The death has taken place of Fr Jim Good, the Cork priest who became the first Irish cleric to oppose the Catholic Church's ban on artificial contraception. He was 94.
His funeral Mass yesterday afternoon in the parish church of his adoptive Douglas heard a tribute from the Bishop Emeritus of Turkana in Kenya, Dr Patrick Harrington and was concelebrated by thirty priests.
A theologian who lectured in philosophy at University College, Cork, James Good became a household name when he made public his disagreements with the total ban on artificial contraception outlined by Pope Paul Vl in July 1968. The Papal encyclical or letter was called "Huamanae Vitae" the Latin for "Of Human Life".
The stance resulted in the then Bishop of Cork and Ross, Dr Cornelius Lucey, barring Fr Good from hearing confession and preaching. It also led to a degree of celebrity and notoriety, depending on which of the opposing camps within Irish Catholicism was concerned.
In a brief summary of his own life released posthumously to journalists, Fr Good writes that, as he was the only priest in Ireland to publicly dissent from the papal teaching on contraception, he attracted a good deal of attention. This was particularly the case when, in April 1969, the English Catholic weekly, The Tablet, published his fullest critique of the encyclical letter under the title "'Humanae Vitae', a Platonic Document". Nonetheless, he was prepared for the repercussions and harboured no bitterness towards his bishop.
"Bishop Lucey had no option but to suspend me from diocesan functions (preaching and hearing confessions)," he writes, "but my university posts remained intact. I have no grievance with Bishop Lucey."
The following year (1970), he was offered the post of Director of a new second-level teacher training course (the Higher Diploma in Education) which UCC was establishing at Limerick's Mary Immaculate Training College. He was invited by the Redemptorist Order to live in its monastery near his new campus. After a while, he realised that the arrangement was designed by church authorities to ensure that he'd be closely monitored, albeit on the most comfortable corridor in the monastery.
"These five years (1970-'75) were among the happiest in my life," Fr Good writes. "It was only when other non-Redemptorists joined me that I realized that this was a project to "protect" and care for potential trouble-makers. I promptly named the project the 'Psychiatric Corridor'," he recalls. But he praises profusely the charity shown him by Limerick's Redemptorist community during those years.
As a Leaving Certificate student in Limerick at the time, I lived not far from the monastery where Fr Good was a long-term guest. One summer evening, I was introduced to him by a younger priest from the city.
The encounter lasted for less than an hour and took place in a reception room in the Mount Saint Alphonsus monastery. I was apprehensive, not about the priests, but about the setting because my Catholic father had warned his older children off attending any Redemptorist Church because he had been alienated by the "hell-fire and brimstone" sermon that was the trademark of many Redemptorist preachers who toured the country giving Lenten missions in parish churches.
Largely because RTÉ was covering the debate about contraception and Catholicism, I was aware that opinion was divided as to whether Fr Good was a fool or a very brave man. I emerged from my only meeting with him convinced that he was more than brave. Relaxed and welcoming, he listened more than he talked and, rather than dominate the discussion with his learning, seamlessly joined the conversation between myself and the priest who had introduced us. I came away reaffirmed, convinced that both clerics had taken seriously the musings of a serious youth who was in the habit of debating about politics, ethics and religion.
Halfway through his Limerick sojourn, Fr Good resigned from his academic post and began a brief career as a writer and broadcaster while establishing for the Redemptorists in Limerick a short-lived Marriage Bureau, a religious version of the secular dating agency.
A visit to Kenya in the summer of 1974, organized by the Irish Missionary Union, proved a turning point in Fr Good's life. It set him thinking again about becoming a missionary, a role which he had considered seriously while training for the priesthood. Back in Ireland, he spent the year 1974-5 teaching philosophy at Mary Immaculate and (successfully) helping the college to apply for formal recognition by the National University of Ireland. But the mission fields of Kenya still beckoned.
His biographical summary reads: "My departure for Kenya (in 1975) was treated in many quarters as being "booted" out of UCC and out of Ireland by Bishop Lucey. This is entirely untrue."
Rather, he says, he went to Africa to respond to the need for priests he had witnessed in the Kenyan diocese of Lodwar in the Turkana Desert. At the time, his contemporary, John Mahon who had trained with him in Maynooth, was bishop of Lodwar.
In a remarkable twist, in 1980, at the age of 78, Bishop Lucey joined his erstwhile "troublesome priest" on the desert mission after retiring and while suffering from leukaemia. He died in Cork two years later.
Seven years of largely organisational work for his adoptive African diocese were followed by a return to teaching philosophy, this time in a seminary. In St Augustine's Senior Seminary in Mabanga in western Kenya he also taught Scripture. He was troubled by the college's many problems.
"Kenya bishops seemed happy to "unload" problem priests on the seminary (as staff), and many of the students were in many ways clearly unsuitable," he laments.
In response to a request from Rome, Fr Good drafted a Charter for Priestly Formation in Kenya, but he failed to persuade the local Catholic authorities to empower their rectors to dismiss students who were clearly unsuitable.
"Invariably, large numbers of unsuitable candidates got ordained," he recalls. "Many seminarians openly rejected the rule of celibacy, and I would think that few observed it. Sadly, the authorities turn a blind eye to the problem," he writes.
After returning to his old job as Diocesan Secretary in Lodwar, James Good made a brief trip home in 1999 to receive an honorary degree from the NUI. He discovered that his only sibling, a sister, Mary Meade and her husband, John were ill and unable to look after themselves. So he returned to Turkana, tidied up his affairs and came back to Cork to care for the couple.
John died in 2000 and Mary passed away two years later. By then, Fr Good had developed heart problems which ruled out a return to Kenya.
Instead, the diocese of Cork and Ross helped him to make his new home in a house in Douglas on the outskirts of Cork. Like a salmon, he had returned to the waters in which he had been born.
His parents, Thomas Good and Margaret Penney were what he describes as "working class people of Nicholas Street (off Douglas Street) in Cork."
He was educated nearby, firstly by the Presentation Sisters in Evergreen Street and then by the Christian Brothers at Sullivan's Quay. He credits the "superb teaching" at the Brothers'' college with his string of scholarships which culminated in a free place at the national seminary in Maynooth where he began his studies in 1941.
He was ordained a priest in June 1948 as the Mother and Child controversy raged in Dublin. The confrontation, in which Fr Good's Church led by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, prevented the introduction by the then Minister for Health, Dr Noel Browne of a free medical service, was to become the subject of his Doctoral thesis, completed in 1954 at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
A scholar to the end, Fr Good published three of his own books in his final year of life. A novel, "Ten Birthdays" traces the fortunes of an Irish nurse who goes to work in Africa. "The Editor Rejects" is a collection of his unpublished writings. And "Mary The Mother of God" traces the etymological roots of that oft-used scriptural expression.
A relative and confidante recalls that, until very recently, "Jim", as he was known to his friends and family, collected Irish coins which had gone out of circulation. Each month, he supplied an official money-changer with 40 kilos of coins and, after they were cashed in at the Central Bank in Dublin, he donated the proceeds to the diocese of Turkana.
A case of God harnessing Mammon, perhaps. Jim Good has donated his body for medical research and has left his papers to UCC.
