Answering the call….

Christened a Catholic but now an utterly unconvinced agnostic, I tend to speak to priests even less than I go to Mass – and that only happens about once a year.

But even when death, life or love invites me on my annual visit to one of God’s many houses, usually the conversation between me and the clergy is rather one-sided: Not only do they seem totally uninterested in getting to know me, but I usually leave feeling like, for all their chatting, I didn’t really get to know them either.

Perhaps it is for this reason that men of the cloth have always intrigued me; especially those who pledge their life to Him these days, when, let’s face it, the dog collar comes with much less power, status and social esteem than it once did.

So why do they do it? What are their motives? Do they really believe? And, if so, what exactly do they believe in?

Well, last week I got the chance to scratch my unholy itch and have a candid conversation with a young man once known as Kevin Cassidy… then Dr Kevin Cassidy… and now Father Kevin Cassidy.

If I was the skeptical secularist coming to the table with a bagful of preconceptions, Fr Kevin was the 21st century apostle sent to turn my prejudices inside out.

But enough spoofing, here we go.

“Well Emmet, how’s the form man?” began the Fintona native, sounding like somebody you might meet in McCann’s smoking area on a Saturday night.

Pleasantly surprised by the absence of airs, graces or sanctimony, I asked Fr Kevin – who recently celebrated his First Mass in his native parish of Donacavey – to tell me about his childhood.

“I grew up in the countryside between Omagh and Fintona. My earliest memories are probably quite typical of somebody from a healthy, happy family living in that part of the world.

“It was my mother, father, two brothers and I. We lived on a farm, so were never idle. My brothers and I fought almost every day, but, as is the way of it, we were there for each other through thick and thin as well.”

Fr Kevin then told me that one of his brothers works in construction in Australia, while the other – Conor, I think – is a windmill engineer at home.

“So you aren’t the only one in the family whose work brings them closer to God,” I said.

That got a laugh.

ordinary childhood

Fr Kevin painted a portrait of an ordinary childhood and adolescence, one backlit by the kind of parochial preoccupations you’d expect of any son of rural Tyrone.

“I went to St Lawrence’s Primary School, then I headed onto Omagh CBS. I was happy, and, on the surface, no different from anybody else, really. I had a good group of friends, I played GAA, I messed about kicking a bit of soccer, and I got by in my studies,” he said.

That was his first half-truth of our conversation. Young Kevin was not the kind of student who was happy to scrape a C and ‘get by’.

“I studied the three sciences, maths and additional maths for my A-Levels. I did well in them, and decided to do medicine at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).

“I liked the subjects, I was attracted to the idea of caring for people, and I had some family who had gone on to become doctors.

“At the same time, it wasn’t like the whole of my being was moving inexorably in that direction. I was only 18,” laughed Fr Kevin.

His choice of words was interesting here. Most people probably don’t know what it is like to be compelled from their very core to do something – with the exception of those who have felt that rapturous, irrepressible drive to pursue a romantic partner, or back a horse that shares the same name as your grandfather.

However, soon after university, 19-year-old Kevin felt the pull of a love which he describes with more eloquence and profundity than I could ever hope to paraphrase.

“My early days in university were defined in large part by the same stuff as most people’s. I was enjoying my first taste of real independence, glimpsing hitherto unseen horizons, and just enjoying my social life and my studies.

“But, where many began to drift from their faith, I never did. As my first year progressed, I began to feel this pull towards something bigger, fuller and higher than myself.”

Fr Kevin explained how, walking home from class, he would find himself dropping off the back of the group and heading into a church located between QUB and his accommodation.

“I’d go in with my own agenda, with nothing more than the raw materials of my world. I had a restlessness in my heart. But in there, in the quiet of the church, I found peace and calm,” said Fr Kevin.

Then, one day, he had an experience that plunged him deeper into the ocean of faith.

“I was on my knees praying, when all of a sudden I started to feel something I had never felt before. I was being spoken to, but not with words. It wasn’t something you could hear. It was happening in my heart.

“The clouds didn’t open and no bright beams of redeeming light broke through the roof.

“It was just a very clearly, defined message, one that came from outside me and said that I should go to Lourdes, which was a place I’d really only heard of in passing.

“Before the summer holidays, I mentioned to a friend that I was planning a trip. I never told them about what happened in the church or the message I had been given. I just said I was going to Lourdes, and they said they wanted to come along,” said Fr Kevin.

spiritual experience

If the spiritual experience Fr Kevin had beneath the gothic ceiling of that Belfast church had caused him to find the frequency of God, his trip to Lourdes turned the volume up another few notches.

“It was a primitive, but very powerful, experience.

“I would go down to the grotto by the river at night, and just sit at the site where Our Lady appeared all those years ago. I found a peace like nothing I had ever known.

“Time didn’t pass in the same fashion. I discovered new things about prayer. At home, I went into the church with my own agenda, but in Lourdes that all dropped away.

“I found a deep and profound contentment. Most of all, I felt the hand of Our Lady on my heart and in my life,” said Fr Kevin.

As somebody who has never had a mystical experience resembling that which Fr Kevin describes, it is hard to imagine the sensation of having the hand of Jesus’s mother laid upon your ticker.

However, perhaps the best way to gauge how profound the experience was is not by picking apart the poetry Fr Kevin uses to describe it, but by paying attention to the changes that it precipitated.

“After the holidays I was back with the boys in Belfast. I returned to school, and the Lord, without my knowing it, continued to reel me in.

“I stayed diligent to my studies, but I also became increasingly involved in my religious life.”

A series of important events followed which sealed Fr Kevin’s fate and paved his path to the priesthood.

He explained one transformative one that took place at the ancient monastic site at Clonmacnoise.

“It was during the Eucharistic adoration that the Lord knocked me for six. I felt an intense joy and the undeniable reality of his presence and love. I felt like my spiritual eyes had finally glimpsed Him. It blew right through my being. The veil was lifted. After that, things tipped radically. I had been riveted by God.”

Fr Kevin said that soon after that he spoke with Jesus, who told him to finish his degree and then become a priest.

“I didn’t tell anybody about my plan for quite some time. I didn’t feel like I had to. When I eventually did, some were unambiguously supportive, while others clearly had reservations.

“For example, some of my family, though they said they would support me, seemed to be worried whether or not I could find happiness in the road I was taking.

“Since I joined the seminary in 2016, it has been interesting to watch the faith journey they have been on, too.”

In July, Fr Kevin finished eight years of seminary education and enlightenment and was formally pronounced a member of the clergy at an ordination ceremony in France, where he will serve Missionnaires de la Très Sainte Eucharistie (Missionaires of the Most Holy Eucharist).

It was attended by many of his friends and family, who, regardless of their beliefs, must have felt privileged to witness one of the landmark moments in what has been a life of spiritual searching.