16 August 2001

‘Anglicans have every reason to be
profoundly grateful for the gift’



Patrick Comerford

The Rev Dr Thomas Carroll, who has recently retired at the age of 68 to his native Longford, is a priest of the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois, but has spent most of his working life as lecturer in liturgy and church history in the US, England, Rome, and Australia. He holds doctorates from both the Angelicum University in Rome and the Pontifical Liturgical Institute.

Despite his retirement, Father Carroll has been in much demand as a lecturer in theological colleges in Dublin. It is to be hoped that in coming years his native Ireland will benefit from his wisdom and learning.

As a young student in Rome in the 1950s and 1960s, Tom Carroll was present at the Second Vatican Council. Since then, he has earned acclaim as a theologian, writing and lecturing extensively on preaching, liturgy and patristics, the study of the early fathers of the Church. His Preaching the Word was published in 1984, and Liturgical practice in the Fathers followed in 1988.

Academic life

But what makes him unusual as a Roman Catholic theologian, perhaps, is that more than 40 years of his academic life have been devoted to researching the life and writings of a 17th-century Church of Ireland bishop, and his work has been highly acclaimed by Anglicans and Roman Catholics alike.

In 1990, he was the editor of Jeremy Taylor, Selected Works, published by the Paulist Press in New York as part of its “Classics of Western Spirituality” series aimed at providing “a library of the great spiritual masters”.

In his review of that book, the former Archbishop of Dublin, the late Henry McAdoo proclaimed: “This volume … is the book I have been waiting for.” Dr McAdoo had been co-chair of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), a pioneering body in the field of securing ecumenical agreements. Moreover, he was the acknowledged expert on Taylor, and his insights from Taylor’s eucharistic theology are said to have been a major contribution to the ground-breaking agreements between Anglicans and Roman Catholics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although Jeremy Taylor was born and educated in England, and spent his early years as a country rector and a junior chaplain to Charles I, he has always been seen as a key figure in the 17th-century Church of Ireland, alongside John Bramhall and James Ussher.

It is surprising that he managed to survive the turbulent years of the English Civil War. He owed his early promotions to the patronage of Charles I’s chaplain, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, who was executed; his second wife, Joanna Bridges, is thought to have been an illegitimate daughter of Charles I, and in print condemned Cromwell as “the Son of Zippor … sent to curse the people of the Lord.”

Moved to Ireland

To save Taylor from a second spell in jail, Lord and Lady Conway invited him to become their chaplain at Portmore, near Lisburn, and he moved to Ireland at the age of 44 in June 1658. Within two years, the monarchy was restored, and Taylor, who was in London for the triumphal entry of Charles II on May 29th, 1660, might have expected to become a bishop in the Church of England. Instead, he was offered the diocese of Down and Connor in the Church of Ireland.

Taylor’s disappointment was undisguised. He wrote to the Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormonde, complaining: “I am thrown into a place of torment … the ministers are implacable.” He referred to the Presbyterian ministers, who were in a majority in his new diocese, as “Scotch spiders” who “have threatened to murder”. His response would be swift: within weeks he declared vacant the parishes of 36 Presbyterian ministers.

Despite his complaints, Taylor was among the 10 new bishops and two archbishops consecrated for the Church of Ireland in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on January 27th, 1661. In front of all the powers of church and state, Taylor was given the singular honour of being invited to preach at his own consecration. In February, he took possession of his diocese, but found it had neither cathedral nor bishop’s residence, and went to live at Hillsborough Castle.

Taylor never realised his ambitions to return to a more comfortable diocese in England. Indeed, his pleas to Ormonde to be moved to any other diocese, including Meath, Dublin and Armagh, were ignored too.

Perhaps by way of compensation, the adjacent Diocese of Dromore, with its burned-down cathedral and handful of priests, was added to his charge, and he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin. In time his reforms and revisions had set Trinity on his feet, he restored Dromore Cathedral at his own expense, and the parish church at Lisburn was serving as the cathedral for the Diocese of Connor.

Personal sadness

Taylor’s personal life was marked by great sadness. His seventh and only surviving son, Charles, died on August 2nd, 1667. The following day, the bishop caught a fever, and he died at the age of 54 on August 13th, 1667. His last words were: “Bury me at Dromore.”

For years, Dr McAdoo complained that Taylor’s voluminous works were inaccessible to the general reader. Father Tom Carroll’s scholarly and attractive Selected Works went a long way towards rectifying that.

More recently, he has been invited to contribute the entry on Jeremy Taylor for the new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography being published by the Oxford University Press.

Earlier this summer, Four Courts Press published a new selection of 11 sermons by Taylor, edited by Father Carroll as Wisdom and Wasteland: Jeremy Taylor in his prose and preaching today. The news that Four Courts Press had agreed to publish the book reached Dr McAdoo the day before he died. In his foreword, the late archbishop praises Tom Carroll for his “large benefaction”, and says: “Anglicans have every reason to be profoundly grateful for the gift”.

This feature was first published as ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in The Irish Times on 16 August 2001.

14 August 2001

Simitis finds little time to
relax on Aegean holiday

Mr Costas Simitis … little time to enjoy the sights of Sifnos

Letter from
Greece
Patrick
Comerford


The Greek Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, is spending his holidays this week in the Aegean on the western Cycladic island of Sifnos, 76 miles south of Athens. In Classical times, Sifnos enjoyed great wealth, derived from its gold and silver mines, and its treasury was dedicated to Apollo at Delphi. Today, Sifniots claim, the island has 365 churches and chapels, one for each day of the year.

However, Mr Simitis is unlikely to find much time to relax among the 365 churches of Sifnos or to enjoy the island’s great festival tomorrow, the feast of the Panagia or Virgin Mary, which comes only second to Easter for its great festivities and celebrations.

Instead, he will be considering how to fight his latest slump in the opinion polls, concentrating on a speech in which he is expected to outline his plans to keep his economic and public sector reforms on track, and contemplating the potential challenges within his own centre-left party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).

Pasok has been in office for all but three of the past 20 years, but dissatisfaction is running high. Last month, for the first time, Mr Simitis’s rating sank below 30 per cent, his lowest ever, and for the first time he polled below Mr Costas Karamanlis, the untested leader of the main opposition party, New Democracy.

As he sees his popularity being eroded, Mr Simitis is now expected to announce a series of anti-poverty measures, along with tax cuts and increased public spending, in a major speech in Thessaloniki next month.

Greeks had hoped that joining the EMU last January would mean greater prosperity and a better standard of living.

The Prime Minister’s supporters point out that in the past few years Mr Simitis has achieved low inflation, faster growth than the EU average and an acceptably low budget deficit.

But his opponents point out that hopes for 5 per cent growth this year have been scaled back, the ailing stock market has hit a three-year low, and consumer inflation is running at 3.9 per cent, with persistent dry weather making fruit and vegetables expensive.

In Thessaloniki, Mr Simitis may want to make the most of the Olympic Games taking place in Athens in 2004, promising that all Greeks and not just Athenians will reap benefits.

But for most Greeks taxes remain high, paying them is time-consuming and complicated, and the poll figures reflect the belief of many that they have seen little change in a daily struggle with bureaucracy and public services.

The Prime Minister’s closest political adviser, the Environment Minister, Mr Costas Laliotis, conceded: “We must not close our eyes and ears to the messages incorporated in the polls.”

Elections are some time away, but Mr Simitis is facing growing criticism within Pasok, the party founded by the late Andreas Papandreou.

The Prime Minister has warned that he will not sacrifice policies for the sake of popularity. But heated street protests led by the public sector unions – his power-base in Pasok – forced him to shelve plans to overhaul the state pension scheme.

Now he has brought the party congress forward by six months to October in the hope of reaffirming his leadership before launching a much-needed cabinet shuffle. A cabinet shuffle is particularly popular among Pasok voters (69.3 per cent), and ministers whose proposals have caused a public uproar recently are expected to go. Although Mr Simitis is standing for re-election as party leader, one of his principal rivals inside the cabinet, the ageing Defence Minister, Mr Akis Tsohatzopoulos, who leads the party’s old-fashioned tax-and-spend populists, may see this as his last opportunity to become party leader and prime minister.

The Defence Minister, angered by a trimmed defence budget and a decision to postpone buying new fighter jets, has never been reticent about his ambitions. Having suffered two previous defeats at the hands of Mr Simitis, Mr Tsohatzopoulos could see the party congress in October as his last chance for revenge.

Mr Simitis, for his part, must win and win convincingly if he can hope to keep the populists silent as he forges ahead with reforms.

If he fails to win convincingly, then the best-qualified alternative is his Foreign Minister, Mr George Papandreou.

Mr Papandreou would have a better chance than most to unite Pasok’s two main factions: the populists loyal to Mr Tsohatzopoulos who still invoke his father’s memory, and the pro-euro modernisers.

A few weeks ago, on the fifth anniversary of Andreas Papandreou’s death, the Foreign Minister danced a zeibekiko to his father’s favourite tune – Vassilis Tsitsanis’s Cloudy Sunday – on the island of Samos.

As he staggered and swirled in the solitary dance, those who watched and clapped included the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ismail Cem.

Tradition and the Turkish presence underlined Mr Papandreou’s desire to bridge the gap between populists and reformers.

But if the steps of the zeibekiko were a hint that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather as prime minister, Mr Papandreou has told friends and allies within Pasok he is prepared to wait.

He believes he has plenty of time to make his bid for the party leadership in the future.

This news feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 14 August 2001

06 August 2001

New Turkish tourists symbolise Greek
search for a pluralist, tolerant society

Minarets still dominate the skyline of Rethymnon in western Crete, where Turkish fountains and hanging balconies decorate the narrow streets and alleyways

Letter from
Crete
Patrick
Comerford


A militant campaign led by Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens has vigorously fought against the government’s determination to drop any reference to religious affiliation from Greek identity cards. The campaign came with veiled threats and challenges to the authority of the government of the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis. But many Greek Orthodox bishops were unhappy with the campaign, and it appears to have backfired as a petition organised by the primate failed to garner the hoped-for number of signatures.

At times, it is easy to confuse Greek identity and loyalty to the Greek Orthodox Church. But the presence of a continuing number of Muslims in northeastern Thrace and in the Dodecanese islands is living testimony to the diversity within the Greek identity and to Greece's struggle to be a more open, tolerant and pluralist society.

The Muslim minority in Crete suffered severely after Crete’s formal unification with the modern Greek state in 1912. Many were removed to the Anatolian mainland of Turkey, while smaller numbers were relocated to the Dodecanese – principally Rhodes and Kos – only to find they were living in a Greek society once again in 1948.

Many Cretan towns still retain fine examples of late Ottoman architecture. The skyline of Rethymnon is dominated by both the Venetian fortezza, capped by the dome of a 16th century Turkish mosque, and by the minarets of the Nerandzes and Veli Pasha mosques. The charm of its side streets and alleyways is enhanced by a multitude of wooden hanging balconies, Turkish fountains, and doorways with Turkish inscriptions in florid Arabic script. In the island’s capital, Iraklion, the former mosque of Vezir Tzami is now the Church of Saint Titus, proudly displaying the severed head of the Apostle Paul’s martyred companion.

The new rapprochement between Turkey and Greece – symbolised this summer by the joint visit to Samos by the two foreign ministers, Ismail Cem and George Papandreou – has brought a new type of tourist to Crete. In recent months, the children and grandchildren of repatriated Cretan Muslims have returned to Iraklion in search of the houses and streets where their ancestors once lived. Greeks have been used to visiting Istanbul – the city they still call Constantinople and continue to dream of as Byzantium – as tourists and as pilgrims to the Patriarchate. But few expected to see Turks becoming enthusiastic tourists in Greece.

For Ms Lena Chryssakis, this is a welcome development in tourism. For years, she and her husband Manolis have run Mika Villas, a popular destination in the foothills above Hersonnisos for “young and lively” Irish holidaymakers. As a trained tour guide with a love of Classical, Byzantine and Venetian Crete, she has delighted in taking special tours to the island’s archaeological sites, including the ancient Minoan palaces and remains at Knossos and near Archanes, in the hills above Iraklion.

Now the arrival of a new generation of Turks in search of their ancestral homes has provided her with an opportunity to proudly introduce visitors to the history and culture of Crete. Many are surprised to find that the old houses in the Turkish quarter of Iraklion, bounded by Avgoustou and Chandakos streets, have been lovingly renovated.

A recent group of Turkish tourists explained that their grandparents once lived in central Iraklion, close to the Cathedral of Aghios Minas. Hidden away from the eyes of tourists, this part of Iraklion is typical of many Greek towns, with its narrow streets, busy shops, and traditional houses. Here, centuries ago, the young El Greco, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, trained as an icon painter.

The area around Aghios Minas is also the setting for the novel Freedom and Death by Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek. The hero of the novel, Captain Michailis, was Kazantzakis’ own father. The book is an epic account of his struggle against the Turks for Cretan liberation and of his marriage to Margi Christodoulakis, the great-aunt of Manolis Chryssakis, who continues to live in this part of Iraklion.

But if the back streets of Iraklion are attracting new attention from the grandchildren of those who fought against Captain Mikhailis, they are home, too, to another of Greece’s tiny minorities, the Roman Catholics. For centuries Crete had a large Venetian population. Although they inter-married and integrated with the Greek Orthodox minority, the small sleepy eastern village of Neapolis, home to Lena Chryssakis’ father and his family, has one claim to universal fame: it was the birthplace of the only Pope born in Crete, the Franciscan friar Alexander V (1409-1410).

Traditionally, the largest Catholic presence in Greece has been on the islands of Tinos and Syros. But today there are four Catholic churches on Crete. The small modern church of Saint John the Baptist, hidden in the side streets, close to the studio of Iraklion’s acclaimed icon painter, Antonis Theodorakis, offers a full programme of recitals and live music throughout the summer.

In Chania, there has been a renewed interest in Crete's ancient Jewish minority, dating back 2,400 years. The island’s only surviving synagogue, Etz Hayyim, was designated one of the world's 100 endangered cultural monuments, and after decades of neglect was restored under the direction of Nicholas Stavroulakis, with the help of the Lauder Foundation, and rededicated in October 1999.

Tourism and a renewed confidence among once-dwindling minorities may yet help Crete to become an example of the pluralism and tolerance that become the hallmark of modern Greek society.

This news feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 6 August 2001.

16 June 2001

‘An Irishman’s Diary’:
the Jews of Hungary

The Great Synagogue in Dohany utca in Budapest is the largest in Europe

Patrick Comerford

Throughout Hungary, the name Virag is splashed across the shop-fronts of flower sellers. I wondered whether Leopold Bloom had a long-tailed family that survived in Hungary generations after his father had moved from the banks of the Danube in 1852 to the banks of the Grand Canal in Dublin, and changed his name from Rudolph Virag to Rudolph Bloom.

In Ulysses, Bloom’s father is Rudolph Virag, who was born in Szombathely in western Hungary in 1815, and moved on to Szesfehervar and Budapest before leaving Hungary in 1852. He arrived in Dublin in 1865, and was quickly baptised into the Church of Ireland as Rudolph Bloom before marrying Ellen Higgins, the descendant of Hungarian Jews named Karoly. Soon after, Leopold Bloom was born in 1866 in Clanbrassil Street, close to Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’.

Hungarian links

The romantic lure of Hungary has proved attractive for many Irish writers. Bram Stoker originally planned to locate Dracula in Styria, but moved the location east to Transylvania, then a part of Hungary, after hearing about Elizabeth Bathori, a Hungarian countess.

In the 20th century, the romance of Gypsy music attracted two Irish violinists of note to Hungary. Walter Starkie, first professor of Spanish at Trinity College Dublin, tramped through Hungary and Romania in the inter-war years in search of Gypsy music and left an account of his adventures in a book appropriately titled Raggle Taggle (1933). Peter O’Connor followed Starkie in search of Gypsy music and was the author of Travels to Music in Hungary and Romania (1971).

But why was Joyce tempted to play on the words Virag and Bloom? According to Patrick Leigh-Fermor, who travelled through Hungary in the 1930s, Joyce picked up some Hungarian while he was teaching at the Berlitz school in Trieste, which was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the outbreak of the first World War. Some believe Joyce may even have taught Admiral Miklos Horthy some English.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and brief experiments with communism and democracy, Horthy came to power in 1919 and ruled Hungary as regent until 1944, taking the country in the second World War on the side of Nazi Germany. In 1941, a series of anti-Semitic laws were passed and the wearing of the Star of David was made compulsory. Thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and in all 600,000 Hungarian Jews were victims of the Holocaust.

It was a sad blight on Hungary’s reputation for tolerance and pluralism. There have been Jews in Hungary since the 3rd century AD, 600 years before the arrival of the Magyars. Hungary's Jewish community was well integrated since the 13th century, when King Bela IV extended a number of privileges to the Jews of Hungary in 1251, including freedom of religion.

Among Hungary’s leading Jews in the 19th century was Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who was born and taught on the site of the present Jewish Museum in Budapest. Close by is the mass grave of 2,281 Jews, who died together in the winter of 1944.

No survivors

Had there been a real Leopold and Molly Bloom, their children would have no surviving cousins in Hungary. All that remains of the Jewish presence in Rudolph Bloom's birthplace, Szombathely, is a plaque recording: “4,228 of our Jewish brothers and sisters were deported from this place to Auschwitz on 4 June 1994”.

Szombathely – its name means “Saturday Market” – was once the capital of the Roman province of Pannonia. The town’s former synagogue, built in 1881, is a fine piece of neo-Byzantine architecture, but today is home to the Bartok Concert Hall and music college.

In Budapest, it is estimated that 50 per cent of the city’s Jews survived the Holocaust. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 20,000 Jews from the concentration camps, disappeared after the Soviet army liberated Budapest, but is commemorated by a memorial by the sculptor Imre Varga on the western, wooded slopes of Budapest.

The capital’s 19th century synagogues signalled the community’s confidence of its place in Hungarian society. With seating for up to 3,000 worshippers on a Saturday, the Great Synagogue in Dohany utca is the largest in Europe – and the second largest in the world after the Temple Emmanuel in New York. Built by the Viennese architect Ludwig Foster in a mixed Byzantine-Moorish style between 1854 and 1859, its exterior is dominated by two richly-decorated Moorish-style minarets or towers, each topped by a distinctive onion-shaped dome.

Moorish ideas were also incorporated in the Orthodox Synagogue on Rumbach utca, built in 1872 by the important Secession architect, Otto Wagner.

Most Jews perished

In provincial Hungary, it is estimated, 90 per cent of the Jews perished. Unlike the Jews of Budapest, who were urbane and integrated, most of the Jews in the provincial towns and villages of eastern Hungary were distinctively-dressed, Yiddish-speaking members of Hasidic communities. They were visible and easy targets for the Fascists, and most fell victim to the Holocaust. Synagogues and cemeteries were vandalised, and a whole way of life was lost to the region.

The Holocaust makes any flights of genealogical fantasy about Hungarian Virags and Irish Blooms pointless. Curiously, Virag is simply the Magyar word for “Bloom” or flower, and most flower-sellers in Hungary in the mid-19th century were likely to be Gypsies rather than Jews. But then, Hungary’s Gypsies suffered grievously during the Holocaust too. Another sad tale for another day.

The Great Synagogue in Budapest was built by the Viennese architect Ludwig Foster in a mixed Byzantine-Moorish style in 1854-1859

This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times on Saturday 16 June 2001

30 April 2001

An Irishman’s Diary:
some Paris churches

Patrick Comerford

No Irish journalist or writer can resist a few days in the city where Oscar Wilde found exile, where James Joyce found a publisher for Ulysses, and where Beckett died. And those who love church architecture and church history are familiar with Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur.

But a recent visit to Paris was also an opportunity to visit some churches just a little off the main tourist trail, including St Eustache, where Vincent de Paul was once parish priest, where Colbert is buried, where Mozart attended his mother’s funeral, where Talleyrand spoke at the funeral of Mirabeau, where Berlioz conducted the first performance of his Te Deum, and where Cesar Franck and Liszt played the organ.

But my two favourite, off-the-beaten-track churches in Paris are St-Gervais-St-Protais in the Marais, and the American Cathedral on the Avenue George V, between Trocadero and the Arc de Triomphe.

Battered by Big Bertha

St-Gervaise stands on the rue des Barres, a winding, stepped and cobbled street that hums with the scent of flowers and incense.

Outside, this late Gothic building looks a bit battered – it suffered a direct hit from Big Bertha in 1918 – but inside it has some of the finest stained glass in Paris. The 17th-century organ is the oldest in the city, the simplicity of the chancel is a foretaste of the beauty of the liturgy, and in the side chapels, solitary monks or nuns sit or kneel silently before icons in meditation.

The church is home to the Monastic Communities of Jerusalem, founded in 1975 by Father Pierre-Marie Delfieux. The nuns and monks at St Gervais quote St Augustine: “If you want to know what we believe, come and hear what we sing.” Their liturgy, sung entirely in four voices, is based on the Roman rite, but draws on both Eastern and Western Christian traditions and is open to the spirit of church renewal and the call of ecumenism.

The men and women of this community have an unusual lifestyle for monks and nuns. Their cloister is the city, and as city dwellers they are concerned about the rapid, global expansion of cities, for “unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchers stay awake in vain” (Psalm 126: 1). They rent their housing to avoid the risks of becoming too settled or accumulating property. They are wage-earners, expressing solidarity with the workplace, but work only part-time, avoiding ambitions to succeed economically or socially.

The name Jerusalem is an apt choice, for not only do they speak of Jerusalem as the “mother of all cities”, but this is the old Jewish quarter of Paris. Two streets away, in rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, is the sombre Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyrs.

As old as Liberty

In a more fashionable area stands the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, commonly called the American Cathedral in Paris, which was consecrated on Thanksgiving Day, 1886, a few days after the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, France’s gift to New York.

The cathedral, one of the finest Continental examples of English Gothic Revival architecture, was designed by George Edmund Street (1824-1881), who at the same time was masterminding the restoration of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. The stained glass windows illustrate the canticles, the Te Deum and the Venite, and the artwork includes an altarpiece that was the last work of the pre-Raphaelite Edwin Abbey (1851-1911).

In many ways, the cathedral reflects the history of modern Paris. Mendelssohn's music was banned as “Jewish music” by the Nazis during the Occupation, and the cathedral was commandeered as a garrison church for the German troops. In a gesture of defiance at the service marking the liberation of Paris in 1944, the cathedral organist, Lawrence Whipp, who had been held in a German prison camp, played Mendelssohn’s Sonata as the postlude.

The cathedral replaces an earlier building on the rue Bayard, consecrated in 1864, but the congregation dates back to at least the mid-1830s, when Col Herman Thorn engaged an English clergyman for the first services in the garden of the Hotel Matignon. Today, Col Thorn’s home on the rue de Varenne is the official residence of the French Prime Minister.

Anglican presence

But the Episcopalian or Anglican presence in Paris predates Col Thorn, thanks to dissident clerical and lay members of the Church of Ireland. Thomas Russell – the “Man from God knows where”, who was executed after the 1803 rising – spent the previous Christmas in Paris, and attended Mass in the Jansenist Church. Before him, the Rev William Jackson spent his days of exile in revolutionary Paris in the 1790s canvassing support for the United Irishmen.

In the early 18th century, the Irish Nonjuror, Canon Charles Leslie (1650-1722), Chancellor of Connor, fled to Paris after he was deprived of his Church offices for refusing to take the new oath of loyalty to William of Orange after the Battle of the Boyne.

For many years, Leslie was the Anglican chaplain at the Jacobite court in St Germainen-Laye, but he returned to Ireland in his last days, and died at Castle Leslie, Co Monaghan. Over 13 pages of the British Museum library catalogue are devoted to his books and pamphlets, making him an early Irish literary and Anglican link with Paris.

Patrick Comerford

This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Monday 30 April 2001

19 January 2001

Debt-ridden airline
with colourful past
faces Olympian task
to find partner

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, wife of Olympic Airways founder Aristotle Onassis, was a “courteous passenger”; Former Greek Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, and wife Dimitra “Mimi” Liani, an ex-Olympic Airways stewardess. Her abuse of power in his party forced his resignation as leader.

Olympic Airways has had a rich history – linked with Aristotle Onassis is has become part of the Greek national psyche. It now faces an uncertain future

Patrick Comerford

The Greek Government is seeking a strategic investor to buy a 65 per cent stake in the ailing state-owned Olympic Airways, in the hope of ensuring the flag carrier’s survival. “Expressions of interest” for the cash-strapped carrier are being sought from companies experienced in aviation, with a solid financial background and a restructuring plan.

The sale would form part of an extensive restructuring process that would leave the Greek state with some debt-ridden parts of Olympic Airways, which has accumulated debts of about $100 million.

Today, Olympic Airways is among the 50 largest airlines in the world, with 33 Boeing and Airbus aircraft and about 8,500 employees. But the company's pre-Olympic history goes back 70 years to 1930, when the first Greek airline was established as the Icarus partnership, replaced within a few months by the Hellenic Air Transport Company (EEES). The new company's first scheduled flight to Thessaloniki was inaugurated the following year, carrying the Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, among the 28 enthusiastic passengers.

Technical Airline Enterprises (TAE) was established in 1935, but with the outbreak of the second World War the airline was placed at the service of Greece's war efforts against Germany. Civil aviation resumed in 1946 with TAE back in the air, although during the Greek civil war, TAE domestic flights were often hit in crossfire.

[Onassis] was
stern, distant
and inquiring.

He had a
critical eye, so
we always tried
to be perfect



In April 1957, TAE was bought by shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis from the Greek state and renamed Olympic Airways. At the time, Onassis was at the zenith of his legendary career. He had already succeeded as a tanker tycoon, and with his wife, Tina Livanou, and their children, Alexander and Christina, had reached international celebrity status.

“The airplane was a new field for him,” Captain Pavlos Ioannidis, one of his closest associates for two decades, later recalled. “He wanted to fly all over the world, as he wanted to send his fleet of ships all over the world. That was it. Cost couldn’t stop him; nothing could. Proof of this is that he started with Dakotas and DC4s and ended up flying to five continents.”

A Dakota from TAE was decorated with the new airline logo – five Olympic circles that had to be altered later because the Olympic symbol is protected under international law – and Captain Ioannidis flew the first flight from classical Athens to Byzantine Thessaloniki.

Denise Karagiorga, the sole cabin crew member, along with the captain, the co-pilot and the radio operator, later recalled: “We didn’t serve a meal that day because it was a short flight. Nothing out of the ordinary happened.”

But Vassilis Vasilikos, the author of Z and later Greek ambassador to Unesco, saw a deeper, cultural significance in Olympic’s first flight: “By inaugurating the link between Thessaloniki and Athens 40 years ago, it succeeded in joining Byzantium and antiquity, the two main constituents of our national identity.”

A few months after taking over Olympic, Onassis provided a plane to bring home the body of the Cretan writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek, who had died in exile. The airline had become part of the Greek national psyche.

In its first years, the new national airline had just 865 employees and 15 propeller planes – 14 DC3s and one DC4 – linking the Greek capital with Mytilini (Lesbos), Belgrade, Frankfurt and Thessaloniki, which had connections to Istanbul and Belgrade. One of those early flights was halted on the runway, and the passengers disembarked, because “one of our wheels had been borrowed from TWA”, Ioannidis recalled recently. “They needed it and came to get it back.”

But the airline grew rapidly during the 18 years between 1957 and 1975 when it was owned by Onassis. The first international route, Athens-Rome-Paris-London, was launched in 1957, and in 1958 new routes were opened from Athens to Zurich-Frankfurt and to Tel Aviv. In the mid-1960s, the Athens-New York route was inaugurated, with Pavlos Ioannidis flying the first transatlantic flight.

Mr Ioannidis remembers the touches Onassis brought to the airline. “When we launched our European routes, he put in gold-plated cutlery. In first class he put a candle on the tables. He wanted a piano on the 707s and 747s.” Denise Karagiorga, the sole flight attendant on the first flight in 1957, knew Onassis. “He was the man who never let anybody know when he was going to show up,” she told Olympic’s in-flight magazine, Kenisi (Motion). “He might well show up at the last moment. He was stern, distant and inquiring. He had a critical eye, so we always tried to be perfect.”

Stavroula Stefanou, one of Olympic Airway’s most experienced flight attendants, remembers meeting Jackie Kennedy soon after her marriage to Onassis. But she “didn’t have any special demands. I remember she just asked me to bring her a vodka and not to wake her up until half-an-hour before landing in Paris ... She was very courteous and kept her distance.”

On a flight to Mykonos, the crew helped deliver a baby. The pilot was invited to become the godfather, and at the baptism the management of Olympic Airways was named as the godmother.

But one ex-flight attendant has also been associated with the fall of a government. The late Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou met Dimitra Liani, a flight attendant popularly known as “Mimi”, on an Olympic flight. Their open affair and the public humiliation of his second wife, Margaret Papandreou, contributed to the election defeat of his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) in June 1989. They married the following month, but her abuse of power in the party eventually forced his resignation as party leader.

Today, Olympic admits its “Achilles’ heel” is the under-developed state of Greece’s airports. But the 2004 Olympic Games have brought a rush to improve standards, and a new airport to serve Athens is being built at Sparta by March. Whoever buys Olympic must operate out of the new airport.

This full-page feature was first published in the Business This Week section of ‘The Irish Times’ on 19 January 2001

18 January 2001

An Irishman’s Diary:
SPG missionaries

George Berkeley: missionary as well as philosopher

Patrick Comerford

Some time ago, as we travelled through east Cork, I was determined to visit Cloyne Cathedral, with its round tower and Bruce Joy’s impressive monument to a former Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley, laid out in the north transept in all his episcopal finery.

As we approached the monument, my younger child asked: “Is he dead?” The bishop was dead since 1753, I replied. But Joe persisted: “Does he know he’s dead?” I presumed so. “Well, does God know he’s dead?” In three quick questions, a young boy had cut to the heart of Berkeley’s empiricist philosophy, which holds that everything save the spiritual exists only as it is perceived by the senses.

Berkeley was Bishop of Cloyne from 1734, but due to failing health he moved to Oxford in 1752. Although his monument may be seen in Cloyne, he does not rest there: he died in Oxford on January 14th, 1753, and was buried in Christ Church. Today, he is largely remembered for his work as a philosopher and mathematician, but is seldom referred to as a pioneering Irish missionary.

Educating colonists

In 1728, Berkeley sailed for North America in the hope of establishing a college in Bermuda for the education of colonists and American Indians. He settled in Newport, Rhode Island, returning only in 1731 after his plans and hopes were undermined and a grant of £20,000, approved by parliament, failed to materialise.

Berkeley’s plans and works in America were sponsored by the oldest Anglican missionary society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701 by the Rev Dr Thomas Bray with the support of the bishops of the Church of Ireland and the Church of England.

Between 1706 and 1761, 26 clergy served from the Church of Ireland served as missionaries with the SPG, all but four of them in the American colonies. William Smith was the first missionary to the Bahamas and the first colonial bishop from the Church of Ireland was Charles Inglis (1734-1816) from Glen Columbkille, Co Donegal. Inglis taught in Pennsylvania before he was ordained in 1759 for the parish of Dover in Delaware.

In Delaware, Inglis worked among the Mohawk Indians, and pressed for an Anglican bishop in the colonies. In 1765, he moved to New York as the curate of Trinity Church, where he became rector in 1777, during the early stages of the American Revolution. Trinity Church was destroyed by the rebels, Inglis was attained and all his property was confiscated.

In 1783, he moved with his family to Nova Scotia. During a brief return visit to these islands in 1787 he was consecrated at Lambeth Palace as the first bishop of Nova Scotia, with jurisdiction over Quebec, Newfoundland and New Brunswick. Two months later, in the first Anglican ordination in Canada, he ordained his nephew, Andrew Inglis.

Founder in Canada

Charles Inglis has been hailed as the founder of the Anglican Church in Canada. His son John became the third bishop of Nova Scotia, with a diocese that extended as far as Berkeley's beloved Bermuda.

Of the 106 clergy from the Church of Ireland who worked as SPG missionaries in the period 1824 to 1870, 67 (more than half) went to Canada, 19 to Australia, and six to South Africa. Among the remaining 14 was the Rev George Hunn Nobbs of Dublin, who worked in the Pitcairn Islands among the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and later joined their migration to Norfolk Island.

In Australia, Hussey Burgh Macartney, a former curate of Kilcock, Co Kildare, built St Paul’s Cathedral and became Dean of Melbourne. William Wright from Ireland was the first Anglican missionary in South Africa. His strong opposition to early racism led to a conflict with the Irish governor of the Cape, Sir Lowry Cole, and he left the colony in 1829. But later SPG missionaries in southern Africa included Francis Balfour from Townley Hall, near Drogheda, the first resident Anglican bishop in Lesotho, William Gaul from Derry who became Bishop of Mashonaland, Davis Croghan from Wexford, who was Dean of Grahamstown, and John Darragh, who was instrumental in building St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg.

Social justice

It was men like these who shaped the Anglican Church in Southern Africa, giving it its high church ethos and its commitment to social justice and action against racism. Later Irish SPG missionaries did pioneering work in Burma, China, Japan and Korea, and provided bishops for dioceses in Lahore (Pakistan), the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and Gambia.

In 1965, the SPG merged with the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. Today the society is known as the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG). To mark its 300th anniversary, a new history of SPG and USPG has been edited by the Rev Dr Daniel O’Connor, former principal of the College of the Ascension in Birmingham. The tercentenary celebrations, which began in St Chad’s Cathedral, Lichfield, on January 6th, will culminate with an international anniversary service of celebration in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, on June 15th.

This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 18 January 2001.

11 January 2001

An Irishman’s Diary:
A saint from Co Clare

Harriet Monsell, founder of the Community of Saint John Baptist, was born at Dromoland Castle, Co Clare

A nun from Co Clare who was also the sister of a patriot MP has been honoured among the saints by the Church of England.

A new prayer book, new liturgies and a new calendar of saints’ days have been in use throughout the Church of England since January 1st. The 1980 Alternative Service Book has been replaced by Common Worship, which includes some changes to the Calendar of Saints’ Days, with an eye to ecumenism and the addition of a considerable number of contemporary names.

Patrick and Columba (Colmcille) were included in the old ASB calendar, along with Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Dromore. But Ireland’s third patron, Brigid, now also features in the Church of England calendar. Another Irish woman named for the first time in the list of saints is Harriet Monsell, commemorated on March 26th.

O’Brien titles

Born Harriet O’Brien, she was a member of the Inchiquin branch of the family from Dromoland Castle, Co Clare. Her father, Sir Edward O’Brien, was a direct descendant of Brian Boru and the O’Brien Kings of Munster. When the Thomond peerages became extinct in 1855 with the death of James O’Brien, third Marquess and seventh Earl of Thomond, it seemed the ancient O’Brien titles had come to an end. However, Harriet’s eldest brother, Sir Lucius O'Brien, was surprisingly successful in taking his claim to an obscure and almost-forgotten 16th century title to the Committee for Privileges of the House of Lords, and in 1862 he became the 13th Baron Inchiquin.

As a result of the decision in the Lords, Lord Inchiquin’s four surviving sisters and two of his three surviving brothers were given a royal licence to use “the style and precedence of the younger sons of a baron” – meaning, in effect, they could put the prefix “The Hon” in front of their names.

The other surviving brother was William Smith O’Brien, MP for Co Limerick; he had inherited the Cahirmoyle estate in Co Limerick through his mother, Charlotte Smith, whose father had bailed the O’Briens out of threatened bankruptcy. Charlotte was one of the founding lights of the women’s branch of the Church Missionary Society, and the MP was proud of his mother’s humanitarian work among the starving and homeless famine victims of Co Clare in 1847. A year later, on the 50th anniversary of the 1798 Rising, he led the Young Ireland insurrection.

After the failure of the Battle of Ballingarry, O’Brien was deported to Tasmania, but was eventually pardoned in 1854 and allowed home. Despite being snobbily snubbed by the House of Lords two years before his death, O’Brien is commemorated today by a statue at the south end of O'Connell Street, Dublin.

Three brothers

In the year the Lords snubbed William Smith O’Brien, his elder daughter, Lucy Josephine, married the Very Rev John Gwynn, Dean of Raphoe and Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin. At one time, three Gwynn brothers were prominent in TCD so that it was referred to jokingly as “Gwynnity College”. Dean Gwynn’s son, the Rev Robert Malcolm Gwynn, shared his grandfather’s radical political outlook: it is said that the concept of the Irish Citizens’ Army was born in his college rooms, and later, as senior master, he introduced social studies to Trinity. His daughter, equally active in campaigning on social issues, was the late Mercy Simms, wife of Archbishop George Simms.

Three of the patriot MP’s sisters were married into clerical families: Anne was the wife of Canon Arthur Martineau of St Paul’s Cathedral, London; Katherine was married to Bishop Charles Harris of Gibraltar; and in 1839 Harriet married the Rev Charles Henry Monsell, youngest son of the Ven Thomas Bewley Monsell, Archdeacon of Derry and a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Harriet and Charles had no children, and after his death in 1851 she founded one of the first Anglican religious communities of women, the Community of St John the Baptist at Clewer, near Windsor in Berkshire. The order soon spread to India, South Africa and North America.

Today, the Clewer Sisters run the Clewer Spirituality Centre, with retreats, conferences and workshops. They also run St Anne's House for the elderly and St John’s Convent Home for mentally handicapped women, and some of the nuns are engaged in parish work, missions and retreats. Individual sisters are involved in a local day centre, the Thames Valley Hospital, work with the deaf and blind, and in ecumenical projects.

Modern names

A pioneering nun, Harriet O'Brien Monsell was the Mother Superior of the House of Mercy at Clewer for 25 years until she died at the age of 71 on March 25th, 1883. However, unlike the usual convention with saints’ names, she cannot be commemorated on the date of her death: March 25th is Feast of the Annunciation, and the day before has been reserved for the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was murdered while saying Mass on March 24th, 1980.

The modern names in the Church of England calendar include Archbishop William Temple, the author and mystic Evelyn Underhill, Mary Sumner of the Mothers’ Union, and two second World War martyrs, Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoffer.

Many people were surprised last year when Pope John Paul II beatified Pope Pius IX in the face of strong opposition and criticism, although he has been slow to recognise the radical martyrs of the 20th century, such as Oscar Romero. But this year Oscar Romero joins the ranks of Anglican saints along with Harriet O’Brien Monsell, the patriot’s sister and radical nun from Co Clare.

PATRICK COMERFORD

This feature was first published as ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in ‘The Irish Times’ on Thursday 11 January 2001

06 January 2001

The Crete of Kazantzakis

The grave of Kazantzakis. It bears the pithy epitaph: “I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free” (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Crete’s main airport lies to the east of the island’s capital Iraklion, well-positioned to whisk tourists further east to the popular resorts of Hersonnisos, Piskopiano, Malia and Aghios Nikholaos. Few return to explore the “Little Athens” of Crete, with its narrow streets and open markets, and their enchanting mix of Byzantine churches, fortified Venetian gates and walls, Ottoman minarets and fountains. This is the city whose museum houses the greatest collection of Minoan artefacts, where El Greco was first schooled in icon painting, and that inspired Greece’s greatest modern writer, Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957).

In the West, Kazantzakis is best remembered for Zorba the Greek (1946) or, perhaps, The Last Temptation. But for Cretans, his outstanding works are his autobiographical but posthumous Report to Greco (1960) or Freedom and Death (1946), set in Iraklion during the struggle against Ottoman oppression. Freedom and Death first appeared in Greek as Captain Michailis, and the eponymous hero is the author’s own father. The characters are the people of 19th-century Iraklion, the settings are its streets, churches, fountains, mosques, and houses. His own epic version of the Odyssey occupied Kazantzakis for 10 years. His novels included Christ Recrucified, The Fratricides, and the fictionalised biography of Francis of Assisi, The Poor Man of God. But his work also included poems, plays, travel books, encyclopaedia articles, journalism, translations, school textbooks and a dictionary.

Educated in Athens and Paris, in his later years, Kazantzakis was banned from entering Greece for long periods, and died in exile in Germany on October 27th, 1957. When his body was brought back from Freiburg, the Greek Orthodox Church refused to allow any priests to provide rites or ceremonies in Athens, and western writers often claim he was denied an Orthodox burial because of his unorthodox views, or because of The Last Temptation. But Aristotle Onassis provided a plane to take the coffin to Iraklion, and Kazantzakis laid in state in the Cathedral of Aghios Minas. Those who came to pay tribute were the Archbishop of Crete and the resistance leader and future prime minister, George Papandreou.

Manolis Chrisakis, the proprietor of Mika Villas, a popular destination in Piskopiano for Irish tourists, denies his great-uncle was ever excommunicated by the Greek Orthodox Church, and insists he was never disowned by the Church of Crete, which is semi-independent under the Patriarch of Constantinople. Family photographs of the funeral on November 5th show Orthodox priests mingling with men dressed like Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight as the coffin was paraded through the thronged narrow streets of Iraklion up to the city walls. A year later, a priest led the traditional family prayers at the graveside on the southernmost bastion, built by the Venetians in the 16th century.

Peter Bien of Dartmouth, who translated many of the novels, once wondered whether Kazantzakis would be read 50 years after his death. Although he never received the Nobel Prize, Kazantzakis is still hailed by Greeks as a literary giant of the 20th century. At Mirtia near Knossos, the country mansion once owned by Captain Michailis now houses the Kazantzakis Museum.

These days, many Iraklians gather on the Martinengo Bastion at the weekend to get a free view of the football stadium below, and to pay their respects at the tomb of Kazantzakis. Here one can look north across the city out to the deep blue of the Mediterranean, or south towards Mount Juktas, described in all its beauty in the opening scenes of Zorba. The mountain ridge looks like a sleeping man - transformed by Cretan lore into the dead Zeus and giving rise to the classical Greek slur that all Cretans are liars. Kazantzakis inherited the islanders' healthy scepticism towards religious and political dogmas. His tomb is marked only by a simple wooden cross framed by a flowering hedge and an undecorated gravestone with the pithy epitaph: “I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free”.

This feature was first published in The Irish Times on Saturday 6 January 2001