Father Herbert McCabe, who died on June 28th aged 75, was a brilliant and controversial Dominican philosopher and theologian.
Born on August 2nd, 1926, in Middlesbrough, his father, a second generation Irishman, was a medical doctor there. It was a devout Catholic family and one of his sisters became a Carmelite nun. In 1944, he went to Manchester University to study chemistry, but graduated in philosophy. He entered the Dominican Order (the Order of Preachers) in 1949.
At the Dominican House of Studies in Oxford, Herbert McCabe came under the influence of gifted Dominican teachers, chief among them Victor White, a theologian and disciple of C.G. Jung.
From him he imbibed a love for the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, and a concern with the theory of meaning. And there was Thomas Gilby, with his keen mind and puckish sense of humour.
Among Dominican students with whom Herbert McCabe rubbed shoulders were the very left-wing patrician, Laurence Bright, and the ex-communist, Cornelius Ernst, who had studied under the philosopher Wittgenstein.
Along with other younger Dominicans, including Fergus Kerr and Geoffrey Preston, they were later to be involved with equally formidable lay people in enterprises in which Herbert McCabe played a leading part. An enterprise which occasioned no little alarm was the attempt to shift Catholic social thinking leftwards.
After his ordination in 1955, the Dominican authorities decided to send Herbert McCabe to Newcastle, and later to Manchester, to do pastoral work.
In large part the decision was motivated by distrust of the newly-ordained's theology. The English Dominican authorities were deeply suspicious of any departure from the prevailing scholastic Thomism.
In 1960-61, the "December Group" began to meet annually at the English Dominicans' retreat and conference centre, Spode House, in Staffordshire. The group's object - less than reassuring for the authorities - was "to discuss social problems from a Catholic point of view independent of any official organisation". Leading spirits in the enterprise were Laurence Bright and Neil Middleton. They were soon joined by Herbert McCabe and Terry Eagleton.
It was not at all surprising that from this group a new periodical ,Slant, emerged in 1964. It was both a left-wing and a literary periodical - literary because most of those involved in it were specialists in literary studies. Herbert McCabe and Eagleton were among those who left their mark on Slant. It could be outrageous, provocative, learned, clever and funny.
Not entirely coincidentally, one presumes, Herbert McCabe was sent to Cambridge in 1964 to take over the editorship of the Dominican periodical, New Blackfriars.
He was well-equipped for the task, as his writings clearly show. In that year he published a splendid book on the sacraments, The New Creation.
Other notable theological publications were Law, Love and Language (1968), The Teaching of the Catholic Church (1985) and God Matters (1986) - a collection of some of his memorable sermons, including one on the genealogy of Christ as given in the Gospel of Matthew. It ends with the words: "The moral is too obvious to labour: Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of Angela Macnamara or Mary Whitehouse, or to the honest, reasonable, sincere world of The Observer or The Irish Times. He belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars - he belonged to us and came to help us. No wonder he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope."
Towards the end of 1966 a Catholic priest, Father Charles Davis, well-known and highly respected, left the priesthood and the church.
Prior to Davis's departure he wrote an article for an English Sunday newspaper explaining his reasons.
This proved too hard to swallow for Herbert McCabe, who might criticise the church for any number of reasons, but could find far more compelling reasons for staying in it.
He wrote along those lines in an editorial in >New Blackfriars in February 1967, while agreeing with Davis that in certain (far from terminal) respects the church "is quite plainly corrupt". That sentence was probably the equivalent of an admission of guilt as far as the Roman authorities were concerned.
Herbert McCabe was instantly relieved of his post as editor of New Blackfriars and "suspension" was imposed, a severe punishment, confined to clerics. It meant he was forbidden to perform priestly functions like celebrating Mass or preaching.
With comparable rapidity, Herbert McCabe's many friends set to work to persuade the Roman authorities to change their minds. The Newman Association organised a "teach-in", a "pray-in" and a voluntary day of fast and abstinence in London.
One can take it that other less visible and perhaps more influential agencies were discreetly asserting that the punishment was disproportionate. After five days Rome relented and the "suspension" was lifted.
During those five days Herbert McCabe was in Dublin, in the company of friends, among them broadcast journalist Sean MacReamoinn and the late Donal Foley of The Irish Times.
It has been suggested that it was at about this time that Herbert McCabe began to be more conscious of his Irishness.
Restored to the editorship of New Blackfriars in October 1970, he began his first editorial with the words: "As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted, ecclesiastical authorities can behave in some fairly bizarre ways."
Over the next number of years he lectured throughout Britain and America and at the University of Malta, though for most of his teaching life his home was at Blackfriars, Oxford, where he lectured for 25 years.
Ireland and the Troubles began to loom larger in his eyes. He was horrified by the killing of innocent civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday and was deeply distressed by Britain's treatment of the hunger strikers and by the death of Bobby Sands.
He took Irish citizenship in 1974, partly as a protest, partly as an assertion of love. But he still remained the blunt Yorkshireman, as more than one of his English brethren have asserted. And he must have been pleased when the Master of the Order, Timothy Radcliffe, wrote - as he frequently did - of his debt to Herbert McCabe, the teacher.
Herbert McCabe is survived by his brothers, Bernard and Frank, and sisters, Sr Kathleen, Eileen and Mary.
Father Herbert McCabe: born 1926; died, June 2001