For several weeks in late January and early February, I spent a lot of time at the bedside of a strapping 19-year-old athlete who was unconscious after a swimming mishap at a resort in Thailand. He never regained consciousness and died as a result of multiple organ failure.
A great deal of my time was spent accompanying the boy's family though this agony. Eventually I returned to Australia with his body for the Requiem.
It was an exhausting experience.
The funeral attracted 2000 mourners. Most of them seemed to be younger than 20 — an age where death has no palpable reality to it and when the myth of indestructibility is alive and well. Here was its firm rebuttal: Our lives spin on sixpence, as the boy's mother told me during our watch in Bangkok.
After the ceremony, I scarpered. I couldn't take it any more and we still had the burial ahead. But as I fled, an old friend — a senior Federal politician with whom I've crossed swords on occasion — came up and gave me a hug.
'Mick, that was just the best: you did a wonderful job for Joe and his family,' said my generous friend.
He added: 'You've gone up in my estimation.'
Struck dumb, I said thanks and continued my escape. I thought to myself that there is only one profession with lower social esteem these days than a Catholic priest and that is a politician. And here is one telling me I've risen in his estimation! With examiners like him, who needs to sit for the test?
Further thought on the melancholy state of the clergy and their public evaluation produced a fruitful and consoling insight. Being seen as an outsider is, in fact, a liberation. Swallowing flattery and exaggerated respect as if it's an entitlement is the one and certain path to self delusion.
In earlier generations in Australia, and perhaps till quite recently in Ireland and the United States, priests were treated as tribal heroes, a superior and exclusive caste, perhaps better educated and so much more awesome because of their involvement in the mysteries of meaning and purpose, life and death, good and evil.
But the sexual abuse scandals and their inept management by Church authorities have dealt lethal blows