Sr Briege McKenna on prayer, priesthood and Pope Leo

“I’m packing for Poland,” Sr Briege McKenna tells me down the phone, pronouncing on prayer, priesthood and Pope Leo.

The globe-trotting nun, with a gift for healing and evangelisation, recently returned to Ireland for the fiftieth anniversary of Intercession for Priests, a mission founded in Dublin by the late Fr Kevin Scallon to heal and restore and renew the priesthood.

The annual retreat at Maynooth, led by Sr Briege and Fr Pablo Escriva de Romani, drew sixty priests. “It was excellent,” she said. “Some are coming for thirty or forty years. We have had great blessings over the years. Fellows who were going through a crisis on their own, in their personal lives, have been transformed.”

Among those who attended was Canon John Murray, who subsequently suffered a brutal attack before Sunday mass in Downpatrick on August 10. “A beautiful man,” she said. “I was shocked when I heard it and I am praying for him. That was a terrible thing.”

Unfortunately, she added, attacks on priests are happening “in so many countries.”

 

Changed

The Intercession for Priests is no longer held at All Hallows, but the retreat itself has changed little:  Eucharistic healing, silent prayer, and an emphasis on the holiness of priests who renew their own grace of ordination before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

“They feel free,” said Sr Briege, “to discuss every aspect of the priesthood.”

What is the greatest need in the priesthood today? “A living faith in Jesus Christ,” she answers without hesitation. “To be convinced that the Gospel is the way.”

As she approaches her 80th birthday, this prophet for our times still has lightning in her veins –  and a passion for Christ that blazes like the first fire of Pentecost. No wonder. She was born on Pentecost Sunday, in the birthplace of St Brigid at Faughart on the Irish border.

You can’t give what you don’t have. You have to have a personal relationship with Jesus”

Sr Briege spends hours each day in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This loving intimacy with Jesus, who healed her of a crippling Rheumatoid Arthritis as a young nun, is key to her own spirituality – and vital to the priestly mission. “Father,” she tells them, “you can’t give what you don’t have. You have to have a personal relationship with Jesus. If you don’t have intimacy with Jesus, how are you going to be Jesus to the people?”

The mission, she declares,  must be about love, not work. She recalls Jesus telling one saint: “You used to love me and spend time with me and now you love the work and you don’t come to me.”

Sr Briege estimates that 95% of priests who quit had stopped praying, leaving themselves open to demonic attack and temptation. “How do you get faith if you don’t pray? If you don’t pray, faith dies. The secular gospel takes over.”

 

Laments

This Sister of St Clare laments that so many Catholics do not accept the faith in a country where the martyrs “crawled to mass”

Urging the laity to cherish the Eucharist and the priesthood, she complains of a “contraceptive mentality”  where mothers and fathers do not encourage their sons into the priesthood. “If you don’t reverence or appreciate a gift it doesn’t just go away, it dies.”

“I have told people over and over again to stop criticising the priesthood. You cannot be saying all these things about the priesthood in front of your children because they won’t respond.”

“He didn’t call saints. He called sinners who have limitations but we have to pray for holy priests.”

Amid the clash between church teaching, unchanged for 2,000 years, and modern culture, with its fluid morality, Sr Briege points to Chapter 28 of Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus himself gave authority to preach and to teach the hard moral issues.  “The attitude of secular society is ‘you can’t tell me what to do’. It is difficult when a secular society decides it won’t follow church teachings.”

There’s been some very bad experiences – but that is not all priests. And I think in Ireland the media has caused a lot of suffering for priests”

“The priest himself has to believe in the priesthood. The priest is called to preach the gospel in and out of season. We are not here to be popular!”

The straight-talking sister accuses the Irish media of “viciously going after the church”. “There is a terrible lack of reverence for the sacred here in Ireland.”

“Yes,” she acknowledges. “There’s been some very bad experiences – but that is not all priests. And I think in Ireland the media has caused a lot of suffering for priests.”

So how do we address this spiritual conflict – and encourage priests to risk all for the sake of the Gospel? “Get the priests themselves to fall in love with the person of Jesus. And to realise they have this extraordinary mission to make Jesus present. Jesus doesn’t ask them to defend him. Jesus just asks them to proclaim him.”

Her own ministry is rooted in a divine revelation that has now come to pass, a vision of the priesthood in crisis. Through this mystical experience, she saw clearly the grace of ordination, a gift for men chosen by God. “God showed me the beauty from Heaven’s side of what a priest is. And it changed my life. Nobody has a right to the priesthood. It is God’s power. It is God’s choice.”

Back in 1972, the mission seemed impossible but she listened to her bishop’s advice: “Just be obedient to the authority of the church and God will lead you’.”

Jesus has led her to a hundred countries to meet thousands of priests – a journey into the wounded heart of the priesthood. “It is a lot harder today, I would find, to be a priest when you’re in such an atmosphere of negativity towards the priesthood.”

“In parishes these fellows would tell you, ‘It is very difficult. You see people yawning or looking at their watch and wanting to get out fast and being very critical of the church’.”

She knows the pain and vulnerability of the priest – and the fear of false accusation following the sex abuse crisis.

 

Value

Catholics, she insisted, must value their priests. “I say to them, ‘priests don’t grow on trees’. And you can’t have priests if you have people all the time being negative towards them.”

“I tell them, ‘There is going to come a day when we are short and have to close our churches and you will ask yourselves, ‘Did we appreciate our priesthood?’”

“We only focus on the negative. Priests are so hurt and I see so many lovely fellows.”

She is mindful too that so many Irish priests are overworked – some with four or five parishes and urges them to take their rest, no matter what. “The graveyard is full of clergy who thought they couldn’t be done without.”

Tired and irritable priests, she warns, can cause deep, lingering hurt. “It is not an easy ministry and you are a public figure and you have a great influence for good or bad. The best kind of priest is a joyful priest.”

As a young nun at an airport chapel, she was once stung by the rudeness of a priest who removed the Eucharist from the tabernacle in a cardboard box. “If you don’t respect Jesus in the Eucharist,” she says. “You won’t respect his people.”

Equally, she advises that bishops must be loving fathers to their priests, who are called to obedience. “It makes a big difference for priests if the bishop is kind to them.”

Young people are crying out for the truth,’ she said. ‘And many young people, as well as us, are getting fed up with woke’”

Sr Briege is tough with those priests who continually live a lie, telling them. “Get out of the priesthood.”

Her advice to young men who are being prompted to the priesthood by the Holy Spirit? “Do not be afraid – and do not procrastinate.”

She gives thanks for The Jubilee of Youth in Rome, which attracted a million pilgrims. “Young people are crying out for the truth,” she said. “And many young people, as well as us, are getting fed up with woke.”

Finally, I ask, what does she make of the new Pope, Leo XVI? “I am very happy,” she enthuses. “He is very prudent. And my one desire is that he is good and positive for his priests – and even for us sisters.”