On 15 November 2020, in a small parish church in County Cavan, Father PJ Hughes did the unthinkable: he held a Sunday mass with around 50 of his parishioners. Speaking later on RTÉ Radio 1’s Today with Claire Byrne programme, Father Hughes said that the Gardaí phoned him just five minutes before the service was due to begin, warning him he was in breach of regulations and should instruct the congregation to leave.

Father Hughes refused, saying “I am not going to tell these people to go home. That would be a huge insult to them, and their faith.”

After the Mass, the Gardai paid Father Hughes a further visit. This time, they informed him that he would be prosecuted for breaking the law, and that he would be fined €2,500 and sent to jail for 6 months. “I’m here to serve the Lord and the people,” he said during the interview on RTE, “not the government.” As far as he was concerned, he had broken no law; he only honoured the fundamental right to practice religion.

Father Hughes went on to say: “We have a divine right to worship God, somebody show me the law that says I’m wrong…It’s telling people you cannot practice your faith. Are we going to live in a Communist state or what? I know the virus is there, but at the same time, we have to live.”

We have to live. Father Hughes’ words and actions shone like a welcome light in the tyrannical darkness of that time. While bishops complied, churches closed, and spiritual life was deemed “non-essential,” one priest stood by his vocation and his parishioners. This wasn’t just a priest talking. This was a man who had served on mission in Ecuador, who had buried the dead and baptised the living in places where faith was not polite or convenient; it was essential. And he returned home to find a Church that had become timid, compromised, and compliant. …

What I will always struggle to comprehend is not just that the church closed its doors; it’s that so few people seemed to mind. Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, with a history of persecuted worship and outlawed sacraments, just accepted locked churches without protest.

The stand that Father Hughes took was striking, not just for its defiance, but because it was so rare. He reminded us that our faith is not subject to approval from experts, that obedience to God sometimes requires disobedience to men. I ask myself why didn’t other priests, pastors, and ministers stand up against this tyranny like Father Hughes did. And why was his disgraceful treatment by the Irish state tolerated? Why did so few object to the sight of a parish priest being fined, targeted, and effectively criminalised for offering the sacraments to his people during the holiest week in the Christian year?

I may never know the answers to those questions, but I will go on asking, because the asking matters.

Father Hughes stood alone. But that he stood at all meant the world to me, and it kept a flicker of hope alive in my heart during those dark and lonely days, and that same light still guides me today.