The Search for Xavier
This play shows why art is needed – to go where history cannot:
in this case into the internal impact of a ‘defection’
from the fortress church
of Irish Catholicism in the 1960s.
Xavier, a monk, has disappeared, but why –
and what will this mean for the morale
and mission of his brothers?
How are they to make sense of it
and what does the future hold for ‘the church’ anyway,
a church over-identified then and now with its celibate clergy?
That question is not yet past history of course:
‘The Search for Xavier’ helps the reader –
and not just the Irish Catholic reader –
to articulate those questions we tend to suppress
because of the ‘Seamus Heaney Protocol’:
“whatever you say, say nothing”.
It obviously took great courage for Sean Walsh
to write this story,
but it is also his skill as a writer that makes the book
one of those as yet unknown classics
that historians of the future will need
if they are to map our recent past and present.
No other book has taken me so close to the inner turmoil
caused to that fortress church of the 1960s
by the answering of a vocation to a life
that can nourish the heart as well as the soul.
– Sean O Conaill.