Fr McDonough: 'Fr Willie Doyle’s hidden works of love are what saints are made of'
Homily of Father Conor McDonough OP during the closing session of the Irish phase of the Diocesan Inquiry of the Cause for the Beatification and Canonisation of the Servant of God Fr Willie Doyle SJ
‘Age to age shall proclaim your works, O Lord, shall declare your mighty deeds, shall speak of your splendour and glory.’
Why are we here, brothers and sisters? Why are we here in Mullingar this afternoon?
We are here to worship our God, Father, Son, and Spirit. We are here to praise Him, to give glory to Him, for what he did in the life of Fr Willie Doyle. God never ceases to raise up saints in every age, for every age, and in our time the Church in Ireland and beyond is coming to appreciate more and more what God did in, and through, this heroic Jesuit.
It is the hope of all those who have worked on his cause for canonisation, and I am sure the hope of all of us here present, that we will one day see the Holy Father declare Fr Willie Doyle a saint, an example proposed to the universal Church for imitation.
But we might well ask ourselves, ‘How could we possibly imitate such a man?’. For the last three years of his life, he was a military chaplain in the unbelievably challenging circumstances of World War I. And, in those circumstances, his dedication to the spiritual life of his flock and his courage in the face of danger were simply outstanding. He was untiring in his labour, and cheerful without fail.
Countless soldiers testified to his character during and after the war:
- ‘Fr Doyle never rests’, wrote one Ulster Protestant officer. ‘Night and day he is with us. He finds a dying or dead man, does all, comes back smiling, makes a little cross and goes out to bury him and then begins all over again.’
- Another soldier, a Belfast Presbyterian, wrote of him, ‘He didn’t know the meaning of fear and he didn’t know what bigotry was. He was as ready to risk his life to take a drop of water to a wounded Protestant as to assist men of his own faith.’
- And a war correspondent who interviewed Fr Doyle’s comrades described his final hours in the Battle of Langemark, ‘He went forward and back on the battlefield, with bullets whining about him, seeking out the dying and kneeling in the mud beside them to give the Absolution, walking with death with a smile on his face, watched by his men with reverence and a kind of awe, until a shell burst near him and he was killed. His familiar figure was seen and welcomed by hundreds of Irishmen who lay in that bloody place. Each time he came back across the field he was begged to remain in comparative safety. Smilingly he shook his head and went again into the storm. He had been with his boys through other times of stress, and he would not desert them in their agony. They remember him as a Saint – they speak his name with tears.’
We too might look on Fr Willie Doyle today with reverence and awe. We might even be a bit intimidated by his example. We see him in action in such dramatic circumstances, performing superhuman deeds. Does his life have anything to do with ours? Can any of us really, truly hope to imitate him?
To answer that question, we need to go back to where Fr Doyle’s journey to priesthood began, here in this diocese, in Tullabeg College. That is where he went at the age of 18, to begin his novitiate with the Jesuits. During his novitiate, he wrote a private note, a personal promise to Our Blessed Lady at the beginning of the month of May, ‘On the first day of your month,’ he wrote, ‘I solemnly commence my life of slow martyrdom by earnest hard work and constant self-denial.’
Here, far from the battlegrounds of Belgium, lies the secret of Fr Doyle’s holiness, and it is a secret that can change the lives of each one of us here, without exception.
Think about that phrase, ‘my life of slow martyrdom’. This notion actually has deep roots in Irish Christianity. One of the oldest texts written in the Irish language, the seventh-century Cambrai Homily, is a sermon on the different kinds of martyrdom. It identifies a life of penance and self-denial as ‘green martyrdom’, ‘glas-martre.’
This is what young Willie Doyle was dedicating himself to that summer’s day in Tullabeg. Under Our Lady’s mantle, he was committing to a life of small sacrifices, simple, daily, unglamorous penances, the kind of thing we all do in Lent and on Fridays – giving up sugar in his tea, or butter on the spuds, or getting up a little earlier for prayer, and so on. These might seem a small matter, but at the age of 18 Willie Doyle already understood the supreme spiritual significance of little actions performed with great love. Later, as a priest, he wrote to a friend, ‘Life is only a day quickly passed and gone, but the merit of it, the glory given to God, will remain forever. Give Him all you can generously and lovingly, do not let one little sacrifice escape you.’
Penance, of course, is not the whole of the Christian life. If it were, the saints would be grim and joyless creatures indeed. But they are not. Many of them are just like Fr Doyle, full of good humour and cheer. In fact, our penance only takes on value if it is part of a love story, the love story that unites us to God and neighbour.
That ancient Irish homily I referred to already makes that very point. ‘We carry the cross of Christ in two ways,’ it says, ‘both when we mortify the body through fasting, and when out of compassion for him we regard the needs of our neighbour as our own. A person who has compassion for the needs of his neighbour truly carries the cross in his heart.’
This is just what we find in Fr Willie Doyle. His dedication to asceticism was combined with a profound commitment to loving his neighbour, and it is both of these dimensions of his spiritual life which came to fruition in his extraordinary life on the battlefield.
Long before he wore a military chaplain’s uniform, long before he needed to be brave in the face of bullets and bombs, long before he needed to love his comrades by laying his life down for them repeatedly, long before he was called on to perform great and mighty deeds, long before all that, his soul was being shaped by little acts of self-control and charity.
The smile that never failed at Ypres was a smile well known to Fr Doyle’s friends and family, to his fellow Jesuits, to his students in Clongowes, and to all those who came to his missions for dockers and factory workers. He loved them all, in all the ordinary, undramatic circumstances of his early life. And the courage and self-control that he displayed in uniform were forged in the ordinary life of Christian penance, in Dalkey, and Rahan, and Milltown, and Glasgow and Aberdeen.
So let us turn to that question again, ‘could we imitate the holiness of Fr Willie Doyle?’. We might not find ourselves in the dramatic circumstances that he experienced, but Christ calls us, no less than He called him, to take up our crosses. God our Father gives us, no less than He gave to Fr Doyle, the Spirit of love and self-control. And none of us here lacks daily opportunities to love our God and our neighbour. It is true that opportunities for ‘big sacrifices’ don’t come around often, as Fr Doyle once wrote, ‘but little ones are as plentiful as blackberries in September’. It might be as small a thing as smiling at a stranger on the street or making a morning offering, spending time with someone who bores us or putting down our phones and acknowledging the presence of God. None of this is beyond our reach, brothers and sisters. And while it is true that these hidden works of love might not make it into the history books, they are nevertheless the stuff that saints are made of. This is the slow martyrdom that young Willie Doyle discovered in Tullabeg: patiently giving glory to God in all things.
Long after his heroic death, a friend of Fr Doyle’s remembered him saying, ‘since you hope to be a saint, why not buck up and be a big one’. Inspired by his example, and with the help of God, let us make the same resolution this afternoon, every one of us, with big hearts intent on the little works of love.
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