SOURCE: Howard, Ben. “Seán O'Faoláin: 1900-1991.” Sewanee Review 100, no. 2 (spring 1992): 298-99.

In the following essay, Howard offers a brief tribute to O'Faoláin on the occasion of his death.

In one of Sean O'Faolain's late stories, entitled “The Human Thing,” an expatriate Irish priest must decide whether to grant a Catholic burial to an apostate—a parishioner who sent his wife and children away and then lived with his lover for five years. After much vexation the world-weary priest agrees to perform the funeral. “Did I do the right thing?” he asks the narrator. “You did the human thing, Father,” the narrator replies.

It is a characteristic moment—and a characteristic response. Over the course of his long career Sean O'Faolain cast a cool but humane eye on church and state, politics and economics, history and religion. His prodigious wide-ranging oeuvre includes biographies of Irish national...