made up. I was dumbstruck. I felt this way once before when my old boss, Seamus Mallon announced his intention to retire from politics in 2001.
Just like Thursday I phoned Seamus in the forlorn hope that I could change his mind. Like John McAreavey, Seamus had already made up his mind. When Mallon was asked by a journalist why now- he simply replied “Anno Domini” ( advanced age). Mallon was 65 then. John McAreavey will be 70 on his next birthday- well past the normal age of retirement. 2018 would have been the twentieth anniversary of his installation as Bishop of Dromore. This year he celebrated 45 years as a priest.
John McAreavey was more than a client. He was a friend. I have known him since I was fifteen years of age. He was the celebrant at my wedding. He would trundle up to my home at Christmas with his varied assortment of wine bottles given to him as presents which he re-gifted. It became a standing joke in our house because John is certainly no wine connoisseur. You might get lucky one year and get something that was actually quaffable. But mostly it was Black Tower or Blue Nun.
Over the past few weeks much has been written about John McAreavey. Most of it negative and written by people who don’t know the man. I do know him.
You get the measure of a person you work with. You see their strengths, weaknesses, humour and personal angst. I rarely lionise people. I usually have a healthy disregard for inflated egos no matter how much they can be deserved. John McAreavey had no such ego. He certainly had his weaknesses. In an interview with the press recently he said “ours is a human Church and as such has human weaknesses.” How right and prescient he was.
Amidst the cacophony of criticisms and unburdened by an official role as a spokesperson I feel it is only right that someone speaks of the man - not the bishop. This is a difficult and thin line to tread as it is because he is a bishop that he has become a lightning rod for public anger for some of his failures, the failures of his colleagues and for those in the leadership of the Church he serves.
The John McAreavey I know is no victim and would not want to see himself as such. More than any priest I know and certainly any bishop, he is the most pastoral, thoughtful and kind man I have ever met. He is quirkily eccentric like most academics. He loves people. But his casualness at times can be frustrating when you see him stretch out and yawn during Mass. Or when he would dress like a country vicar rather than a Roman-collared priest. When you meet him you know he has piety but is not pious.
Some of the criticisms aimed at John McAreavey over the handling of the Malachy Finegan case are justified. He was paralysed at times by indecisiveness - a dilatoriness not caused by laziness or misplaced clerical loyalty but caused by the real dilemma of balancing the competing and conflicting needs of the victims he met. Had he protected himself as many bishops do by being more aloof, less hands on, by being more procedural than pastoral, he may not have felt the need to resign last Thursday. But that's not the route he chose.
Many men are not great at conveying their emotion and priests less so. They don’t have deep emotional wells from which to draw - nor do they have the benefit of a partner. Their mistakes are ours too. They are not endowed with super mystical powers.
John McAreavey is a man, plain and simple. He is not gifted with an ability to judge his own past actions with the benefit of rear view mirror. A Catholic Church bereft of people like John McAreavey is a much poorer place.
