BISHOP LAURENCE FORRISTAL (1931-2018)
When he died at Gowran Abbey Nursing Home on October Bishop Laurence Forristal had been retired from episcopal duties for more than a decade, having handed over the see to Bishop Freeman in 2007. He thus became the first bishop of the diocese to retire in its entire history (he would be joined in that regard in 2017 by Bishop Freeman, and would share a residence in retirement with his contemporary from his years in Rome, Archbishop Thomas White, originally a priest of Ossory and formerly of the Vatican’s Diplomatic Service, who died in May 2017).
Laurence Forristal was born on June 5 1931 to William Forristal, who farmed at Jerpoint Church near Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, and his wife Kathleen (nee Phelan). He was one of a family of seven (three boys and four girls). Though there were several Forristal families in the Thomastown area, they were not all related; when Bishop Forristal was welcomed to the parish after his episcopal consecration, the then parish priest, Dr. Michael Carroll, noted that the name occurred in the church registers as far back as 1782. In response Dr. Forristal remarked that ‘his’ Forristals had only been in the area since 1873. In fact the Forristal connection with Kilkenny goes back to Norman times, and after several land losses, evictions, migrations and emigrations from and within the south-east corner of Kilkenny (Shanbough and Forristalstown included) Thomastown became a focal point for the several branches of the family (a Fr. Pierce Forristal, born in 1649, was parish priest of Thomastown in 1704, and he was succeeded some years later by a Fr. Thomas Forristal).
The priestly tradition in his own family was strong: a granduncle had been ordained for Ossory and was briefly on the staff of St. Kieran’s College before joining the Jesuits. An uncle, also Laurence Forristal (1894-1963), was one of the founding group of priests and students of the national seminary who established the Maynooth Mission to China (also known as The Columbans) but was forced to go to California for health reasons; he later became a much respected vicar general of the diocese of San Diego until his death in Ireland in 1962.
The future bishop attended the local national schools in Thomastown and (after his brother Joe had an unhappy experience at St. Kieran’s) was then sent as a boarder to Cistercian College, Roscrea, run at that time by a thriving monastic community that included sixty priests and sixty brothers. When he completed his secondary education in 1949, the diocese of Ossory was closed to new candidates for the priesthood and he opted instead for service in the Archdiocese of Dublin, enrolling at Holy Cross College, Clonliffe.
The tradition of Ossory-born priests in the service of the metropolitan see was not a new one and over the years more than a dozen natives of the diocese have held pastoral positions there. In Laurence Forristal’s time, he had as colleagues Michael Traynor of Durrow (who died in 1972 aged 104), Walter McDonald (d. 1978) and William Kenny (d. 1981) of Mooncoin, and John Piert of Kilkenny City (now retired); during his episcopacy John Dunne of Ballycallan and Michael Shortall of Castlecomer would be ordained for Dublin.
He attended University College Dublin, studying Philosophy in a faculty that then included many prominent professors who were clerics of the Dublin Archdiocese. Following studies in theology at Propaganda Fide College in Rome, where he resided at the Irish College, he was ordained priest on December 21st. 1955. He spent an extra year in Rome to acquire his Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL) and then returned to Ireland to study for the Higher Diploma in Education at UCD, combining his academic commitments with pastoral positions as chaplain to the Dominican Sisters convent at Sion Hill on Blackrock’s Cross Avenue, and with parish duties at St. Brigid’s, Killester.
In 1957 Laurence Forristal returned to Rome for three years of study towards his Licentiate in Canon Law, and during those years he also served on the staff of the Sacred Roman Rota, which in 1958 came under the direction as Dean of an English archbishop named William Heard, who was made Cardinal in the following year (he was succeeded in the same year by a long-standing official of the Rota, an American prelate of Kilkenny background named Francis John Joseph Brennan, who became an Archbishop and a Cardinal in 1967 but died a year later, just as he was taking up responsibilities as Prefect of the Congregation for the Discipline of the Sacraments).
In 1960, having received his Licentiate (LCL), Fr. Forristal returned to Ireland and became a staff member of the Dublin Regional Marriage Tribunal, serving the archdiocese and its suffragan sees of Ferns, Kildare and Leighlin and Ossory.
Over the next ten years he combined this position with pastoral appointments as chaplain at St. Vincent’s CBS and High Park Convent in Glasnevin, with weekend duties at Corpus Christi parish, Drumcondra, and (from 1967) as a designated curate at Our Lady Mother of Divine Grace, Raheny. During his time there the Archbishop McQuaid era ended with his retirement in 1971 and the appointment of Archbishop Dermot Ryan, just six years Fr. Forristal’s senior, in his place.
This pastoral orientation and experience was advanced more fully in 1974, when he was appointed administrator of the newly-formed parish of Rivermount in Finglas. He had 10,000 parishioners, over a third of them under eighteen, and he began the task of providing them with a church and schools.
It is probably fair to say that in his five years at Rivermount, Laurence Forristal was at his happiest. The huge challenges of creating a new parish spirit and infrastructure at St. Oliver Plunkett’s did not phase him, and his pioneering approach produced a main church, a smaller oratory (St. Finian’s) and a twelve-teacher national school. His achievement was recognised by his appointment in 1977 as a vicar general of the archdiocese and a domestic prelate with the title of Monsignor.
He was appointed an auxiliary bishop of Dublin on 3rd. December 1979 and ordained Titular Bishop of Rotdon on 20th. January 1980 at the age of 48, alongside his fellow auxiliary, Fr. Brendan Comiskey, joining Bishops Carroll, Kavanagh and O’Mahony (Bishop Forristal’s classmate, Desmond Williams, would join the group in 1985). Bishop Comiskey would later serve as Bishop of Ferns from 1984 to his resignation in 2002; another Dublin auxiliary bishop, James Moriarty, consecrated in 1991, would serve as Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin from 2002 to 2010 (for a brief period in 2002 all of the priovince’s bishops were former auxiliaries of Dublin).
His new responsibilities involved administration of a section of the Dublin archdiocese that included 22 parishes in the south-west of the city (covering the rapidly expanding areas of Tallaght, Clondalkin and Blamchardstown), and 17 parishes in west Co. Dublin, west Wicklow and south Kildare (his remit stretched beyond the town of Athy to within eight miles of the Ossory diocesan boundary in the parish of Clogh).
On 30th June 1981 Laurence Forristal was appointed Bishop of Ossory to succeed the late Dr. Peter Birch who had died suddenly some three months earlier at the age of 69, having served as co-adjutor bishop and bishop for almost twenty years (the diocese of Ossory is almost unique in that it has had only three bishops in the century up to Bishop Birch’s death). The new bishop now had responsibility for 43 parishes as against 39 in Dublin, but with only a third of his previous pastoral flock (70,000 as against 200,000).
There is little doubt that the new bishop approached his responsibilities in his native diocese with something approaching trepidation. Though he claimed to have made as much Kilkenny hay and cheered on as many Kilkenny hurling teams as his Ossory confreres, he knew he had a hard act to follow in succeeding the inspirational, if somewhat withdrawn, Bishop Birch.
By contrast with that of his predecessor, Bishop Forristal’s personal style was informal, often to the point where some perceived it as superficial; to others it was refreshing, engaging and encouraging of communication. But those who took the trouble to get to know him were aware that this masked an unusually keen mind and a deep understanding of personal spirituality and pastoral theology.
A Clonliffe classmate who maintained contact with him up to his death said that for him the most remarkable thing about Laurence Forristal was his memory. ‘He could remember every detail of a meeting or a hurling match for years and even decades after it happened, with pinpoint accuracy.’
His entry to the diocese of Ossory was not as formal as had been the case with his predecessors: he was the first bishop of the diocese to have been aready consecrated at the time of his appointment, and therefore was installed rather than liturgically elevated to his new status.
But the courtesies accorded to him on that occasion were no less than if a consecration was involved. Over twenty fellow-bishops attended, together with 200 priests from Ossory, Dublin and elsewhere, and representatives of every parish in the diocese. Special places were reserved for the relatives of the late Bishop Birch.
In his sermon the principal consecrator, Archbishop Dermot Ryan of Dublin said of his former colleague: ‘You gave him to us in the first place. The experience he has had in the intervening period will provide a large return on your investment of nature and grace during those early years when he was born, grew up and was educated among you, the people of Ossory, whom he is now called by God to serve. May his work bear fruit a hundredfold in the shared dedication in faith and love of all the people in the diocese.’
The new bishop took as his motto ‘In Fide and Caritate’, explaining it as deriving from the Eucharistic Prayer to ‘strengthen in faith and love your pilgrim church’ and echoing the exhortation of St. Paul in a reading from his installation Mass to ‘follow the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus’.
In his own sermon to the gathering Bishop Forristal asked for the help of his people and his priests. “I know that my acceptance of the office of bishop of this ancient and vibrant diocese is cause of rejoicing to many. But to me it is the assuming of a great responsiblity in which I will need the assistance of my fellow priests. Like Moses, I too feel like crying out for help. These will be my closest collaborators for the rest of my days; working together and united in prayer and our common priesthood, we will strive to make the Church a sign of salvation to the people of Ossory.”
His episcopal coat of arms included references to his patron saint (a lion symbolising St. Laurence O’Toole), place of birth (arches symbolising Jerpoint Abbey) and family (a spear taken from the Forristal crest).
Bishop Forristal made it clear from the beginning that despite his informal manner, he would insist on the highest standards of administration and the keeping of records, as well as maintaining a lawyer’s approach to controversial issues or situations. It made for sometimes difficult situations during parish visitations, with one parish priest commenting that ‘if the books weren’t right, you could expect a solemn warning - and maybe the sound of screeching tyres on the drive way when he left.’
He had his first test in public relations with the case of a female teacher at a convent secondary school who was reported as being in an inappropriate relationship. The legal action that she took to counter her removal failed, but the entire incident created a perception of an embattled church resisting the advance of contemporary practice (the teacher concerned later regularised her situation and returned to teaching in a Christian Brothers school).
Despite the formidable reputation of his predecessor, Bishop Forristal lost no time in taking responsibility for the extensive social care infrastructure that Bishop Birch had created. He maintained it under the direction first of Fr. (later Monsignor) Paul Fitzgerald, who later became one of his Vicars General) and then Fr. (later Monsignor) Kieron Kennedy, who combined the task with the presidency of St. Kieran’s College. The principal services were maintained and expanded and the more specialist areas, such as in the School of the Holy Spirit, benefitted from major investment of both state and diocesan resources.
Laurence Forristal had the misfortune to be appointed bishop at a time of traumatic transition in the Catholic Church, as priests began to look critically at their commitment to a celibate life and multiple controversial issues arose in areas of authority, doctrine and morality.
Over the period of his episcopacy, he lost almost a dozen of his most talented and dedicated ministers through voluntary laicisation and terminal illness, the latter a particularly poignant situation in the case of three of his senior pastors, Monsignors Paul Fitzgerald and Martin Campion, and Fr. Jerry Joyce. A few others were lost to criminal conviction and compulsory laicisation in what became the most controversial issue to affect the modern church - clerical abuse.
Long before the explosion of such accusations nationally, Bishop Forristal took on board one of the earliest and most extensive incidences in his own diocese. He co-operated with the criminal investigation (involving hundreds of interviews with those affected) which resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of the individual involved. He did the same, comprehensively and expeditiously, in a second case, while also directing the Irish church's early formal response to the developing situation through his chairmanship of an ad hoc committee that produced a set of guidelines in the mid 1990s.
At national level, his reputation as a parish and diocesan administrator in Dublin resulted in his being nominated as a member of the Irish Episcopal Commission on the Clergy, Seminaries and the Permanent Diaconate, which he later served as chairman. Here, sadly, he was forced to preside over the closure of every regional seminary for the secular priesthood in Ireland (Kilkenny, Carlow, Thurles, Waterford and Wexford), as well as the two major Dublin seminaries of All Hallows and Clonliffe (some maintained an existence as centres of further education open to the laity). The National Seminary at Maynooth was also greatly affected by the decrease in the number of aspirants to the priesthood, though Bishop Forristal played a major role in the negotiations that led to the establishment of the thriving independent entity that is now Maynooth University
The closure of the seminary at St. Kieran’s College in 1994 removed a vast resource of learning and outreach for the diocese of Ossory, as well as a local option in training for the priesthood. But this was replaced by a variety of new institutions and projects, the more recent of them flourishing on the former seminary campus through the Outreach programmes of Maynooth University and St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, which included diploma courses in theology and an on-site First Arts course. Sadly many of these initiatives were not to survive his successor’s term of office and the Maynooth outreach program ceased in 2016.
One other area of interest in this context was his encouragement of research into parish history and genealogy, by facilitating access to diocesan and parish records. He commissioned the indexing of Canon Carrigan’s diocesan history and sponsored its publication in print and CD formats. He had a great interest in family history himself, and in retirement set up an elaborate computerised genealogical table of his own ancestry.
The creation of a diocesan forum, initiated in a consultation with priests and people carried out in 1999, resulted in a strong movement towards parish engagement and lay participation. Among the outcomes were the creation of an office of Adult Faith Development, and the laying of a foundation for the production and implementation of a diocesan pastoral plan under his successor.
Despite the huge burden of responsibility and sadness that he had to endure during his twenty-six-year episcopacy, Bishop Forristal kept his sense of humour. He was buoyed by the support of his close family, attending hurling matches with his engineer brother Joe, and visiting the homes of his brothers in Jerpoint and his sisters further afield who had all qualified in the associated sciences of medicine, dentistry, nursing and radiography. He was deeply affected by the tragic death of one brother and, over a period of the last ten years of his life, the loss of four other siblings.
On 14th. September 2007 Bishop Forristal retired at the age of just over 76 on the announcement by Pope Benedict XV of the appointment of Fr. Seamus Freeman SAC as Bishop of Ossory. For the first time in its history, the diocese of Ossory now had a retired bishop of the see in local residence. He lived at a house named Molassy on the Freshford Road in St. Canice’s Parish until he was forced by ill health to move to Gowran Abbey Nursing Home, where he resided until his death.
Bishop Forristal was survived by three sisters, a brother in law and two sisters in law as well as battalions of nieces and nephews to whom he was an appreciative and thoughtful uncle.
An unsympathetic obituary in the ‘Irish Times’ produced a spirited response from correspondents: ‘he was constitutionally incapable of being unpleasant to anyone ..... you might say that that made him unsuitable to be a bishop, and he would be the first to agree with you;’ ‘like is all, Larry Forristal was not perfect, but on balance his contribution to the church and to life were positive.’
The Irish hierarchy in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first faced challenges that had never before been witnessed, or even envisaged, in the life and work of the Irish church. It might be said that its leadership during that time was not generally of a calibre that was adequate to recognise these challenges and act upon them – there was a scholarly, reticent and overly defensive aspect to many of their strategies and actions. In that context Laurence Forristal stands out for his open pastoral style based on wide experience before his appointment, and his clear-minded appraisal of situations based on his singular intellectual qualities and his knowledge of both canon and civil law.