Capuchin priest Bryan brings the good news to parishioners
By Aura McMenamin
Tallaght priest Bryan Shortall will be returning home this week to discuss his book, Tired Of All the Bad News, which details his work with Dublin’s homeless.
Fr Shortall is a Capuchin friar, whose work revolves around St Michan’s Parish on Halston Street, Dublin 7.
The 48-year-old priest now lives in St Michan’s parish but has fond memories of Tallaght.
Speaking to The Echo, Fr Bryan, whose father Enda is the current groundskeeper and sacristan of St Killian’s Church in Castleview, Kilnamanagh, recalled smelling the Jacob’s Biscuit factory, swimming in the Bohernabreena Reservoir, and was a keen breakdancer in the 80s.
He said: “It was a big craze in the 80s. Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Michael Jackson . . . they brought hip hop to Ireland.”
Fr Bryan said that years later, he’s ‘suffering’ the effects of windmilling and moonwalking, but remembers dancing as a good way to avoid anti-social behaviour: “Instead of a group of guys getting into a fight, you’d have a dance-off.”
So how did a young, hip hop-loving teenager from Kilnamanagh become a priest? “It’s like any vocation,” he says.
“Sometimes it just happens in a person. It is bizarre and it was certainly counter-cultural because most teenagers would prefer to drink. But I joined the Capuchin friars at 18, made my vows at 21 and was ordained at 27. It was a long process, so I had time to think about it.”
The Capuchin friar has spent the past 30 years feeding Dublin’s homeless. The Capuchin Day Service offers free meals and showering facilities for those in need. They estimate that they serve two to three hundred breakfasts each day, 480 dinners a night and make 2,000 food parcels per week.
Despite an increase in homelessness and family food poverty, the Day Centre’s funding has remained at €450,000 since 2011.
In 2012, Fr Shortall began a blog about his experiences in the Capuchin Friary on Church Street, where he said he was exposed to the ‘raw edges of life’ – poverty, drug addiction and homelessness. But he said he also found the milk of human kindness.
He said: “You see the answers to those problems. The volunteers in the friary, the young people that volunteer during transition year. I have to take my hat off to the young people that volunteer there. There’s no denying that there’s bad news, but there’s some great stories too.”
After being asked by Colombo Catholic Press to write the foreword for an autobiography on Padre Pio, the publishing house offered Fr Bryan the opportunity to turn his observations of parish life into a book.
Tired Of All the Bad News was published last December.
Fr Bryan will be meeting with parishioners at the Church of the Incarnation in Fettercairn on Thursday, August 31 as part of the Vine Mass.
