Priest who puts focus on body as well as soul

I am orthodox . . . I think,” says Inverin priest Fr Pádraig Ó Fátharta. The softly-spoken 70-year old may not look like a revolutionary, but he is offering people a fresh approach to Christian spirituality – one that actively embraces the human body.

Throughout his life, in addition to his Christian studies, Pádraig has explored areas from yoga and journalling to psychosynthesis and he most recently qualified as a teacher in the Alexander Technique, which aims to alleviate pain by removing unnecessary tension from the body.

Now, the retired Kiltegan Father has just released a CD of meditations based on Christian teachings, At Home in my Body: Reconnecting is designed to bring spirit, mind and body into harmony. It’s also available in his native Irish as Sa mBaile i Mo Cholainn: Athchuairt.

Pádraig is a member of a Church that isn’t exactly renowned for its healthy attitude towards the human body – Catholic teaching has regarded the physical as a distraction to matters spiritual. But this wasn’t always the case as he points out, quoting the 13th century Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who referred to the importance of ‘delighting the senses’.

And it’s not just the Church that has issues with the human body. Pádraig feels there is an ‘anti-body’ bias in all of modern society. “In spite of our consumerist preoccupation with food and drink, diets, sex, dress style and cosmetics, as well as health and fitness, we tend to be generally unaware of our bodily sensations and feelings,” he notes.

On a clear winter’s morning in the small house overlooking Galway Bay that he shares with his dog, Rosie, he pours tea and outlines the journey that led to this CD – the first in what he hopes will be a series. “I felt I had something to say because of my own experiences in life,” he explains.

Since retiring from his work as a Kiltegan priest, he has returned to his native place of Aille, just a few hundred yards from the church in Inverin.

Pádraig’s road home was a long one, involving almost 15 years in Africa and a period spent teaching philosophy at the Kiltegan headquarters in Cork – now the Rochestown Park Hotel. There was also a two-year stint in Kinvara, which he loved, and over a decade as a priest in the parish of Spiddal, serving the churches of Rossaveal and Minna.

The young Pádraig went to secondary school in Cólaiste Éinde, after which he trained as a priest with St Patrick’s Missionary Society, better known as the Kiltegan Fathers.

He joined the priesthood, because “in the 1950s and 1960s if you were an idealist, that is what drew you”.

Despite that call, something was missing. “When I was a young fellow I wasn’t getting something from my studies.”

In his quest to find fulfillment he “went down a lot of routes that would have been regarded as unusual at the time”.

As a young man, he bought a book on yoga in O’Gorman’s Bookshop in the city – now Eason’s – and pursued Eastern philosophy for years because he felt the physical wasn’t getting its due.

“I was always searching and going through faith crises as people do.”Throughout his life as a priest, he continued this quest, through dream work journalling, “and whatever I could, sometimes on the go”.  

For more, read this weeks's Galway City Tribune.