Cardinal Cahal Daly, Roman Catholic archbishop emeritus of Armagh and primate emeritus of all Ireland, who has died at the age of 92, was an enigmatic figure in Irish public life.Neither as a churchman nor as a Northern Irish Catholic did he fit any stereotype.
He was socially progressive but theologically conservative, intellectually ecumenical but convinced that the official stance of his church on moral issues was alone coterminous with the common good.
His forthright, courageous and sustained opposition to violence did him great credit, as did his frank recognition of unionism as a legitimate reality in Northern Ireland. It would be difficult to find an equally strong assertion of nationalist legitimacy by a Northern Irish Protestant prelate.
Yet, when it came to encouraging an endeavour that would clearly assist reconciliation of the communities in the north, such as the setting up of inter-denominational schools, the cardinal withheld his blessing.
These contradictions in no way detracted from his stature, but rather underscored the willpower needed in a man of his background to break loose from the sensitivities of an aggrieved people. If he did not travel the whole road, he travelled further than many.
In 1972, he denounced the "mystique of the patriotic rifle", while, in 1995, in response to a plea by the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, for Irish forgiveness, he asked the British people to forgive the wrongs inflicted on them by the Irish.
Much of Daly's ministry between these dates was devoted to similar flying in the face of cherished resentments. It was not an upbraiding of his own; it was, rather, showing them and their Protestant neighbours alike how Christians should react in the troubled times they lived through. Peace was to be found in repudiating recrimination. It was positive preaching.
Daly was born at Loughguile, in the Glens of Antrim, 35 miles from Belfast, where his father was a primary school teacher. His early life, he said, was passed in "settings of absolutely typical Protestant-Catholic good-neighbourliness".
He went via St Malachy's college in Belfast to Queen's University, and then to Maynooth, Co Kildare, to study for the priesthood. After ordination and gaining his doctorate in divinity, he spent some time in Paris, studying philosophy at the Institut Catholique. He returned to Queen's to lecture in scholastic philosophy.
In those years he also became involved in Christus Rex, a Catholic movement for social reform which he helped to move from arid criticism of state intervention to serious research, leading to proposals on economic planning, unemployment and related problems.
His unexpected appointment in 1967 as bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, a rural diocese in the republic, almost certainly came about through the influence of Cardinal William Conway, then archbishop of Armagh, who was anxious to strengthen the intellectual fibre of the Irish hierarchy. From this quiet base, where he gave special care to the social problems of a declining and ageing population, Daly was able to implement his interest in contemporary church decor and design.
A mini-renaissance of these art forms in Ireland coincided with the need for alterations in church buildings to meet the liturgical norms of the second Vatican council. Through his patronage of young architects and artists, notably Ray Carroll, Daly set a standard for the whole country and had an influence far beyond his own midland diocese.
In the mid-1970s, he co-chaired a Protestant-Catholic working party with the distinguished Methodist the Rev Eric Gallagher, which published a key report in 1976 on violence in Ireland. This not only condemned violence, but explored the possibility of a joint stand by Catholics and Protestants on the divisive, underlying issues.
At the same time, the bishop joined vigorously in condemning "the contraceptive mentality" supposedly behind the growing campaign to end the prohibition of the sale of contraceptives in the republic. Urging the common good, he was unmoved either by southern Catholic comments that civil law in a pluralist society should not be moulded on the teaching of one church, or by northern Protestant suspicions that the church controlled legislation in the independent Irish state.
In August 1982, Daly moved from his rural see to become bishop of Down and Connor, a diocese which included Belfast and accordingly harboured the tensions of the north at their most extreme. There, he valiantly continued his twin apostolate of ecumenism and community reconciliation.
In 1985, for example, he said it was good neither for religion nor politics that to be born a Protestant should mean being born a unionist, and being born a Catholic should mean being born a nationalist.
In 1990 he spoke of how Christ's admiring references to the once-despised Samaritans had transformed relations between Samaritans and Jews, "making the two divided peoples into one 'new creation' in Christ" – a dramatically apposite quotation in an address to Protestants setting out his vision for the future of Ireland.
For a moment it seemed that Daly might even be reconsidering his commitment to a rigid conformity between civil law and Catholic teaching. At a meeting in 1984 of the New Ireland Forum, established by the Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald to elicit views from north and south, the bishop said that the hierarchy would not stand in the way of moves to achieve a reconciled society, and would, in fact, oppose constitutional proposals that could endanger the civil and religious rights of northern Protestants.
The following year, however, saw the bishops resisting the proposal to lift another prohibition in the republic, the constitutional ban on the enactment of divorce legislation. In northern Protestant eyes, this was a further sign that the Catholic church had no intention of taking into account the views of persons who disagreed with its doctrines, notwithstanding what Daly had told the forum.
In November 1990, Pope John Paul II appointed Daly archbishop of Armagh, in succession to the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich. This made him ex-officio president of the Irish Episcopal Conference and leader of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland.
At a time when there was much criticism among Irish Catholics of the Roman practice of naming priests to be diocesan bishops with little regard for local preferences, there was universal satisfaction at Daly's elevation. His ecumenical outreach, persistent pursuit of reconciliation and his intellectual standing vastly outweighed whatever controversy touched his theological opinions, and he was seen to be uniquely qualified for the office and the traditional cardinal's hat that soon followed.
He took his role seriously. To his fellow Catholics, he predictably stressed the duty, as he saw it, to abide by the whole of church teaching rather than adopt an "a la carte" approach. If this left him a pillar of the integrationist right wing of the church, he contradicted the image by taking every opportunity to speak out against complacent establishment economics which failed to see what he called "the correlation of violence with deprivation" – the phenomenon of violence in urban areas of high unemployment and rural areas of struggling small farms. He stood firmly with the leaders of the Protestant churches on a common platform for peace and brought his message to places where Irish bishops had rarely been heard, the grand committee room of the House of Commons and St Margaret's, Westminster. In England, his plea for mutual understanding appropriately pointed to the essential moderation of mainstream Irish nationalists.
His last years in office were clouded by a succession of scandals that hurt the Irish church and damaged the authority of its churchmen. The resignation of Bishop Eamonn Casey of Galway, who was found to have fathered a child while a bishop, the jailing of a paedophile priest and the revelation of the inability of church authorities – including Daly himself – to deal satisfactorily with the case, together with a crisis over the editorship of a church journal, all found the cardinal manifestly ill at ease with a world where people spoke harsh truths brusquely rather than waited in prayerful silence for episcopal direction.
By the time he retired in 1996, the longed-for end to violence seemed increasingly to be a reality, and Daly could invoke the prayer of Simeon: "Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord ... because my eyes have seen thy salvation". Compatriots of every Christian faith could respond in tribute to his life's work: "Blessed are the peacemakers."
Daly spent his retirement in Belfast, occasionally lecturing and writing but taking little part in the affairs of church or state.
• Cahal Brendan Daly, priest, born 1 October 1917; died 31 December 2009
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