Rite and Reason:Ahead of Cardinal Seán Brady's return from Rome on Thursday, Jim Cantwellreflects on the overlooking of another archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal William Conway, since his death.
Cardinal Conway died 30 years ago this year, aged only 64. He was arguably the most important leader of the Irish Catholic Church since Cardinal Paul Cullen a century before. But is he being written out of history?
The question is prompted by a trawl through a variety of recently published books. The latest, Roy Foster's A Brief History of Change 1970-2000, mentions Conway only to assert that Jack Lynch and Garret FitzGerald were belted by his crozier.
The Oxford Companion to Irish History includes five cardinals and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid but not Cardinal Conway. The multi-volume New Oxford History of Irelandand the Encyclopaedia of Irelandare both similarly deficient.
Diarmaid Ferriter's Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000has as many references to Archbishop McQuaid as to Seán Lemass, but no mention of Cardinal Conway. Tim Pat Coogan's 800-page Ireland in the Twentieth Centuryhas two innocuous sentences on Cardinal Conway but countless passages on Archbishop McQuaid.
This imbalance is truly bizarre, like reading reports of football matches that consistently disregard the second half.
The episcopal careers of Archbishop McQuaid and Cardinal Conway overlapped for 12 years. Omit Cardinal Conway and the story of their era is only half told.
Cardinal Conway was at the helm from 1963 to 1977, a period of major transition in the Irish Catholic Church and Irish society, during and immediately after the Second Vatican Council. It was also a time that saw the emergence of serious turmoil in the North.
No one since Cardinal Cullen commanded the hierarchy as completely as Cardinal Conway. He achieved this through moral authority, whereas Cardinal Cullen's clout was powerfully reinforced by his powers as papal legate.
Born in Dover Street, Belfast, Cardinal Conway had an absolute horror of violence, having witnessed as a teenager the pogroms of the 1920s.
He had a gift for the telling phrase, such as "who in his sane senses wants to bomb a million Protestants into a United Ireland?"
At the height of the tensions in the early 1970s he asked all the Christian denominations to meet to survey "the whole field of ecumenism". Thus began the Ballymascanlon talks process.
Cardinal Conway was far-seeing, single-minded and occasionally Machiavellian. Doctrinally a determined guardian, he had a subtle mind and an intense curiosity. Space exploration fascinated him. A photo of Earth from the moon hung in his study, beside one of the Palaeolithic rock paintings in the caves of Santander.
An interview with Vincent Browne in 1975 turned into an animated dialogue lasting more than four hours. Browne reported he found "not the ecclesiastical stereotype, a man of dogmatism and certitude", but one "groping towards an understanding of what is happening in the world about him with all its normal uncertainties and wonderment". To appreciate his achievements, consider what went before! The Irish bishops were unprepared for the Vatican Council, the Catholic Church's most important event of the 20th century. I can find no evidence in minutes of hierarchy meetings that it was discussed in its two-year preparatory phase. With the then Catholic primate Cardinal D'Alton ailing, Archbishop McQuaid led the bishops' early contributions in a depressingly negative tone.
This changed when Cardinal Conway succeeded D'Alton in 1963. His contribution to the debate on the priesthood found its way into the council's central document, Lumen Gentium. On religious liberty, Louis McRedmond reported that Cardinal Conway "ranged himself firmly and with enthusiasm among the supporters of the declaration". His intervention in the debate on the church in the modern world was applauded.
Cardinal Conway's deft touch was immensely important in the post-conciliar period. Initially, he had difficulty asserting his leadership role because Archbishop McQuaid continued to see himself as the controlling influence.
The archbishop's response to the council was one of dutiful but uncomfortable compliance. As Desmond Fennell observed, he "simply began to carry out the new ordinances and counsels from Rome as loyally as he did the old ones". Cardinal Conway negotiated himself adroitly around Archbishop McQuaid.
He was a creative conservative. Historian Joseph Lee believes the "cautious, but not reactionary" course the cardinal charted was important in helping society adjust to the pressures of change.
"The church continued to provide psychic moorings for many who would otherwise have suffered a great deal of emotional disturbance in the face of incomprehensible change," Lee wrote in Ireland 1912-1985.
Cardinal Conway had acute pastoral instincts. The finding in a church survey in 1974 that 91 per cent of adult Irish Catholics went to Mass weekly did not overly impress him. He found another finding hugely significant: that only 28 per cent received Communion weekly, suggesting 63 per cent did not seem to see reception of the Eucharist as an integral part of attending Mass.
The liturgy was the critical post-conciliar reform because it had the greatest potential for turmoil. Ireland escaped the acrimony that plagued other countries. Seán MacRéamoinn described liturgical renewal as "the success story of Vatican II" .
It was after a visit to India by Cardinal Conway that the bishops launched Trócaire in 1973. Cura was the bishops' practical follow-up to a 1975 pastoral on abortion. Bodies on catechetics, doctrine, justice and peace, marriage, missions, social welfare, communications, liturgy, education and emigration all emerged during Cardinal Conway's watch.
He was also responsible for an important shift in the episcopal approach to legislation in the Republic on issues of public morality, with a landmark statement by the Bishops' Conference in 1973. It asserted that there were many things the Catholic Church held to be morally wrong but no one suggested they should be prohibited. Those insisting on seeing the issue purely in terms of the State enforcing, or not enforcing, Catholic moral teaching were "missing the point".
Jim Cantwell was press secretary to the Irish Bishops' Conference from 1975 to 2000.