I MET Cardinal Sean Brady on Sunday a week back. He was the main man at the celebrations of St Oliver Plunkett in Dundalk and I was there making the Nationwide programme.
We were close and I would probably want to interview him, so, I came clean.
“My dear Cardinal, a couple of weeks back I called for your resignation but I said that you should do so honourably and for the sake of your health.
I am concerned for you and you have a responsibility to yourself. It is your duty to stay strong and well.”
I think he understood where I was on this and realised instantly that he wasn’t in the cross hairs of an angry media man.
I like Sean Brady. I believe, instinctively, that he would never have knowingly done anything to promote the interests of abusing priests.
Mistakes yes and maybe the growth experience from those would well equip Sean Brady to battle on and make a difference in the Catholic Church of the future.
On the day in Drogheda it was given to Bishop Donal McKeown to deliver the “ground-breaking” homily but abuse victims hammered him the next day for what they held to be insensitivity.
I knew where Donal was coming from…the plethora of circumstance and threat that makes the modern Ireland a more dangerous place for the young than in the bad days that we are all trying to put behind us.
Donal McKeown is an intellectual man and on the day the power of his message was lost to the overly nuanced script which was so subtle that it was lost on all but the most discerning listener.
The pulpit is a place for simple language, radio scripts the same, because in the twinkling of an eye the words are out and gone forever. The listener may or may not have caught the message.
So, in my view, the Catholic Church is ill-served by its media trainers, that’s if the have such and if they haven’t they should.
The modern message of apology and going forward to a new era of excellence, needs equally excellent delivery mechanisms and skills and they do not exist.
The majority of spokespersons for Irish Catholicism speak their new truths from behind the barricade of poor communication skills. They have the message I believe but they do not have the skills to drive it home.
Donal proved the point in Drogheda. Overly complex sentiments and analogies had no place in the pulpit of St Peter’s on West Street and, even as I heard it, I knew well that my old friend from BBC days was delivering himself up to the altar of media sacrifice.