Francis Desmond Wilson (1925–2019) was an Irish Catholic priest and church dissident who in the course of the Northern Ireland Troubles embraced ideas and practice associated, internationally, with liberation theology. Active in working-class and Irish nationalist West Belfast, he defended the right of communities failed by the state to create “alternative education, alternative welfare, alternative theatre, broadcasting, theological and political discussion, public inquiries and much else”. More controversially, he did not condemn paramilitary groups when they presented themselves, in his words, as “alternative police and alternative armies”.
Sanctioned by his bishop, from the mid-1970s Wilson supported his community ministry and engagement with writing, broadcasting and lectures, including in the United States where he promoted the McBride Principles for American investment. Alongside Fr Alec Reid, from the 1970s he facilitated discussions between republicans and loyalists, contacts which have been credited with helping prepare the ground for the Northern Ireland peace process.
Legacies of his community work in west Belfast include his contributions to the establishment of Springhill Community House, the Conway Education Centre and Conway Mill Community Enterprises.
Early life Des Wilson was born in Belfast in 1925, youngest of five sons to Emma (née McAvoy) and her husband William Wilson, a prominent publican. Wilson describes being raised in “mixed area” of south Belfast within a middle-class Catholic family “very conscious of their position and their need to improve it within the system”.Wilson (2005), p. 10
Wilson had ideas of becoming a scientist or journalist. He described setting these aside after witnessing in 1941 “science” in the form of the German Luftwaffe “blasting our streets and friends”, and, as if gratified that the Germans had recognised Northern Ireland as part of Britain, “journalism in the form of the Belfast Telegraph” describing the Blitz as “Ulster's night of thrills”.Wilson (2005), pp. 16-17 He also felt called to address "what was happening" to Catholics in Belfast. He had seen barricades thrown up around Catholic districts during the deadly riots of 1935, and family members "run the gauntlet” of Protestant school children who might later (in the Unionist establishment) “grow into men and women with power”.
With a number of his friends, Wilson believed what "we had been taught": that the church had "the answer to many of the problems to what life was about" and that as priests they could lead their community in making changes. Later he was to reflect:It took a long time for us to realise how many problems were born and nourished inside the churches too, how many problems and hardships the churches condoned for the sake of gains they believed important to themselves. And what we thought was their ability to change the world was at best an ability to help people cope with a world that was not willing to be changed by anybodyWilson (2005), p. 18After attending grammar school at St Malachy's College, Wilson entered the college's seminary while studying English and Philosophy at Queen's University. He proceeded to St Patrick's College Maynooth and was ordained in 1949 for the Diocese of Down and Conor.
On the disregard for women Newly ordained, age of 24, Wilson was assigned as a chaplain to the Mater Hospital in north Belfast. He was later to write that his experience at the hospital showed "very clearly the lowly status the church accorded women". Taking advantage of their sense of vocation, the Church "exploited" the nurses, and from the nurses he learned, in turn, how the Church abandoned the many women living with abusive husbands. Their problems, he concluded, were made all the worse by the Church's "rigorous opposition to divorce, and its refusal to agree with birth control". The Church was leaving women "in many ways impoverished both materially and spiritually".
On the role of the Church in education In 1952, Wilson was appointed as his former school's Spiritual Director. During his 14 years in post, Wilson's aversion to St. Malachy's “strict and sometimes vicious” disciplinary regimeWilson (2005), p. 37 developed into a broader questioning of the Church's presence in schools. He hoped for a “radical review” that might persuade the Church to withdraw from the formal education of children (those with special needs excepted). Their instruction in religious devotion, he concluded, was little value as it induced young people to “to leave it as if it were just a part of their childhood”. “Worship of God is a matter for adults” and it was on their lifelong learning needs that the Church should concentrate its educational resources.Wilson (2005), pp. 76-77
After leaving St Malachy's, he criticised the school system for segregating, not only Catholic from Protestant, but also “parents from their children, boys from girls, and older pupils from younger ones”. As an alternative he proposed a system of community education under which “the primacy of the parents in the education process is restored, the elderly of the community can share their knowledge, and the child is exposed to many different traditions”.
Community priest In August 1966, at a few days’ notice, Bishop William Philbin removed Wilson from St Malachy's. He reassigned him to a local parish, St John's, as a junior curate with a responsibility for the residents of housing estates in the greater Ballymurphy area. Wilson was distressed not only by the poverty he encountered, but also by the sense that, since their shoddy post-war construction by the city government, the projects had been the subject of “abusive propaganda” as a “problem area”.Wilson (2005), pp. 62-63
He believed that the people did as much as those in other areas to help themselves, with the district's unemployed being amongst the most busy and creative.Fitzpatrick, Smeaton, Wilson (1980), p. 83 But “journalistic cynicism”, nonetheless, undermined their efforts.
The immediate challenge for Ballymurphy—and, as tensions crested in violence, Wilson was to propose, more broadly for Northern Ireland—was a “crisis of confidence” rooted in people's fear that “that they have nothing to offer each other”. The first step was to begin “with what people do best, whether it is arranging social functions or starting a new company”—such was the depressed state of these urban areas that “morale had to be raised on many fronts”. He was clear, however, that the “end product” must include “increased employment opportunities”.Wilson (2005), pp. 84-85This was an analysis that Wilson and a number of local residents, interviewed, advanced in a 1971 television documentary Unseen Ballymurphy--A Story of a Troubled Community.
Encountering refusals to build small business units for those who wanted to create work, to follow up private investment offers, to help cooperatives desperate for capital and, in 1979, the decision of the British Army to commandeer the premises of the Whiterock Industrial Estate, Wilson found the state not merely indifferent to the task but hostile.Wilson (2005), pp. 72-74
At the same time, he was persuaded that the community could not rely on the understanding and support of their co-religionists in business and the professions. I don't think people realised how deep and awful was the prejudice against their own people. The only difference between them was a difference in income. To say that Catholics would look after fellow Catholics and that Protestants would look after fellow Protestants--that was not so and we learned that very tragically as time went on.
Criticism of the Church's response to the Troubles In Wilson's estimation the Church itself was failing in solidarity. For all its international connections, money and “two thousand years’ experience dealing with political and economic regimes of every kind”, he suggested that for the distressed community in West Belfast the Church might as well have been “an impoverished, unconnected heap founded last Thursday”.Wilson (2005), p. 67 Even in the midst of a humanitarian crisis—in 1969, when thousands of refugees streamed into the Falls Road—the Church failed in practical relief.
Had the Church "rallied to the side of the oppressed nationalist people", Wilson believed it would have rendered "impossible" the developments from which violence was to flow in the coming decades: "internment-without-trial, the torture, the H-Blocks and the hunger strike". In a “highly volatile” situation requiring “all the resources we could get to heal the poverty and the hurt suffered by so many people”, Wilson found his church superiors more interested in “controlling what there was than creating something better.” Among the “damaging” results were policies that failed to give “adequate place to women”, “marginalised” others who should have welcome, and squandered the “potential of priests" to set society on a gentler path.Wilson (2005), p. 113
In 1973, in an address to a Justice and Peace Conference, he wrote:Gallagher and Worrall (1982), p. 105If the institutions of our society, the courts, the police the universities and the Church, had given the same measure of recognition and protection and a sense of dignity to those people as the small guerrilla groups have given them, then they would have as much loyalty to those institutions.Among politically engaged priests, in his criticism of the Church Wilson was not alone. Fr Denis Faul, who campaigned against security-force abuses, argued that in failing to "understand the suffering of his own people", Philbin conceded leadership by default to the Provisionals (described by the bishop as being "of the devil").Gallagher and Worrall (1982), p. 95 Fr Pat Buckley suggested that had the bishop "led two hundred thousand people up the Falls Road demanding civil rights, the Provos might not have been necessary".Dillon (1997), p. 115
Concluding that he could not detach himself from the policies of the Church without “detaching” himself from the priesthood, in 1975 Wilson resigned his curatorship. According to Wilson, Bishop Philbin took it as an act of defiance, accused Wilson of threatening to destroy the Church, and never spoke to him again.Wilson (2005), pp. 120-121
Springhill Community House and Conway Mill Barred from officiating in church, Wilson said Mass in his Ballymurphy home, and with help from Quaker and Presbyterian friends (and a course in community relations at Queens University) concentrated on supporting local community initiatives.
In January 1972, Wilson had moved out of his church accommodation to live among his parishioners in public housing. Wilson operated 123 Springhill Avenue as an open Community House. An admirer, Fr Gerry McFlynn, found the house "reminiscent of the Catholic Worker houses set up by Dorothy Day in the US in the 1940s for feeding people, providing liturgies and, interestingly, Clarification of Thought sessions following talks by invited guests". Noelle Ryan, a former nun drawn to the house, saw Wilson as a worker priest after the model of those clergy in France who, freed from parochial duties, sought connection with the working class by living and working among them.Siefer, Gregor. 1964. The Church and Industrial Society. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, p. 4.
With Wilson's support, Ryan helped launch education classes tutored by volunteers from the Workers Educational Association and the Ulster Peoples College. Conceding to local demand, these were soon joined by outreach to children expelled, or truant, from school—the "school refusers project". The Community House also experimented in different forms of public discussion, inquiry and theatre.