From teenage terrorist, to married man, to a late-vocation seminarian, Shane Paul O’Doherty’s story shows that radical Pauline conversions are not merely biblical tales but still happen even in this day and age:
"Before [Shane Paul O’Doherty’s] arrest, he’d become the most wanted man in Britain, a hero for the Irish Republican Army whose letter-bomb campaign had maimed a dozen people and terrorized all of London. We had walked the streets of Derry, his hometown. At that time [of his previous interview with the journalist Kevin Cullen], we paused at the rooming house for British soldiers where he had planted his first bomb in 1970, when he was 15. We passed the spot in the Bogside where Barney McGuigan’s brains spilled out onto the pavement on Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British paratroopers shot and killed 14 civil rights demonstrators. We walked by the apartment in Crawford Square that O’Doherty used as a bomb factory, the one that blew up, killing Ethel Lynch, his 22-year-old assistant.
"He was given his middle name because he was born on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul [January 25], who was a zealous killer of Christians before his own conversion on the road to Damascus. But O’Doherty’s story is not about a miraculous religious conversion as much as a gradual spiritual evolution. He had a tug of war with God, and God won. His odyssey, from teenage revolutionary to middle-age seminarian, is a story of redemption.
"’Hell,’ he says, shrugging. ‘If I can be saved, anyone can.’"
beautiful story.
“I don’t think the Priesthood could be reduced to a logical consequence. It is a special call and one in which entails sacrifice and demands a compassionate humble heart…”
With all respect, by the same reasoning St. Paul would never have been a priest since at the time of his baptism he outwardly showed no evidence of a “compassionate, humble heart.” The guy who baptized him — name escapes me at the moment — tried to talk the Lord out of it by pointing out Paul’s past dirty deeds (including complicity in murder).
In other words, I don’t think it’s for us to presume that Mr. O’Doherty will not make it to the priesthood. It’s the Church’s place to discern that, not ours.
I was curious, does anyone know if Mr. O’Doherty ever became ordained a priest?