Willy Slavin - The Hermit in a Hut

1940-2023

An avid fan of Thomas Merton has passed away. Fr Willy Slavin, a well-known priest of the Archdiocese of Glasgow, died in St Margaret’s Hospice in Clydebank on 21st July 2023 at the age of 83. His was a fascinating life characterised by his dedication to the marginalised within society and the short shrift he gave anyone who reeked of hypocrisy or cant.

Willy was born in Bristol but taken to Glasgow as a child, attending St George’s Primary School in the parish of Our Lady and St George’s where his requiem Mass took place, before going to Blairs College, the then junior seminary, in Aberdeenshire. He studied for the priesthood at the Scots College in Rome and went on to study psychology at the University of Glasgow.

He was an educational psychologist in the schools of the East End of Glasgow, founded and ran the Scottish Drugs Forum, a national resource for drugs and related issues, a chaplain in Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie Prison for years, parish priest in various parishes, and was the main fundraiser for the homeless Jesus which lies outside the Presbyterian Church called the Tron in central Glasgow (and has never, miraculously, never been sprayed with graffitti).

He retired in his seventies and became a very peripatetic hermit, living in a hut on the Falkland estate in Fife after a tour of Scotland by campervan.

Willy managed to complete his memoir, Life is Not a Long Quiet River, and it was published in 2019. He writes vividly of his life with the Xaverians in Bangladesh. Having been Director of SCIAF (the Scottish equivalent of CAFOD or Trocaire), which is how I began to know him, I particularly appreciated his comment that, on leaving Bangladesh, he was asked by the police how many converts he had made. He writes, “I said one and gave my own name. I had gone to help but ended up being helped to become more like the person I should have been”. He understood the integral human development concept of Pope Francis very well.

Willy organised a very busy meeting of the Thomas Merton Society in his parish of St Simon’s in the West End of Glasgow. St Simon’s is now in ruins after a homeless man, who lived nearby and no doubt ate in the cafeteria run by Sr Mary Ross SND for the homeless, set it alight in 2021.

In the hut to which he retired when enjoying the ‘extra’ of entering his eighties, he had a picture of Merton on his wall next to a quotation by the 19th century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Don’t go where the path may lead, instead go where there is no path and leave a trail”. That is something which Willy in his life of linking action with contemplation could seriously take as his motto. May he rest in God’s peace and enjoy his time with Merton.

Duncan MacLaren

Dr Duncan MacLaren, born in Dumbarton, was Director of SCIAF and then Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis in the Vatican. He was part of a justice and peace community started by Fr Willy in Ruchill in Glasgow in his early thirties and participated in an ecumenical halfway house for drug users through Fr Willy’s influence. They had a long friendship over many years. Duncan is a member of the Thomas Merton Society.