They went on calling him "Father". In this culture, even though he embodied the worst wickedness anyone could think of, the notion of taking his title from him, or tacitly agreeing not to use it, was not entertained. Fellow-priests tried to protest: why was he always called paedophile priest, they asked when farmers who commit the same crimes aren't identified as paedophile farmer or teachers as paedophile teacher? But their ingenuousness only testifies to their hurt. Half the horror was that he was a priest. That he held up the host at the Consecration.
That he led the people in great and ancient words such as "Lord, I am not worthy". That he dispensed the Sacrament of Forgiveness. That he baptised babies in their absolute innocence . . . Denial sustained the terrible sham of his long career of evil. The only hope for our humanity is that he never stopped giggling and conniving long enough to grasp fully what he was doing.
How did he talk, at the end, to his God? Every hour of every day, and every morning when he paused at the beginning of Mass, at that moment where we recollect our sins, he was in the presence of the specific Christian dialogue on transgression and forgiveness. When he felt the pang or the constriction yesterday, what did he beg for? "Oh my God, help me?" Or, "Oh my God, forgive me?"
Or had he indulged his vices to the point where he was dull and slow even at the moment death came and stood at his door? The prison officers said on his way to and from court - long after the process of self-understanding was supposed to have begun - he became sexually excited peering out the van at schoolgirls. He was beyond shame, never mind repentance. Maybe there wasn't much left of him at the end except for flaccid flesh.
Think of the hearts he so callously attacked - the sore hurt, the near intolerable revulsion, that he planted in so many hearts. A woman wrote in to RTE radio. The nuns at her school delivered her over and over again, down the shiny corridor, to the parlour where Brendan Smyth's flesh waited, looking for satiation. That girl swallowed needles. She tried to kill herself as much as a little girl who doesn't know much except that she is astray in a world of terror and degradation can try.
Then there are all the families, all over Ireland, who waved their kids off in the car - the little killing-machine for innocence that his confreres allowed him - and how they feel in their hearts. There are good men and women who facilitated him all unknowingly and whose lives have been soiled by their failures in the face of him. Hundreds and hundreds of people of all types and ages were attacked by him. Most of them sexually, but all of them where hope and love and trust live - in their hearts.
There's nothing good to be said about it. There's no consolation. We could have learnt all we learnt about cautiousness, about a more measured approach to authority, about looking at and listening to children and their fears. We could have learnt all that in a less disgusting way. Not just the people who covered up for him and the people who preferred him, but everyone concerned with him and the way they did things, the very structures of social and familial intercourse, come out of the Brendan Smyth affair despoiled. A loving man can hardly take a child onto his knee. That much innocence is dimmed.
Some clever future historian will use his story to describe an era. There was an Ireland in which priests could do what they wanted. There was an Ireland in which priests were assumed not to be bad. Ordinary humans, yes, But priests, no, not priests. Even now, because he is a priest, he will be buried differently from the rest of us, his feet that spent so long bent on harming his young victims pointed towards the altar, as a mark of eternal respect. His grave will be specially lined to keep him symbolically safe for the Last Day. And to the end he'll be called, of all things, "Father."