John Charles McQuaid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
|
| Denomination | Roman Catholic |
|---|---|
| Senior posting | |
| See | Dublin |
| Title | Archbishop of Dublin |
| Period in office | 1940 –1972 |
| Consecration | 27 December 1940 |
| Predecessor | Edward Joseph Byrne |
| Successor | Dermot J. Ryan |
| Religious career | |
| Priestly ordination | 29 June 1924 |
| Previous bishoprics | none |
| Previous post | Teacher |
| Personal | |
| Date of birth | 28 July 1895 |
| Place of birth | Cavan |
| Date of death | 7 April 1973 (aged 77) |
| Place of death | Dublin |
John Charles McQuaid, CSSp (28 July 1895 – 7 April 1973) was Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland between December 1940 and February 1972.
Contents |
[edit] Early Life and Ministry
John Charles McQuaid was born in Cootehill, Co. Cavan, on 28 July 1895, to Dr. Eugene McQuaid and Jennie Corry. His mother died shortly afterwards. He attended St. Patrick’s College, Cavan, Blackrock College and Clongowes Wood. He entered the CSSp (Congregation of the Holy Spirit or "Holy Ghost Fathers") in Kimmage, Dublin in 1913. He was ordained on 29 June 1924. In 1925 he was appointed to the staff at Blackrock College in Dublin where he remained until 1939. He served as Dean of Studies from 1925-1931 and President of the College from 1931-1939.[1]
Although regarded as a strict taskmaster, Dr. McQuaid strove to improve the performance of average and poor students. Holy Ghost priest Michael O'Carroll was a student in Blackrock when McQuaid was appointed Dean of Studies. He recounts how, when McQuaid discovered that a class of sixth-year boys lacked even the rudiments of Latin late in term, he announced in his low steely voice: 'Gentlemen we shall begin with mensa'. By the end of that term, his systematic exposition of grammar and syntax enabled 17 of the 18 boys to pass the Leaving Certificate examination in Latin.
Blackrock College had educated many senior Irish political and business leaders. McQuaid was close to Éamon de Valera, a future Taoiseach, himself a former Blackrock College teacher. He would later influence de Valera in drafting the modern Irish constitution (Bunreacht na hEireann).
[edit] Intellectual formation
He studied at University College, Dublin where he was awarded both a first class honours BA in 1917 and MA in Ancient Classicsin 1918. His MA thesis was 'A Roman of of the Early Empire: Lucius Annaeus Seneca' He was awarded an honours Higher Diploma in Education in 1919. He was immersed in the theology of the French church through his studies in the order's house of studies at Kimmage, Dublin. He retained close intellectual links with academic developments in France throughout his life. Besides his Francophile upbringing, McQuaid also trained at the Gregorian University in Rome where he completed a doctorate in theology. His recall to Blackrock in 1925 prevented him from completing his course in Biblical studies.
McQuaid's MA thesis on the life and philosophy of Seneca, the philosopher-statesman of first century Rome illustrates some important aspects of his own character and concerns. He characterised Seneca as a pre-Christian moralist living in an age of immorality, sinfulness and confusion. "It is a great sign of strong virtue to abstain from pleasure when the crowd is wallowing in filth, to be sane and temperate when it is vomiting and drunk," he wrote. "But it is a much greater sign not to withdraw from the crowd nor mingle with it in all things. We can be merry without debauch." In a licentious age, Seneca commended chastity and upheld by his own example the natural sanctity of marriage. In days of brutal selfishness and callous cruelty, Seneca reverenced the slave and the outcast.
McQuaid compared the horrors Seneca experienced during Nero's reign with the growing troubles he saw in Ireland. Referring to "the stealthy fear that crept around Seneca", McQuaid argued that this was a feature of the Roman writer's life which "it seems only those can fully appreciate who have themselves undergone a period of unnerving terrorism".
McQuaid saw himself as living through "Senecan" times. In addition to the horrendous carnage of the World War, the ungodly Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the slide towards guerilla war in Ireland , there was an outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918 that killed an estimated 20 million people worldwide. Among them was Father Dan Walsh who had been McQuaid's novice master in Kimmage.[2]
[edit] Archbishop of Dublin
He was appointed Archbishop of Dublin on 6 November 1940 at the age of 45. His motto was ‘Testimonium Perhibere Veritati’-"to bear witness to the truth". McQuaid oversaw a massive expansion of the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Dublin during his term. He also established a wide range of social services for the poor of the city. He is especially remembered for his work in the area of charity. He oversaw the establishment of the Catholic Social Welfare Conference and the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, between 1941-1942. He had a personal interest in providing for people who suffered physically, mentally and spiritually. During his episcopate the number of clergy increased from 370 to 600, the number of religious from 500 to 700 and the number of parishes from 71 to 131. [3] In addition some 80 new churches were built, 250 primary schools and 100 secondary schools.[4]
This record of phenomenal expansion had one curious side effect. Dublin has two Protestant Cathedrals built in the Middle Ages but no Catholic Cathedral. The centre of the Catholic Archdiocese is the 19th century St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral in a side street near the city centre. The Pro-Cathedral was never intended to be other than a temporary acting cathedral, pending the availability of funds to build a full cathedral. Archbishop McQuaid bought the gardens in the centre of Merrion Square and announced plans to erect a cathedral there. However he felt obliged to use the funds originally designated for the new cathedral to build the new churches and schools instead. His successor eventually handed over the gardens to Dublin Corporation and they are now a public park. [5] As a result of the Archbishop's sense of priorities, Dublin still has no Catholic Cathedral. It is a story to be set against the common depiction of McQuaid as an arrogant Renaissance style prelate.
[edit] Politician
There was the impression of friendship between McQuaid and Eamon de Valera, founder of Fianna Fail and frequent head of government from the 1930s to the late 1950s. Historian Dermot Keogh believes that there has been a tendency to view the relationship between the two men as being static and not subject to change or development. Dr Keogh thinks it was quite the reverse. The men were friends and the relationship was less complicated in the 1930s when McQuaid was not archbishop. But after his ordination, McQuaid represented in a formal fashion the interests of the Church and he defended those interests even when it brought him into conflict with the leader of the state who also happened to be his friend. That friendship never clouded both men's concepts of their duties on behalf of church and state. It is all too facile to hold, a priori, that de Valera and McQuaid sang consistently from the same hymnal.[6]
As Archbishop, McQuaid appeared to be a powerful and conservative figure who wielded much influence in all aspects of Irish society. His opinion and support were sought in many areas including the wording of the Irish Constitution, the Mother and Child Scheme, censorship, youth affairs, lay organisations and hospitals. McQuaid also took an active interest in industrial relations and helped resolve more than one dispute during his time as Archbishop. One of the most notable disputes was the Teacher’s Strike of 1946. He was sympathetic with the teachers’ case and was very active on their behalf.
In the early 1950s, Noel Browne, the First Inter-Party Government's Minister of Health, - shocked by the absence of ante-natal care for pregnant women, and the resulting infant mortality rates in Ireland - proposed providing free access to health care for mothers and children in a new Mother and Child Scheme. The Archbishop's criticism of the scheme, compounded by political misjudgements by Browne, as well as tensions between Browne and Sean MacBride, his political party leader, and Browne's behaviour towards other ministers, helped pave the way for the government's decision to withdraw the scheme.
There was continuing conflict between McQuaid and de Valera. In 1946 McQuaid's support of the national teachers’ strike, greatly annoyed de Valera. McQuaid was never made a cardinal. Joseph Walsh, the Irish minister to the Holy See, had warned the Vatican that if McQuaid was elevated “the Nuncio would have endless difficulties, with every sphere of his activities, owing to this deplorable weakness in [McQuaid’s] character, already so well known to the Holy See”. [7]
[edit] Personal Qualities
The late John Feeney, published in 1974 "John Charles McQuaid - The Man and the Mask". This critical essay on the archbishop presents McQuaid as living outside his time but as a "first class bishop of the old school" who, had he lived fifty years earlier "would have no critics worth speaking of and would hardly be remembered today except by those who benefited from his quiet, personal charity" (page 78/9).
Feeney also evaluates his role in a negative light under the headings 'schoolteacher' and 'medievalist'. Yet, he was also for Feeney a Christian and 'a diligent, sincere and absolutely honest man who did his duty as he saw it".(page 79).
Examples of the archbishops "quiet personal charity" are rarely supplied in John Cooney's biography, "John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland". He quotes McQuaid's secretary (from 1940 onwards) Father Chris Mangan as recording that "after supper at night, six nights a week he would go out visiting hospitals" (page 144). However Cooney then passes quickly on to the archbishop's administrative methods. There is no discussion on how this regular visiting of the sick, fits in with Cooney's portrait of a power hungry Renaissance style prelate.
Behind his formidable exterior the Archbishop was an extremely shy man who was ill at ease at social functions. In 1963 after the first session of the Vatican Council, Dr McQuaid set up a secret all-priests Public Image Committee "to examine what is now called the public image of the Church in the Dublin Diocese". The Archbishop insisted that the committee members should pull no punches and they obliged. The committee reported that his public image "is entirely negative: a man who forbids, a man who is stern and aloof from the lives of the people, a man who doesn't meet the people (as they want him to) at church functions, at public gatherings, or television or in the streets, who writes deep pastoral letters in theological and canonical language that is remote from the lives of the people". One of the committee members noted that the archbishop was "somewhat disappointed" after the first meeting. "He felt the discussion centred too much on him personally. The image of the church was not the same as that of the archbishop." [8]
[edit] The Archbishop and the Poet
McQuaid regularly gave money to the poet Patrick Kavanagh whom he first met in 1940. In 1946 he found Kavanagh a job on the Catholic magazine 'The Standard' but the poet remained chronically disorganised and the archbishop continued to assist him until his death in 1967. Patrick Kavanagh was a great religious poet but his long poem 'The Great Hunger' (1942) gave a very bleak view of Catholicism, and the ultra-orthodox prelate must have been well aware of this. Why he choose to disregard this uncomfortable fact is something of a mystery.
(However journalist Emmanuel Kehoe wrote of Kavanagh: "As a teenager I'd nourished a natural Irish anti-clericalism and anger at the sex-denying Catholic Church by reading his staggeringly powerful poem, The Great Hunger. Yet even this epic exercise in savage indignation did not lose Kavanagh the patronage of the Blackrock Borgia, the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. What this ostensibly austere Spiritan found to admire and support in the raggle-taggle character who sometimes sounded like a latter-day William Blake long puzzled me, except that McQuaid must have seen in him a deep and authentic Catholicism.")[9]
The following is an extract from 'Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography' by Antoinette Quinn (2001):
"Since the cancer operation, Dr McQuaid had maintained an interest in his protégé's welfare. When Kavanagh was still living in No 62 [Pembroke Road], the archbishop's chauffeur-driven Humber would draw up outside at Christmas time and the priest at the wheel would be sent to ring the doorbell and summon the poet. Kavanagh, who checked the identity of all callers to the front door in a car mirror he had rigged up for the purpose, would join His Grace in the car rather than let him see the state of his flat. On the first occasion he confided in the priest that the visit was inconvenient because he had a woman with him. When Dr McQuaid was told, he showed his sense of humour by responding, "Some good woman from the Legion of Mary, doubtless."
The Archbishop also played a role in the events that led to the composition of Kavanagh's poem "On Raglan Road".There was a curious (chaste!) triangular relationship involving Kavanagh, McQuaid and Hilda Moriarty, the lady whose rejection of the poet provided the theme of the song. [10]
[edit] Second Vatican Council
In 2007 Columba Press published "Hold Firm: John Charles McQuaid and the Second Vatican Council" by Francis Xavier Carty. The book focuses on how the legendary archbishop handled the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and its aftermath in his own diocese.
John Charles McQuaid will always be remembered for his attempt to reassure his flock at the end of the Council that "No change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives". How wrong he was. There was to be no more tranquillity in the Dublin diocese as priests and laity struggled to implement the new liturgical changes, to allow in the winds of change unloosed by Pope John XXIII, to reach out to non-Catholics with the new-fangled ecumenism and then endure the storm raised by the condemnation of artificial contraception in the encyclical Humanae Vitae issued by Pope Paul V1 in July 1968.
Dr McQuaid, whose watchwords were control and discipline, was ill-prepared for these turbulent years. Much in his traditional clerical formation rebelled against the new spirit of renewal, aggiornamento, emanating from the Council. He confided to a fellow conservative prelate, Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, that the Holy Faith nuns "will do anything to aid a parish priest. They are untouched by modern craze for aggiornamento". But Dr McQuaid was above all loyal to his Church and pope and in his own way introduced the necessary changes. They were "a new emphasis on old truths rather then new truths" he assured his priests and flock, divided between those who wanted to go faster and those who thought Vatican Two was a lot of hot air which would blow away and life would go on as before.
FX Carty tells the story of that decade, which opens with the Council and closes with the death of Dr McQuaid. His research has thrown new light on the approach of the archbishop to the challenges, especially in the communications field. A poor communicator himself, he inspired the setting up of the Radharc religious TV programme under Fr Joe Dunn and he appointed the first diocesan lay press officer, Osmond Dowling. The files of the press office describe Dowling's private purgatory as he tried to present and defend the strange world of a diocese ruled by a clerical autocrat.
Dr McQuaid's attendance at the Council sessions in Rome was dutiful but without much enthusiasm. He and his fellow bishops were unprepared for the excitement generated by the first session. Dr McQuaid for his part was unimpressed by the reporting of the Council by the Irish religious affairs correspondents. He told the Public Image Committee that "the criticism produced is quite ignorant, the reporting on the Council has been very bad". He told Fr Burke-Savage from Rome: "I am dismayed by the facile ignorance of the journalists who are writing about the documents that have cost us years of work, and by the more facile dictation in regard to what we bishops must now do".
The archbishop would sometimes joke about his "ogre" image in the media. Behind the aloofness was a sense of humour but also, surprisingly, a sense of insecurity as he grappled with unwelcome change. He was devastated when the obligatory offer to resign on his 75th birthday was accepted by Pope Paul, albeit with a year's extension. Carty writes, "He was possibly worried that the Pope's rapid acceptance of his resignation was a negative judgement on his work". [11]
Dr. McQuaid formally relinquished the government of the Archdiocese of Dublin when his successor was ordained Archbishop in February 1972.
[edit] Allegations of child abuse
In his biography of the Archbishop, John Cooney relates a number of stories that suggest that Dr. McQuaid had an unhealthy interest in children. The main allegation - that the Archbishop had attempted to sexually assault a boy in a Dublin pub - is based on an unpublished essay by McQuaid's bitter antagonist Noel Browne. No reputable historian or journalist supports these claims. Even reviewers who praised the book stated that the author should have left out these allegations (e.g. Dermot Keogh, Professor of History and John A. Murphy, Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork). [12]
There is a satirical account of the controversy by then Irish Times journalist Kevin Myers in his Irishman's Diary on 10th November 1999. [13] There is also an interesting account by Colum Kennny, Associate Professor of Communications at Dublin City University of a meeting he had with the Archbishop as a teenager in the 1960s. Although his attitude to Dr. McQuaid is hostile, he regards Cooney's allegations as absurd. He also provides this revealing vignette: "I remember the archbishop later sighing about the amount of correspondence he received from people. He waved a hand across the papers on his desk and muttered: They write to me about the system. What system? There are only people; or words to that effect."[14]
A Curious Sequel
In 1961 Archbishop McQuaid established a hostel in Dublin for boys who had been in industrial schools - mainly Artane - and assigned priests to see to their spiritual welfare and to help them integrate into society. In the mid 1960s, one of these priests was the young Diarmuid Martin who went on to become Archbishop of Dublin in 2004 and to take a strong line against alleged clerical abusers. On 20 June 2009, John Cooney wrote an article in the Irish Independent demanding to know why Martin had not denounced the alleged horrors of Artane 40 years previously! [15]
[edit] Death Comes for the Archbishop
On Saturday April 7, 1973 McQuaid was too ill to get up at his usual time of 6.30am to say Mass at his private residence in Killiney Co. Dublin. He was taken to Loughlinstown Hospital where he died within an hour. Shortly before his death he asked nurse Margaret O'Dowd if he had any chance of reaching heaven. She told him that if he as Archbishop could not get to heaven, few would. This answer appeared to satisfy him and he lay back on the pillow to await death. He died at about 11am. [16] He is buried in St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese.
| Preceded by Edward Joseph Byrne |
Archbishop of Dublin 1940–1972 |
Succeeded by Dermot J. Ryan |
[edit] References
- ^ "Archdiocese of Dublin" http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=600&Itemid=292
- ^ John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland by John Cooney, page 41
- ^ McMahon, Deirdre (Winter 1998). Noel Barber S.J.. ed. The Politician - A Reassessment. Studies. 87. pp. 349–350. 348.
- ^ http://www.dublindiocese.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=600&Itemid=292
- ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary%27s_Pro-Cathedral
- ^ "Towards a Biography of an Archbishop", Dermot Keogh, Studies 1998 http://www.studiesirishreview.ie/articles/1998/981201.htm
- ^ Dermot Keogh – Ireland and the Vatican. (1995)
- ^ Hold Firm: John Charles McQuaid and the Second Vatican Council, by Francis Xavier Carty, The Columba Press, 2007
- ^ Genius Among The Buckleppers, Sunday Business Post, 2 March 2003 http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/03/02/story958487144.asp
- ^ "The Poet, The Archbishop and 'On Raglan Road'" http://www.alliancesupport.org/news/archives/002112.html
- ^ Tradition and Turbulence, by Joe Carroll, Irish Times 26 January 2008 (Review of "Hold Firm" by FX Carty)http://news.myhome.ie/newspaper/weekend/2008/0126/1201073628204.html
- ^ "John Cooney and John Charles McQuaid (1) on http://www.alliancesupport.org/news/archives/001289.html
- ^ See article "Kevin Myers, John Cooney and John Charles McQuaid" http://www.alliancesupport.org/news/archives/001306.html
- ^ See article "My Hour Alone with John Charles McQuaid", Sunday Independent, 14 November 1999 http://www.alliancesupport.org/news/archives/001766.html
- ^ http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/why-did-good-guy-diarmuid-stay-so-silent-for-40-years-1781384.html
- ^ John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland by John Cooney, page 431/2
- Bernard J Canning – Bishops of Ireland 1870-1987, Ballyshannon [Ireland] : Donegal Democrat, 1987
- John Cooney: John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland, O'Brien Press, 2Rev Ed 2003, ISBN 0862788110
- Patrick J. Corish: The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey, Dublin : Gill and Macmillan, 1985
- Joe Dunn - "No Lions in the Hierarchy: an anthology of sorts", Dublin : Columba Press, 1994
- John Whyte – Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923-1979, Dublin : Gill and Macmillan ; Totowa, N.J. : Barnes & Noble Books, 2nd ed 1980
