The death of Cardinal Cahal Daly brings to two the number of cardinals in Ireland - and there are no immediate prospects of another red hat.Although Cardinal Desmond Connell of Dublin, who is 83, is in poor health, Cardinal Sean Brady, the current head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, still has five years to go before being required to offer his retirement.
But the passing of Cardinal Daly marks the end of an epoch in the Irish Catholic Church.
Cahal Brendan Daly was born in the village of Loughguile in the Glens of Antrim on October 1,1917.
As a child, Daly’s home was burned in an IRA attack on policemen billeted in the house next door. The son of a schoolmaster and the third of seven children, Daly said he could not remember a time when he did not want to be a priest.
Educated at St Malachy’s College, he went on to study classics at Queen’s University Belfast, winning the Henry Medal in Latin studies.
After completing his MA, he entered the national seminary at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and was ordained in June 1941, subsequently obtaining his doctorate of divinity in 1944.
Continuing his scholastic career, Fr Daly returned to St Malachy’s as classics master and, in 1945, was appointed lecturer in scholastic philosophy at Queen’s, a link he maintained for the rest of his life.
During the first session of the Second Vatican Council, from 1963 to 1965, he was a Latin speaking peritus, or theological expert, for Bishop William Philbin, and subsequently theological adviser to Cardinal William Conway for the remainder of the council.
It was there that he first met the peritus to Cardinal Frings of Germany. That young radical was later to become Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and eventually Pope Benedict XVI.
In 1967,at the age of 50,Daly was appointed Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise (Daly’s diocesan cathedral, St Mel’s in Longford, was severely damaged by fire early on Christmas morning, just three days before Daly suffered his final illness.)
Twelve years after his elevation to the episcopate, Daly hosted the late Pope John Paul II on his visit to the shrine of Clonmacnoise. Daly was also credited with penning the appeals for peace made by Pope John Paul in Drogheda during his Irish visit.
In October 1982, Daly returned to the North to succeed Philbin as the 30th Bishop of Down and Connor, based in Belfast. Just 18 months after the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, the Northern Troubles were at their height, and Daly’s period as a bishop - and later as primate - was dominated by the violence.
He was outspoken in his condemnation of the IRA, particularly after two British soldiers were beaten up and shot dead after driving into the midst of an IRA funeral in west Belfast in 1988.
‘‘For God’s sake, rid our hearts of this poison," he said at the time. ‘‘Evil must be rejected totally and unequivocally. There must be no ambivalence, no double standards, no selective indignation." But while Daly could be liberal on issues such as ecumenism and liturgy, on other matters he remained staunchly conservative.
During the divorce referendum debate , Daly backed calls by Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa to vote against divorce.
The liberalisation of divorce laws in the North had led to a dramatic increase in the divorce rate there, he said.
In the North, Daly opposed the integration of schools for Catholics and Protestants, and he was a strong supporter of the Catholic tradition of a celibate priesthood. Indeed, in 1995, Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns was summoned to Rome to explain his views after clashing publicly on the issue with Daly.
When Cardinal Tomás O’Fiaich died suddenly in 1990 while on pilgrimage to Lourdes, Daly was not the most obvious choice as his successor.
Republican priests in Armagh considered that Daly would be unlikely to succeed the strongly republican O’Fiaich. Besides, at the age of 73, Daly was the oldest nominee as Primate of All Ireland for almost two centuries, and was only two years off the official retirement age.
But as the 114th successor to St Patrick, he went on to play a prominent role in politics and ecumenism until his eventual retirement in 1996.
‘‘It’s plainly contradictory for the IRA to be committed to violence as a way forward, and for Sinn Féin simultaneously to claim they are committed to the peace process," Daly said in 1996, ‘‘and it would be insane to plunge this country again into the madness and agony of the last 25 years from which we so recently escaped."
More recently, however, Daly said he believed Ireland would not return to the full scale violence of the past.
‘‘We simply have to find a way of living peacefully together and of cooperating, and leaving the longer-term future to the evolution of democratic politics, without compromising the constitutional positions of the two main communities," he said.
In 1991, Daly was named a cardinal and had to face the scandal of clerical child abuse.
He gave a diocesan social worker permission to report to the RUC an allegation of abuse by the notorious paedophile, Fr Brendan Smyth.
Just weeks before his death, in his last media interview, Daly spoke to The Sunday Business Post from his home in Rosetta Avenue, Belfast, to condemn the clerical abuse highlighted in the Murphy Report.
‘‘I am deeply, deeply saddened by it all," he said. ‘‘It is a very, very difficult time for the Church and it will pain a great number of people - particularly the victims, who are our first concern. But then there is the much wider hurt of Catholics who are distressed by the whole matter, which is almost beyond belief."
Daly said al l the Irish bishops were committed to reporting allegations to the civil authorities - though it subsequently transpired that that commitment was honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
Months after guidelines were introduced for the Catholic Church, Daly resigned at the age of 79, happily returning to his study of philosophy and theology.
Daly wrote several scholarly books, including Philosophy in Britain from Bradley to Wittgenstein and The Minding of Planet Earth, published five years ago. In an interview just before the launch of that book, Daly spoke about the ‘‘relentless depreciation’’ of non-renewable resources, including water, the crisis over the price of oil and the exhaustion of the earth’s energy resources.
‘‘We are doing extraordinarily little, nationally or internationally, to combat it," he said. He said care for the earth and its people was not a new idea, but an ongoing truth of Christianity. He criticised the ‘‘shocking problems of the illegal dumping of waste’’, sometimes transported from the Republic to the North by criminal gangs, including ex-paramilitaries or even paramilitary organisations themselves.
‘‘We consume too much and we waste too much, and litter gives our towns and cities, including Belfast, a bad name," he said.
‘‘There is excess in our drinking, in our eating and in our shopping. It is up to each one of us to ask ourselves: ‘In what area of my life am I guilty of wastefulness, and what should I do about it?’ " In 2001, he donated all his written work, including 500 sermons and essays, to Belfast’s Linen Hall Library. Daly was plagued by illness following his retirement. His annual visits to the shrine of his favourite saint, St Thérese of Lisieux in France, had to be curtailed because of heart problems, and he was unable to attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2006.
But he keenly followed Irish newspaper accounts of the funeral and subsequent conclave.
Following his latest heart attack, Daly was admitted to the coronary intensive care unit at Belfast City Hospital last Monday.
He died peacefully with his family and friends at his bedside.
He is survived by his brother Paddy, his sister Rosaleen and sisters-in-law Barbara and Mavis, as well as their children.
Daly’s successor in Armagh, Cardinal Sean Brady, said it was difficult to do full justice to the significance and achievements of Daly’s ‘‘long, full and happy life’’, but he believed that his legacy to the ecclesiastical and civil history of Ireland would eventually be seen as ‘‘immense’’.
President Mary McAleese, who was close to Daly, said he would be remembered for his ‘‘immense courage’’ in advocating a peaceful resolution to the Northern conflict.
Daly’s remains will arrive at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh at 5.30pm today. After funeral Mass at noon on Tuesday, he will be buried next to his predecessors in the cathedral grounds.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
SIC: SBP