Fanatics

I come from a long line of apparent fanatics. If family lore is to be trusted (should it really ever be?) my mother’s fraternal grandfather came from County Wexford in British-occupied Ireland to New York City in 1882. He belonged to a faction of the Irish Nationalist Fenian Brotherhood called the Invincibles - a name that seems today, to be honest, a little overly compensatory.

Nevertheless, Wexford had once received the worst of Oliver Cromwell’s murderous rampages across Ireland more than two hundred years before, so the county town was a place that nurtured a young man’s fanaticism. The Invincibles claimed responsibility for killing two British cabinet members in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882, and among the members on a short list to be rounded up and interrogated was Joseph Barry, an apparently a card-carrying Invincible. While attending Mass (and where else would a good Irish Nationalist have been?) a note was passed to him via the collection basket (this is the best way for the Catholic Church to communicate with its congregants). The note read:

Joe,
The British are outside waiting for you. Go out the back.

Which he did. The Irish Nationalist always receives absolution from the Eucharist under such conditions. The next part of the story finds him taking the next ship out of Wexford bound, he thought, for Johannesburg, South Africa where he could join up with the Boers. However, he miscalculated and the next ship was actually bound for New York Harbor, which is where he eventually landed.

The entire story lacks details and, frankly, a little truth. Did he play any part in the murders? And what about those collection basket? Did he throw anything in? And if the British Empire could encompass the globe, couldn’t it as well send representatives who might have enough common sense to cover the back door to a local church? Even more suspicious is the assertion that Joe wanted to give aid to the rebellious Boers in South Africa, whose guerrilla war against the British would actually not get started for another 15 years. More likely he was a young man in over his head, and he ran for his life, which was a smart move. Maybe, just maybe, he left because his Mother Country was an impoverished hellhole.

According to my mother, Great Grandfather Joe became a ferocious American patriot upon his arrival, which shows just how much in the ordinary Joe might have been. Like most normal people, he followed a new home team when he moved.

His own son, my grandfather Mickey, inherited his father’s zeal and directed it toward following Notre Dame football, which was the Irish working class’ answer to the football-crazed Ivies. By all accounts, Mickey was a gloomy man, sometimes given to pangs euphoria only when Notre Dame won a Saturday football game, which would happen often during the years he followed them. No win was ever enough for Mickey Barry, for with winning comes inevitable losses down the stretch, too - maybe not next week, but some day. And then what'll happen?

His household was devoutly Catholic, and although Original Sin is a concept shared among Christian denominations, Catholics all the while fear that Protestants are right - that good works are a paltry gift to God. So a double jeopardy takes hold in the Catholic. In his heart an irrepressible sense grows that no good work is enough and that if the works are no good, then his faith is probably just a delusion (to Catholics, Protestants always seem to get away with a freer and happier conscience).

Thus, if original sin makes existence so hopeless, then how could dozens of Notre Dame wins give comfort for the suffering caused by one inevitable loss? Therefore no one approached Mickey in his despair during the week after a hard Notre Dame loss. Had this lugubrious man lived long enough, I might have actually witnessed in him a reflection of my own hopelessness with the Jets. Surely he would have agreed: No win is ever enough, and consciousness itself consists of a pervasive struggle against the dangerous comfort of hope.