The 16th of March has come around again. So what? you may ask, as would anyone else whose birthday or anniversary doesn’t happen to fall on that day. What’s so special about a nondescript day that barely has a toehold in spring?
A couple of years after I took up my teaching post in a local Catholic secondary school, our school community entertained the arrival of a new chaplain. Before his arrival, my mind began formulating a stark mental image of a formidable figure, possessed of a booming voice and a towering air of unassailable authority. His would be a powerful intellect set to navigate life via the use of a stringent moral compass, pushing aside any that lost their way along the route. Dressed completely in black, he would be a figure to inspire awe, terror, and a pious need to fall to the knees and confess all sins whilst weeping like a lost child in the supermarket.
On the day he was scheduled to arrive for the first time, to introduce himself to the pupils and the staff, I was ready. I was resolved that I would stand up to even the fiercest glare, deflect the harshest of interrogations. My immortal soul was already beginning to ache. Then it happened.
The Headmaster strode up to me in the school’s main corridor: “Simon, I’d like you to meet Father Eddie Murphy.” I looked behind him, then looked down. Even at his full height, Father Murphy stood nearly a foot shorter than me. “Vewy pleased to meet you” he chirped in a voice not unlike how I imagine Michael Caine would sound had he inhaled a little helium. This thought was never far from my mind in his presence, and I would often have a little chuckle to myself when he began school Masses with
“In the name of the Farver, an’ of the Son, an’ of the ‘oly Spiwit”
Slightly podgy, with thinning hair, he couldn’t have been any more contrary to what I had expected. A latecomer to the priesthood at the age of fifty-three, he would later tell us of how his long-running desire to become a member of the clergy had been hampered by dyslexia. Here was a man who had seen the splendours of the Rome, had strolled through the glories of the Vatican, but wore the fact exactly the same as he did his own insecurities and failings. I, and everybody else, liked him immensely from the very start.
The children particularly loved him, probably because he seemed to share their random sense of humour. Once, during Mass, he had raised his hands in supplication and then, out of nowhere, stopped. Turning his eyes to the seated ranks of pupils in front of him, he then said: “You know, I ‘ave to keep my hands like this for a little while now, but it dun’ arf ache. Just thought I’d share that wiv you”, before proceeding with the celebration of the Mass.
Another time, during an open evening for parents of prospective pupils, he had been circulating the room, chatting to parents, when he suddenly sidled up to us.
“Ello.”
“Hello, Father. How are you?”
“Yeah, I’m awright. Do you know what the best fing was, the thing I most wemember, about my twaining in Wome?………The buses”. By now we were used to his random ramblings, but this one had even me stumped.
“The buses?”
“Yep. Always full they were. But ‘cos I’m little, this meant I was always at just the wight height to appweciate the beautiful Italian ladies. They’re vewy…” he searched a second for the right word, ending diplomatically with “…fwagwant”.
This was probably the only time that I had ever seen the Assistant Head, a former English teacher, lost for words as he nearly spat out his tea. “You can’t say that! You’ll be …discombobulated or…disembowelled or…whatever it is that they can do to you!”
“Ah,” replied Father Eddie, “That’s only if they catch me!” He wandered away, leaving us with a wink and a chuckle.
When the powers-that-be within the Church decided that he was needed more in a parish in East Anglia, the entire school community was devastated. Then, less than a year after his move, whilst driving to Waterford City to visit family, he drove over the crest of a hill, seeing a stationary truck too late on the other side.
Even though those long months had passed, when the news reached our school the impact was huge, and the reverberations long-lasting as ripples settling in a pond. By then, though, any apprehension I had ever carried about priests had been destroyed forever.
And so every year, as with this year, when March 16th comes around again, unremarkable for its neither-her-nor-there-ness, I raise a glass in memory of, and thanks to, a simple but wonderful man who once walked with his head in Heaven and his feet firmly on the ground, and who now lies with his Rosminian brothers in the soft soil of Clonmel.
