Earlier this year I read, and commented upon, a series of novels by Brendan O'Carroll, stories that are raw and vibrant with the life of the Jarro, a working class slum in Dublin. They are well-worth reading, as long as you can see beyond the language, which is somewhat earthy... I enjoyed the stories of Agnes Browne and her rambunctious clan because they reminded me of life in the North of England. O'Carroll has since written a 'pre-quel,' as they say, telling the story of Agnes as a young girl. I don't think it's as well written as the main stories, as is often the case with works written to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that it was written to satisfy the demands of a curious public (and the publisher). Be that as it may, The Young Wan is a cheerful tale. There's a smattering of Irish nationalism, a tipping of the hat to the unions, and series of entertaining anecdotes. I'm not sure I'd pay full price for it, but I'd borrow it from the library, or pick it up at Half Price Books, which is where I got my copy.
In my previous review, I noted that there was an absence of anti-clericalism, which struck me as odd. The Church was simply an irrelevance to Agnes, as an adult. This volume may give us part of the reason why.
Towards the end of the story, Agnes is about to be married to Redser Browne. She is already having doubts. However, she is pregnant and he has agreed to marry her. The tension in the story concerns Agnes' wedding dress, which is white. Her mother and grandmother before her had worn the same dress. Her first communion dress had been made from its train. Agnes is determined to wear the dress, but when Father Pius finds out that she is "in the family way" he forbids it. Only virgins may wear white. She will have to wear something else, and suffer the shame. Secretly, the priest sympathises with Agnes, and would like to bend the rules, but the Church refuses compromise on the sacrament of marriage. If he performs the ceremony, and she is wearing white, he will lose his job. In the end, this is precisely what he does, and before the registers have been signed, he has been defrocked by the bishop. Only then do we learn of the debt owed to Agnes' father by this priest.
So, the issue is raised of rules or compassion. The priest wants to exercise compassion, but the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church refuses. When he acts according to his conscience, the hierarchy responds with legalism, it crushes his rebellion, and a family spends the next fifty years resenting the Church. The question is: which should be paramount, the rulebook or compassion, law or grace?
It is easy to answer "compassion." In recent years whenever there has been a conflict between what have been called the masculine and the feminine sides of the Church, the feminine has always won. We find it increasingly difficult to make hard decisions. Church discipline is almost impossible to enforce. Now, I'm not suggesting that we should return to an entirely law-based ecclesiology, but I do wonder whether the pendulum has not swung too far. If we have no standards to keep then we compromise too readily with the tears of the world. Sometimes those tears are genuine, but sometimes they are not. Surely, there is a balance to be found? The Church should be seen a place of principle, but also as a bastion of love. The truth is that, if love is always exercised in a vacuum, and if no standards are fixed, then it is love that suffers. Grace without law ends up merely being licence, and that is a corruption of the Gospel, just as much as the inflexibility of Law.
Earlier Review at http://presbuteros.blogspot.com/2009/06/dragonflies-and-death.html
