Revolution, Reluctantly: Fr Kieran Creagh’s journey through trauma

No less than five documentaries have been made about Fr Kieran Creagh’s life, by the BBC, ITV and CBS.

After an enjoyable but quiet midweek Mass, sitting in the cafe attached to Sacred Heart Church, you might wonder if we’ve come to the right address. Yet Kieran’s presence here, drinking tea in the cold January sunlight, is in itself a more remarkable fact than you could possibly guess.

It took some prayer and reflection for Kieran to accept his present job, in October 2022: as the administrator of Sacred Heart Parish, Oldpark, near to his family home. He had not relished the prospect of a return to Belfast; the city does not hold happy memories for him. Much of the last 15 years has been spent reckoning with chronic PTSD that has its deepest roots here. 

The Ardoyne native, “born a Passionist”, is astonishingly pragmatic, however. The Irish Times credited him with A Selfless Passion for Helping Others. The Belfast Telegraph, too, labelled him The Reluctant Hero (a title he rebuffed at the time: “When there’s a need there, when you see people suffering and you think you can do something to help them; well then, do it, you know?”). Did we mention Ireland’s International Person of the Year Award?

Making his return now—which, thankfully, is working out better than he could have imagined—attests to a remarkable resolve, and years of therapeutic work. But you’d have to admit that it’s not the kind of heroism that makes headlines. To explain why this unassuming Ardoyne native has received such accolades requires some backstory: when Kieran was invited to go to South Africa for six months, to cover for a Passionist priest who had taken ill. 

A Seismic Shock

A red brick wall, razor wire around the top. Behind it, the corrugated metal roof of St George Catholic Church. This is Atteridgeville, South Africa; a black township some 20km West of Pretoria.

Arriving to this sight, Kieran’s reaction was unsurprising: “What on earth am I doing here?” He had arrived in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ with no training in inculturation, no knowledge of the languages. Overworked and disillusioned from his previous role (promoting priesthood while the clerical sex abuse scandals exploded) Kieran confesses that the seismic culture shock fed into something of martyrdom complex.

The white parish, 20km away, didn’t do much to relieve his concerns. His first mass was celebrated on Holy Thursday, with some 20 people in attendance. “I left my family behind for this?” he wondered. He took care of these English-speaking services while learning Sotho.

Despite the initial sense of isolation, though, Kieran “quickly fell in love with the place.” Apartheid had ended—nominally at least—and Thabo Mbeki had taken over the presidency from Mandela; it was a genuinely exciting and hopeful time for the country.

On the other hand, the parish was bankrupt. Kieran had the job of telling the parishioners that there was no more foreign money to keep it afloat. The AIDS pandemic was rife; Kieran recalls visiting many domestic situations that were unspeakably heartbreaking, due to the conditions in which people were dying. Prostitution amongst migrant workers living at squatter camps was a huge problem.

In 2002, Kieran was called out to a parishioner who was dying and in a pitiful state, in one of the squatter camps. Despairing that no-one was doing anything about these desperate conditions, he felt what he had to describe as the voice of God: “Well, you do something.” 

Two things were clear: he wanted to build a hospice, and he wanted to ensure that the parish was financially self-supporting before he went anywhere. The problem was, he had no idea how to do it. The support of local businesses and retired nurses gave shape to his initial plans, and led to getting bigger donors on board; amazingly, by July 2004, the eighteen-bed Leratong Hospice (“Place of Love”) was open. 

Kieran talks with an understandable pride about the hospice’s beginnings, describing it as the best place he has ever worked. Since its first audit, it has remained the highest-scoring medical centre in South Africa. Today, it trains doctors in palliative care, giving them invaluable experience. 

While drumming up support for the hospice, Kieran ended up with a favour to do in return: becoming the first person in the world to be tested with the AIDS vaccine. “I think it sent a message to donors,” he smiles. “If I was willing to put my life on the line by testing a lifesaving vaccine then the least they could do was to donate a tenner!” And indeed, the flood of media attention made the hospice known around the world. It also saw Kieran flown home to receive that International Person of the Year Award, from the President of Ireland. 

By 2007, six months in South Africa had become nine years, with no end in sight. Kieran had moved from St George to be live-in director at the hospice. It was a thoroughly ordinary day—a board meeting in Pretoria, checking on the patients and night staff, retiring for the evening. Thinking of the hospice’s recent audit, Kieran wrote in his diary two words, unfortunately prophetic: it ends.

Awoken by the doorbell, Kieran was somewhat surprised; but with AIDS patients, things can change quickly.

The yard between his flat and hospice had a stable-type door, to keep out snakes, scorpions and the like. Upon opening the door, Kieran saw a man who appeared to be sheepishly hanging around, with his back to the door. 

Enquiring if the man was alright and if he needed help, Kieran opened the door wider only to see a gang of men running towards him. He suddenly realised they were after him. The men landed a few blows, but Kieran escaped into the courtyard. However, they soon caught up with him, shooting him in the arm and in the chest. 

One man stood over him with a gun, but Kieran managed to push it to one side and the bullet struck one of the others standing nearby. This panicked them enough for Kieran to escape their clutches and try to get into the hospice building; but all the emergency shutters had come down once the staff had heard the gunfire. 

Finding Kieran on the ground, the gang attempted to finish him off by shooting him from point-blank range. This third bullet did the most damage, as it hit his internal organs. He describes how it entered his back, travelling up his spine and doing a U-turn, lodging in his lung rather than entering his heart. To this day, he has no explanation as to why the bullet changed course. 

The trauma was far from over, and seemed to last for an age. Emergency services were nervous about attending the area where all this took place, as it was seen as a danger zone even for them. Sitting there waiting for help to arrive, seeing blood everywhere, and struggling to breathe, he said an ‘Act of Contrition’, thinking this was the end. 

Finally, the police turned up, but insisted on waiting for an ambulance. Realising the danger had gone, hospice staff emerged and found him struggling for breath due to a collapsed lung. The next few hours would make for a black comedy if they weren’t so agonisingly awful; the hospice secretary drove Kieran away, but the police stopped them, saying he couldn’t leave the ‘crime scene’. An ambulance refused to take him, as they had no oxygen supply. Kieran was left at the roadside, waiting for a second ambulance, as concerned locals gathered around him. The second ambulance drove him to a faraway Catholic hospital, at an unhurried pace, without sirens—seemingly unaware of the blood dripping from his back.

The Little Company of Mary Hospital had no idea what to do with Kieran’s injuries. Finally, an Indian doctor, who was a thoracic surgeon, arrived. Shocked at Kieran’s condition, he decided to transfer him to his own hospital only two minutes away. Four hours after being shot, it finally felt like someone knew what they were doing. 

Kieran awoke the next morning full of morphine and in intensive care. A bullet had been deliberately left in his lung, but two days later he was found to be losing blood due to a slight tear in the lung. Once again, he was rushed into emergency surgery, for the lung to be temporarily taken out and the bullet removed. He also required an operation to remove blood from his abdomen. Kieran’s family were informed that he was on life support and breathing through a ventilator and, if he survived the next forty-eight hours, he should pull through. 

The Road Back

“Trauma builds on trauma,” Kieran says knowingly.  “A lot of my trauma was witnessing things as a teenager you shouldn’t have to witness, sectarian shootings—you were always on edge,” as he told the Irish News in 2020. He adds to me, “most of my peers are drunk, on medication, or dead. Very few are leading ‘normal’ lives.” 

Kieran recovered from the assault, and returned to Ireland for just three months. “I believe it may have been the ‘Hand of God’ that guided that last bullet away from my heart,” he says thoughtfully. “Though it would have been nicer if God had stopped the bullets altogether.” Despite people’s concerns, he soon came back to South Africa, where he had his home, his work, his life. Ever pragmatic, he was determined to finish building a church, creche and health clinic adjacent to the hospice.

“Everything was the same—except I wasn’t, but I didn’t realise it,” he says matter-of-factly, but with a tangible sadness. “I wasn’t as free in the township as I’d been before. I had a fear on me.” Over the next 2 years, he was the target of four attempted hijackings; the last time, four gunmen chased him for half an hour along a dirt track.

“After that I was very unwell, mentally, physically, spiritually,” he recalls. He flew to Ireland overnight, leaving his clothes still hanging in his wardrobe at the hospice; he fully expected to go back, but he never did. “I was afraid of everyone and everything, living daily in fear, having night terrors.”

Diagnosed with PTSD, he began to improve through intense psychotherapy, which encompassed his Ardoyne childhood as well as the events in South Africa. The therapy, along with further exploration of Celtic Spirituality, helped a great deal. It eventually led Kieran to living on an Irish-speaking island off the coast of Donegal, Tory Island, which lasted four and a half years. 

His first attempt to move back to Belfast, however, went poorly; “it was like one big massive trigger. A man was shot dead in a petrol station, not far from where I was staying, and it led to a riot at the front gate of the monastery.” He also mentions being called out to a house in Shankill Road with reports of a poltergeist; “my head went to pieces. I know things had moved on a lot, but I hadn’t moved on.”

Gradually, painfully, things improved. “I had 11 of the 12 main symptoms of PTSD,” Kieran recalls, then laughs: “the one I actually wanted, I didn’t get—fearlessness!” He still bears some scarring from his physical injuries, occasionally gets breathless if he talks too much; but the lasting effects are the mental ones. The PTSD doesn’t go away, but he has learned how to deal with it.

If Kieran was reluctant, then, to come to Oldpark in Belfast again, you certainly couldn’t blame him. Testing an historic vaccine, overseeing a top-rated hospice, surviving an horrific attempt on his life: these things are rightly celebrated, but nowadays Kieran exemplifies a much more commonplace heroism—facing fears, and still giving his all—albeit, hopefully, with personal safeguards in place.

“I feel like I have always been in a constant conversation with God,” Kieran reflects, when I ask whether his faith has been changed by all these experiences. “Chatting things through is really my thing, not sitting still and meditating. I find it hard not to be active; I talk to God as I go through my day.” He made the decision to commit to Sacred Heart Parish after praying for “a convincing sign” and believing he got one.

Kieran describes Sacred Heart as underprivileged: not so much in economic terms, but emotionally. The social deprivation there is underscored by lots of transgenerational trauma. Nearly every funeral involves a family which has experienced tragedy associated with the Troubles. The area has a high suicide rate (at one time, the highest in Ireland), especially among young men. 

“I feel like I have always been in a constant conversation with God. I find it hard not to be active: I talk to God as I go through my day.”

The level of practising Catholics stands between five and ten percent; however, when deaths occur, families still expect the church to be there for them. People still hold traditional Irish wakes in the home, and some of these can last between 2 to 5 nights; longer, if they are in the waiting list for the crematories. 

“This is our chance to show the compassionate face of the church to people who mostly have little or nothing to do with it,” Kieran shrugs. “It could be the deceased was the only one who had contact with the parish, but they have the right to the ministry and rites of the Church, even if their relatives don’t appreciate it.” Kieran makes it his business to visit a wake house every day to check how the family is doing; he’s occasionally met with hostility for his efforts. He’s well aware of the anger at the Church; and that the younger generation has moved from anger to apathy.

A fellow priest challenged Kieran to ‘put the heart back into Sacred Heart’ and it’s evident that he has set about doing just that. “I don’t like that priests speak about ‘my parish’—it’s the people’s parish,” he says. “The priestly ministry is about being alongside people. And we’re not going to have any meaningful progress until we truly take blame for clerical sex abuse and the way it has been handled.”

By the end of our time together, I believe it would be difficult to disagree with that earlier description of Kieran: a selfless passion for helping others. Kieran has lived through some extraordinary things, and has at once a gentle woundedness and a stoic strength in him. Despite his reluctance, and the many things he has been asked to carry, he is present with people. When others talk, a real concentration appears on his face as he leans in, giving them his focused attention. 

Here in Belfast, where it began, Kieran is determined to do his best for the people in the city; even if, in his quieter moments, he thinks about his former life in Atteridgeville, or the Passionist house in Paris where he might like to move next. His mission to make Sacred Heart a welcoming place of friendship, reaching out to where people are, is firmly underway. ·