Roy Donovan’s review of Eamon Maher’s ‘The Prophetic Voice: Jean Sulivan’s Ongoing Relevance in France and Ireland’
June 8 2026
In his book ‘The Prophetic Voice’, Eamon Maher has done us a great service in transporting Jean Sulivan, the French priest, from anonymity into mainstream. He does this by putting forward from within his fiction writings that Sulivan is prophet and is a role model for our times. I was left feeling that it is remarkable that such an unheard of ‘rebel’ priest existed in the 60s and 70s.
Eamon successfully puts forward Sulivan’s prophetic voice by ‘comparing and contrasting’ Jean Sulivan’s ‘caricature’ of priests with those conveyed by Mauriac and Bernanos. He accentuates the ‘prophetic voice’ of Sulivan further in his Irish Comparative Case Studies relating to Canon Sheehan, William King, Colum McCann, John McGahern and latterly, Tony Flannery.
It strikes me that Sulivan’s priests and Sulivan himself echo Albert Camus in L’Estranger (The Stranger) and The Plague. As in L’Estranger, Sulivan lives by being authentic and true to what is deepest inside (conscience) himself which at another level makes him an outsider in society and in the Church. Sulivan refuses to be a functionary and conform to an outdated institution. Sulivan’s priests are like the doctor in The Plague who are alleviating human suffering where they find it, emphatically in the marginalised and creating communities within the periphery areas such as with the prostitutes.
Sulivan reiterates that living from the depths within happens through ‘revelatory’ moments of grace. This is something akin to Thomas Merton’s mystical affinity with the East. Sulivan’sexperiences a moment of transformation while staying in an Ashram which leads to a rebirth. The ‘scales’ fall from his eyes and he sees with new eyes and the priest characters in his later writings become modern ways of making the Gospel come alive. Sulivan’s uncompromising honesty makes him a disturbing voice.
Maher argues that Tony Flannery encapsulates many of the Church issues already outlined by Sulivan. Flannery and Sulivan, by being true to the deepest depths within themselves (conscience), have become outsiders. Maher states that Sulivan was much more critical of the Church than anything that Flannery every said or wrote. There is a difference in that Sulivan was mostly putting out these issues through the characters in his fictional literal writings whilst Flannery had no camouflage and named it directly and succinctly ‘as it is’ in a layperson’s language. For example, even though Sulivanconveys a positive view of women, Flannery puts forward the full equality of women at every level of the Church. Unlike Sulivan, Flannery has suffered severely at the hands of the patriarchal authoritarian Church leaders for being true to his conscience.
The late Fr. Séamus Ryan (Lecturer and gifted Limerick hurler) often put out that our God is too small. The God of the prophetic Sulivan and Flannery is a very big God, the God of Jesus Christ, ‘a God big enough to house all of humanity’ (John Moriarty).
Read The Prophetic Voice and you will be surprised by Sulivan’s very big God at work.
Roy Donovan is a priest of the Cashel & Emly Archdiocese and a member of the ACP Leadership Team.
****************
Link to QR code to order a copy of the book.
****************
Dr Eamon Maher, School of Tourism and Hospitality Management
TU Dublin – Tallaght Campus, Room 132B, D24 FKT9, Ireland
General Editor of Reimagining Ireland and Studies in Franco-Irish Relations
