Sean Walsh

The Reckoning. 3

Drama in 2 acts, parts. A play for Yesterday and Today… Set in a Dublin friary

more than half a century ago… “What a play! What a play!..”

Why the 60’s?

A modern audience will be able to look back/look into the Church as it was at that time;

the strict regime of “the old days” had only just begun to give way to the changes and uncertainties resulting from Vatican Two;

the old regime of “black is black – white, white” was slowly, inexorably,being eroded;

the element of fear – correction, reprimand, punishment, transfer – loomed large in the clerical psyche;

the shock waves caused by the defection of Charles Davis from the priesthood and the diocese of Westminster had only just begun to reverberate around the universal Church;

the old certainties had begun to give way to the new uncertainties;

when the term, paedophile, was far from common coinage;

when the debate on clerical celibacy/married clergy was still in its infancy;

when the aristocratic Pope Pius XII was still a vivid memory in the minds of the faithful;

when the clerics and religious who lived at that time could not have foreseen the scandals that would rock the Church of the 90’s and subsequent decades…

Briefly, a modern audience will be able to look back at the Church of the 60’s – a Church that no longer exists to any great extent – an era that formed their forebears; view it objectively and with a certain curiosity.

Change, then, is the operative word. Church of change… of friction, dispute, challenge, doubt, uncertainty, the old absolutes gone for ever.