He was a controversial figure who was mocked and scorned, but Lord Longford lived simply and bravely by God's instructions, Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor told mourners at his funeral yesterday.
A week after Lord Longford's death aged 95, about 500 family and friends of the Labour peer, including his wife, Lady Longford, and their seven children, gathered at Westminster Cathedral to pay their respects.
The archbishop, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said the peer did not care that others criticised his campaign to secure the release of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley and pardons for other high-profile prisoners, including Rosemary West and the former Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken.
"When he spoke out against abortion or pornography or spoke out for penal reform or visited the forgotten ones in prison, he was only living out simply and bravely the instructions of the kingdom of God. The world needs to hear and see a witness to values that are different to those espoused by the rest of society," said the archbishop.
The archbishop said the peer's life was dominated by the "quest for holiness". But those who thought religion was a refuge from risk were mistaken and Lord Longford had not lived his life that way.
The 7th Earl of Longford, born at Pakenham, Co Westmeath in 1905, converted to Catholicism in 1940. When he died he was the oldest member of the House of Lords, and although disappointed when many hereditary peers were removed under Labour government reform, he was happy to accept a life peerage and continue his political career.
One of the high points of that career was in 1963, when he chaired the Justice Committee, which proposed that victims of violence should receive state financial compensation. It is now accepted as an important feature of modern law.
His championing of the Hindley case prompted critics to dismiss him as "the Loony Lord", but the long campaign for Hindley's release was a practical reflection of Longford's guiding ethos that forgiveness was the distinguishing Christian virtue. Indeed, Lord Longford's friends said it was an approach he adopted as a young lecturer and councillor when he visited prisoners in Oxford in the 1930s.
Among those who attended the service were Deputy Prime Minister Mr John Prescott and the former foreign secretary Lord Carrington, representing the Queen.