We can only condemn Cleary’s one ‘integrity’ — he lived his lie to the end
“Cleary was a victim of the times,” Ryle Dwyer wrote. “Of course, he made mistakes. Who hasn’t? He may have been hypocritical at times and he told some lies but if only those who had never done either were allowed to criticise him, you can bet there would be no criticism.”
In fact, far from being a victim of the times, Michael Cleary was a beneficiary of the times. He gained enormously from the period in which he lived. The ’60s and ’70s were times of excitement and growing freedom. A priest who could tell a few jokes, sing a few songs and satisfy the demand of an expanding media for “a down-to-earth, ordinary kind of a cleric” could — and did — become a household name.
Buoyed up by that facile fame, Cleary bounced on the surface of the Church like a cork. He was never short of money or of card-playing buddies. A clever courtier, he constantly showed loyalty to the institution by taking on the role of the enforcer: the man who drew the line between a la carte Catholicism and the demands of the real thing. His man-of-the-people persona wrapped in the mantle of orthodoxy undoubtedly led to him being given pride of place when the Pope visited Ireland.
Against that background, and no matter how much we seek to be balanced, it goes too far to describe as merely “hypocritical at times” the life of a cleric ostensibly and overtly committed to celibacy, who at the same time sexually exploited an unschooled, unsophisticated and unstable young woman to whom he owed a duty of care as a fellow human being, as a Christian, as a Catholic priest and as an employer.
The suggestion that Cleary sustained the lie that constituted his life, even in the face of imminent mortality, because he was afraid that he would not get a fair or sympathetic hearing in the 1990s merits examination. By that point, hundreds, if not thousands of men had left the priesthood, many of them because of discomfort with Church stances on issues including contraception, many of them because they had fallen in love, many of them suffering grievously in the process of leaving what they had believed to be a vocation for life.
Just as a vaccination gives the body the capacity to fight later assaults by the same virus, that first tranche of priests leaving made later departures less exceptional, less traumatic. The faithful adapted. Generously. Cleary could have relied on that generosity, that changed attitude.
Even more to the point, a true “man of the people” could not fail to understand the marvellous unconditional love of older Catholics for priests who have served a parish long and well, best exemplified when a curate from Dublin’s northside died of a heart attack in a gay bath house. Although many of his parishioners must have been floored by the news, they nonetheless pitched up in large numbers at his funeral and told the media to back off: this man had been a good priest, never mind the circumstances of his death.
Cleary doesn’t seem to have believed he could rely on the unconditional love of his parishioners or on the generosity of the general public, even though he, unlike other priests with problems, had access to endless TV and radio programmes, not to mention newspapers, in which to present his case.
OR PERHAPS he sustained his spurious self-presentation to the grave because he knew that once he had confessed and — as the Church puts it — been “reduced to the lay state,” he would no longer have been Fr Cleary. He would no longer be in a context where minimal talent is applauded simply because it is amateur and exercised for charitable purposes. Shorn of clerical status, his vulgar, cliché-ridden jokes would have been roundly rejected for their shallow shoddiness. He desperately needed the priesthood.
His priestly status protected him to the end, as did the obvious signs of his impending death. Those who loathed him for the patronising, inattentive contempt he had shown vulnerable groups, ranging from clerical child sex abuse victims to men who left the priesthood, gave him the unearned gift of their silence. He died clinging to the wreckage of a confected life. A strange paradoxical integrity, that: living a lie to the end.
The notoriety that followed his death carries with it the danger that he will be retrospectively elevated to a position he shouldn’t hold. He was not a definition of the Catholic Church at the time.
He was a fag-smoking, bet-laying, dirty-talking showbiz groupie who, when he landed on a temporary platform provided by the coming together of Church and media, knew he was sitting pretty. He was protected by the media against the Church, protected by the church against the rude realities of having to actually earn a living in the media.
He had it both ways. Yes, the Church can be condemned for allowing such a man to be showcased, as can the media for showcasing him. But every era, every sector of life has its Michael Cleary.
Ryle Dwyer mentions that many of those who knew Cleary talk of his humanity. His common-law-wife didn’t. His son doesn’t. Now, here are the people with whom he lived, down all the days. If they do not bear witness to his humanity — if their lives demonstrate his lack of humanity — then we have a measure against which to set the evidence of his having that virtue.
Thomas Kenneally’s early novel Three Cheers for the Paraclete nailed the mentality that allowed Cleary to exploit and damage those closest to him in the interest of some vague wider humanity; to further the giving of kindness to strangers (always easier than the continuum of kindness required in a true family).
“Because they love nobody, they think they love God,” wrote Kenneally of a particular kind of priest.
Diarmaid Ferriter is appalled that having bullied, lied and exploited his way through life, Cleary “was still able to look forward to his final journey”.
A very different man, in very different times, showed the same tranquil confidence. In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More advises his executioner not to be afraid, because the fall of his blade will send More to God. Archbishop Cranmer, supervising the execution, remarks waspishly, “You’re very sure of that, Sir Thomas.”
“He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him,” More replies.
Michael Cleary was no Thomas More.
But his blithe conviction that God would not refuse him, while on the one hand demonstrating the uncaring self-absorption Diarmaid Ferriter and Mary Raftery (in The Irish Times) properly condemn, may also point to Cleary’s visceral faith in one pivotal principle of the religion he half believed in: Forgiveness.
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