I can't remember his name, but I recall that he worked as a shoemaker in a local shoe store. All the girls in town were secretly in love with him, which was no wonder because he was tall and good looking and always well dressed. In a football-mad town, he played at centre half back on the local team and was in that position the year they were beaten in the championship final. After that game, he disappeared.
It was assumed at first that he had gone 'on the batter' and would turn up in a few weeks. Others said he had gone home to look after an aged mother, but then it was pointed out that he was an orphan and had spent some of his youth in an orphanage, which was where he learnt the shoe trade.
Finally, the truth came out. He had gone into Mount Melleray — a Cistercian monastery in the foothills of the Knockmealdown mountains in the South East of Ireland. Only a few of his friends knew and they were the kind who didn't take part in small-town talk and were quite happy to let the truth come out in its own time.
In those days, the Cistercians were the strictest of all religious orders of men. The monastery in Melleray was completely self-sufficient: all fruit and vegetables were grown in its own fields; milk, butter and cheese came from its own herd — the cattle were quite safe, because the monks were vegetarians. They dressed in a coarse woollen habit, white with a black scapular. They spun their own thread, wove their own cloth, made their own clothing and footwear. And they went about their daily work in silence from one end of the year to the other.
Their superior was an abbot, which is the same rank as a bishop and all the monks said the full Office every day — matins and lauds and compline and vespers and I can't think of the others. It was a life completely given over to prayer and contemplation.
Our mothers talked in hushed tones of what it involved and for all I know, tried to ruin our lives by secretly praying that one of their own might get the call. If our fathers had any opinions about it, they kept them to themselves, except that they were a bit annoyed when they discovered that their fine centre half back, who