Author Spotlight: Sean O’Conaill, author of “The Chain That Binds the Earth”
Sean O’Conaill is the author of The Chain That Binds the Earth, a book published by Author Reputation Press with a gripping plot and a detailed analysis of a society trying to reconcile with its past.
Prior to writing books, Sean was a teacher of secular history in Catholic schools in Northern Ireland for 30 years. In 1996, he retired from teaching in order to write on what he saw to be an escalating crisis of church and culture in the West.
In the 1960s, Sean began taking serious consideration of the failure of the designated Catholic leadership in Ireland to realize the Vatican II vision of the church as the ‘people of God’. He believed that the continued identification of ‘church’ with clergy was the origin of the parallel rise of secularism in Ireland. This perception became even more worrying for Sean as the mean age of priests rises almost year-on-year and as younger generations abandon religious practices.
Aside from The Chain That Binds the Earth, Sean is also the author of Scattering the Proud, which reflects the author’s argument that all major human problems arise out of human vanity, which in turn is born out of insecurity. He posits the very existence of the Jewish and Christian scriptures as a manifestation of this problem.
Sean has also written shorter pieces since 1995, including “Holy Sacrifice?”, an attempt to explain why people must strive to make a holy sacrifice to keep all Irish chapels currently in use open, and “A Priesthood of All Believers?”, published by The Irish News in July 2019.
He is also an active member of the Boston-founded Catholic victim-support movement ‘Voice of the Faithful‘ since 2004 and fronted VOTFI until 2010. Since around 2013, Sean has been a member of the Association of Catholics in Ireland, the website of which he helps to edit.
Sean was born in Dublin in 1943 and studied English and History at University College Dublin in the early 1960s. He later developed a deep interest in the European Enlightenment and a fascination for the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church, which gained momentum in those years.
