AS THE English language chaplain at Lourdes, Father Martin Moran is always busy, but the papal visit this weekend meant it was positively frantic, writes Lara Marlowe
Fr Martin made sure there were 11 English-language confessors available, scheduled English-language Masses in the grotto where Saint Bernadette is said to have seen the Virgin, and battled with the massive, paralysing security bureaucracy that surrounded the Pope's presence.
Lourdes is a far cry from Fr Martin's previous posting, to Nunavut in the Arctic Circle. "Contrary to what you might think, it was quicker for me to find God among the Inuit, in the permafrost of the Canadian north than in the Marian shrine.
"Here is very high church; in Nunavut things were simple. In the Arctic, if I wanted to have a meeting, I'd call it the same day. Here, we are scheduling events for 2010. My job is to make sure things go smoothly."
In Canada, Fr Martin's two parishes were the size of western Europe, with a population of 26,000. "I performed two weddings in three years," he recalls. "The best man didn't show up at the last one, because the weather was good and he had to go fishing; the bride and groom understood. We were snowed in for 10 months a year. It was whale blubber and fish, caribou, blizzards, minus 40 degrees . . . I really loved it."
Born 45 years ago in Coleraine, Fr Martin joined the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Dublin, where he lived for seven years, before serving as priest for the immigrant community in Birmingham, then Canada. (The Oblates have a contract with the bishop of Lourdes to provide language co-ordinators for the shrine's six official languages.)
The confessional has left the deepest impression on him in Lourdes. "In normal parish settings, it's out of fashion," he explained. "Here, there's a hunger for it, because coming here gives people a sense they need to have reconciliation in their lives. Sometimes it's been 10 or 20 years since their previous confession. It's very humbling to hear them unburdening themselves."