Book Review: The Monsignor looks at the life and times of a chancer that preached piety
Úna O'Hagan and Colm Keane
- The Monsignor: The Man, His Mistresses and The Missing Money
- Colm Keane and Una O’Hagan
- Capel Island Press, pb €15.99
This book is a reminder that though everything changes, nothing changes too dramatically. It also underlines that there is little enough new under the sun, especially at the vortex where human expectations and failings collide, where good intentions and baser instincts joust.
Monsignor Thomas John Capel was born in Ardmore, Co Waterford, in October, 1836.
The son of a coastguard boatman he achieved notoriety that evaded most of his contemporaries. Blessed with a powerful intellect, ensnaring charisma, exceptional looks, and powerful animal magnetism, he was afflicted by shamelessness, Boris-Johnson-grade dishonesty, voracious, predatory lust, and a life-long disregard for the obligation to repay spectacular debts.
If those foibles were not enough to cloud the prospects of an irrationally ambitious churchman his life-long commitment to Olympian drinking meant that he was, like so many of his successors, transferred by one unhappy prelate after another so he might stay ahead of an inevitable and closing posse. Despite this, he repeatedly oversold himself as a hand-picked representative of the Vatican.
He routinely stole funds — Peter’s Pence — entrusted to him to fight poverty. He once used a substantial cheque from an American socialite to buy a diamond bracelet at Tiffany’s in New York. He was also an appalling snob with an affected English accent happy to prey on the vulnerable and lonely especially, or rather almost exclusively, if they held an elevated position in Victorian society and were rich enough to be less than disciplined in their largesse.
That snobbery however did not preclude him from regularly pressing unwanted sexual ambitions on the young female servants of those who welcomed him into their homes. An equal opportunities philanderer, he was as happy to prowl downstairs as he was to prowl upstairs. That appetite was almost insatiable as an endless litany of affairs leading to “illegal intercourse” with one of his “Pious Ladies” showed but despite that behaviour, he was trenchantly opposed to women’s rights: “The position of women’s rights are so absurd that I think every intelligent person will be willing to cast them aside,” he assured his flock. Another indication of how much things have improved since the century before last.
One of the ways he built and international reputation, one hardly relevant today, was in the capture of converts to Catholicism. This proselytising was almost a public entertainment especially if the convert came from the top tiers of the Protestant aristocracy. One, then Britain’s richest man the Earl of Bute, was a real feather in Capel’s biretta, one that until the convert’s eyes were eventually opened, lavishly feathered the monsignor's nest as well.
One of the ways this book shows how it may be very difficult for today’s reader to immediately grasp how different our world is to Capel’s is the status then conferred on churchmen and the universal, unbreachable deference that shielded them from the consequences of their misadventures. In this increasingly post-religious world, it is hard to imagine how very interested our forefathers were in the private lives and sermons of the galácticos of the pulpit. They were, in the loosest sense, the soccer stars of their day, subject to relentless scrutiny and voyeurism — and just as animated by to the opportunities for material gain and sexual adventures their prominence brought. That attention reached a highwater mark with an 1872 tour of Ireland. It, according to , led to “Capel Fever”. Indeed, this newspaper described a series of 11 sermons given in Cork City’s Ss Peter and Paul’s, where the atmosphere was “illuminated throughout by triple gas jets”, in terms that might be used to describe a Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift concert today.
By the end of this book, Capel is frayed by life, endless flight and too much wine and he is living on California’s Arno ranch with a rich and beautiful divorcee. It is difficult not to admire his stamina and persistence even if he misused his talents to lie, cheat, and defraud — shortchanging himself as much as anyone else.
The authors have done a good job in turning what could have been a repetitive Trump-scale charge sheet into an engaging read and left an obvious question: Why, unlike the clerical scandals of recent decades, did the corporate Catholicism of Capel’s time not lose position and power when his crimes and hypocrisy, and the efforts to cover them up, were exposed?
So, at the very end, the message is an optimistic one: Things do indeed change for the better.
