Fun and Games With a Priest
By Cormac MacConnell

ONE of these New York evenings when you are down around West 37th Street in Manhattan you are likely to see a smiling big rotundity of a priest, clearly Irish, somewhere close to the famous Church of the Holy Innocents. 

That will be Brendan, a good friend and colleague of mine, and I hope you see this before he does so that you can surprise him and have a bit of craic at the same time. 

Just so you get the right priest, can I say that he has dark hair, is truly rotund and big, has blue eyes behind spectacles and is as sharp as a tack. Still, you might catch him out just once.

Go up to him and say, “Good evening Father Quinlivan,” and “It’s great to see you again after all these years,” or words to that effect and, being courteous, and probably curious as well, he will stop in his considerable tracks to bid you the time of day. 

He’ll want to know, of course, where the two of ye met before and he’ll get around to that quite quickly being, as I say, as sharp as a tack.

“Ah,” you will say, “Father Brendan, I’m not one bit surprised you don’t remember me because, faith, you were not all that well at all, between the strong drink and the weight of them gold vestments in the Italian sun, the last time we met up. I’m glad to see you survived anyway. How are they all in Newmarket-on-Fergus in the county Clare?”

You’ll have him now if you’ve played it right. Now the next bit is important. 

Look away into the middle distance and sigh and say – exactly now, concentrate – say, “Ah sure that old bishop of Cork, that Thaddeus McCarthy, sure he never caused anything but trouble anyway.”

Say that bit right, with exactly the right nuance, and you’ll have him rooted to the spot, sharp and all as he is.

Then you’ll say – exactly now – “What was the name of that village anyway, away up in the North of Italy, where I saved you? What was it – Ervrea or something like that? I forget. 

“All I remember was the heat of it, and the festival, and the strength of the wine, and the heavy food at them street parties, and the sight of you and all the other young lads from the Irish College in Rome being captured by the cute Italians the way they always catch any visiting priests at the festival, laughing behind their hands at ye for a week they were afterwards.”

Say exactly that now, and keep your face straight if you can when you see Brendan’s. It will be a study. I promise you that.

I’ll tell you the rest of the story briefly and you can shape it to your own ends. When Brendan Quinlivan was in the Irish College in Rome a decade or so ago, himself and some other young Irish seminarians went up to this village – Ervrea or Ivrea or something phonetically like that – on a hot Italian day. 

They stumbled atop the huge town festival in honor of a crabbity old Cork bishop called Thaddeus McCarthy who went to Rome nearly 500 years ago to seek the intercession of His Holiness in some Irish dispute, and expired in the town. 

For whatever reason (the Italians are like that) he has become hugely venerated and remembered there, and there is an annual festival in his honor in which a casket or ossuary containing his bones are carried through the streets in procession. 

On this day, when the Irish seminarians arrived in town, they were given the royal treatment because they were Irish, were feted with the best and heaviest of food and the strongest of local wine (atop a seminarian stomach mark you!), and then were robed in the heaviest possible golden vestments, each weighing about a hundredweight, and had to carry the bones of Bishop Thaddeus McCarthy around the town, a distance of a couple of miles. 

The heavy vestments – food, wine, and the extreme weight of the Cork bones in their casket – combined to create a staggering kind of procession which our good friend will never forget. That’s the gist of the story.

I suggest that you pitch the yarn this way. That you were then resident in the village for a couple of years and became aware of the tradition of the villagers to cod innocent visiting young clergy to carry the bones. 

You could also suggest that, when they have their victims, they add several slabs of lead to the box of bones and sit back and enjoy the fun. 

Since Brendan Quinlivan’s recollection of the event, because of the heat in particular, is somewhat hazy towards the end, you could also suggest that you thought at the time he was going to die and that you stepped out from the crowd and helped him, so to speak, to carry his cross. 

Do it right and you’ll catch him out for sure. Shortly after that you will make a good friend of an extremely jolly, articulate, lively Irishman who is also a much beloved priest here in Clare. 

He is over there now studying adult spiritual development at Fordham University and attached to the Church of the Holy Innocents.

Wander down there. Catch him out. And when the laughing is over tell him that Cormac sent his regards.