Mass in St Peter's:The Catholic primate Seán Brady received his cardinal's ring from Pope Benedict XVI at a Mass in St Peter's Basilica, Rome, yesterday, completing ceremonies that saw him elevated to the College of Cardinals.
At the consistory on Saturday he received the zuchetto, or skull cap, and his biretta, or "red hat", with 22 other men.
They included Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the first Texan cardinal and Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, whose mother is Irish; as well as Cardinal John Patrick Foley, pro-grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, whose father was of Irish extraction.
Yesterday's Mass was also attended by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, whose father was from Cork; Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, who was born in Ballycastle, Co Antrim; and Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, Archbishop of Durban in South Africa, a Franciscan educated in Galway.
Also present at yesterday's Mass were Cardinal Cahal Daly and Cardinal Desmond Connell, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam, and Archbishop Dermot Clifford of Cashel, as well as a large contingent of Ireland's Catholic bishops.
Among the 10,000 congregation were an estimated 500 Irish people, including Cardinal Brady's brother Con, sister Kitty, and their families, with many people from Cardinal Brady's native county Cavan.
There were also large numbers of priests and laity from both Kilmore diocese and Armagh archdiocese.
At a reception she hosted to mark the occasion in the Irish Embassy to the Holy See on Saturday night, President McAleese reflected on the "new culture of partnership . . . bedding down in Northern Ireland".
She said "it has been a long hard road to these blessed and grace-filled days, and Cardinal Brady has been a key player in the achievement of today's new dispensation".
She said the new cardinal's archdiocese "places him well to be part of the emerging new Ireland, for the Armagh archdiocese is in many ways a microcosm of the island of Ireland. It runs from near the outskirts of Belfast to almost the outskirts of Dublin."
It was also from the ecclesiastical province of Armagh that, 400 years ago, the great Gaelic chieftains were driven out. The remains of the Earls of Tyrconnell and Tyrone lay in the Church of San Pietro "not half a mile from where we gather", she said.
They went to Rome and died "unaware that even in their despair the green shoots of hope were already growing again. It would take many generations before Ireland would transcend the seething and unsought turmoil of her disrupted history. It has long been a work in progress but now it is a work making progress, miraculous progress," she said.
