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By Kevin Wells, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 11, 2023

Kevin Wells is a former Major League Baseball writer, Catholic speaker, and author of Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz (Ignatius Press). His best-selling book The Priests We Need to Save the Church was published by Sophia Institute Press in 2019.

 

I once experienced Ireland as being warmed by peat fires, laughter, and locals who rose from benches to sing old emigration songs. But now I saw it covered in what seemed a blanketed indifference and cold-heartedness.

Kevin WellsMy uncle, a Catholic priest, and I stood by an Irish strand in the shoe-box-sized village of Castlegregory on a July evening in 1992. We were watching my cousin Brendan play pick-up soccer with a dozen or so teens beneath an incensed Irish sky of salt, seaweed, and burnt sod.

It was the first night of a two-week vacation, where my uncle of fond memory would take us deep into the countryside and cottages of farming families who loved him.  ….

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