CARDINAL Daly should not have resigned this week. He should have resigned almost two years ago, as the holder of any other senior office in Ireland would have done in the circumstances in which he then found himself. If that seems a harsh and unjust judgment on a man of undoubted courage, commitment and intelligence, the following three sentences should be set beside the many heart felt and well deserved tributes paid to Dr Daly this week:
There have been complaints about this priest before, and once I had to speak to the superior about him. It would seem that there has been no improvement. I shall speak with the superior again."
The publication of these words, from a letter written by Cardinal Daly to the family in Belfast of one of the victims of the paedophile, Father Brendan Smyth, would have led to the immediate departure of any other office holder. Indeed, two of the most senior office holders in the Republic - the Taoiseach and the president of the High Court - had to resign because of far less direct failures of authority and accountability in the same case.
If he had chosen to resign at the time of the Brendan Smyth affair, Cardinal Daly could, paradoxically, have gone down as a great moral leader. He could have taught his flock - and everyone else - a great lesson in humility and responsibility. If a prince of the church could have stood up and said, "I was wrong, I failed in my duty to the weakest and most vulnerable, I should go" he could have achieved more for the cause of public morality than any number of sermons and pastorals.
Instead, we had the strange situation in which higher standards of moral accountability were seen to be placed on politicians and judges than on spiritual leaders.
IT CAN be argued, of course, that the head of the Irish church does not derive his authority from the people and is, therefore, not answerable in the sense that a government minister or a judge should be. This is, as far as it goes, patently true spiritual leaders are not politicians, and the Catholic Church makes no bones about the fact that it is not a democratic organisation. But it misses the point that the Archbishop of Armagh is also the leader of an organisation which holds, and insists on its right to hold, huge temporal power in both parts of this island.
In particular, he is the leader of an organisation which claims wide ranging rights over the health service, the education system and the welfare of children. Cardinal Daly, as was evident in his handling of the Smyth affair, never seemed able to acknowledge the simple fact that in democratic societies, the people who wield power over essential services paid for by the public have to answer for their stewardship.
It may have been Cardinal Daly's curse to have lived in interesting times, but he also had an opportunity that was granted to none of his predecessors to learn what it's like to be on the receiving end of self righteous moralising. Last April, opening the new Veritas building in Dublin, he talked about the huge change in media attitudes to the coverage of church affairs in recent years.
"There have been," he said, "allegations of scandal, reported sometimes with scant regard for the pain and the rights of the subjects of these allegations ... Exposure of the abuses and lapses of the past is a legitimate concern of media; but the moral indignation thus evoked can be spurious, and dangerous moral smugness and complacency about the present can be fostered, unless the wider truth is also revealed . . . let us be wary of partial truths, and let us pursue truth in its integrity and its fullness, for that is the truth that sets us free."
It is easy to sympathise with these sentiments. Some media coverage of the church scandals with which he had to deal was undoubtedly marked by hypocrisy and smugness. Some of it substituted hysteria for nuance, and moral absolutism for a compassionate understanding of human complexities. For the first time in their lives, Irish bishops learned how it feels to have fingers pointed at you, to be beaten about the head with crude moral judgments, to be hounded and pursued.
WHEN Cardinal Davy said on radio that he wept during the Brendan Smyth affair, the hearts of all fair minded people must have gone out to him. But where had the church's accusers learned all of this self righteousness if not from the church itself? And where is the evidence that the painful lesson of what it's like to be the object of spurious moral indignation was really learned by the church in the course of Cardinal Daly's leadership?
It was hard in the divorce debate, for instance, to find the new determination of the church to "be wary of partial truths". On the contrary, church spokesmen used scare mongering and distorted statistics with as much abandon as any cynical spin doctor. It was hard to see - in the way Bishop Brendan Comiskey was slapped down by Cardinal Daly for merely suggesting that priestly celibacy should be debated - an example of a new openness to a rounded and subtle view of human dilemmas.
And Dr Daly's hard line against multi denominational education, negating as it did his sincere opposition to sectarianism, was hardly evidence of an absence of moral smugness.
By staying on until this week, Cardinal Daly effectively declared that there would be a limit to the change that might arise from the traumas that have afflicted the church in his time. He sent a silent but deeply significant message that the church was sorry, but not so sorry that the most public ritual of repentance resignation and replacement - would be acted out. He has, in effect, left to his successor the job of showing whether the church has actually taken to heart the lesson that unaccountable power leads inevitably to deception, smugness and abuse.
Archbishop Sean Brady, who now succeeds Cardinal Daly, must be aware that he has to make choices that have been evaded for far too long. The alternatives are clear. He can lead a church that avoids the scandal mongering, spurious indignation and moral smugness it so rightly condemns. Or he can expect his own actions to be judged as harshly as his church judges the actions of others.
He can accept that holding temporal power over areas like education and health means having to account to the public for the way you use that power. Or he can claim the exemptions of a purely spiritual leader by giving up control of publicly funded institutions. He can allow his own office to dwindle into an increasingly irrelevant ceremonial function. Or he can earn the right to be listened to with respect by showing that morality starts where personal self interest and institutional self perpetuation end.