A career of duty, marred by controversy

Desmond Connell never sought an easy life, reports Caroline O'Doherty.

IT is hard to know if it is a sign of love or hate when the boss keeps you on three years past retirement age. At least Cardinal Desmond Connell will have more time to consider that conundrum now that he has belatedly handed responsibility for running the Archdiocese of Dublin on to his successor.

Up until yesterday, his schedule did not allow for such frivolous musings. Even for such a notoriously early riser, his day had few free moments. The time he didn't spend as administrative and spiritual director of a one-million strong congregation, or wasn't taken up trying to extricate himself and his archdiocese from child abuse controversies, was given over to intense periods of prayer, reading and contemplation.

Strolls in the grounds of the Archbishop's Palace, visits to close family and listening to recordings of his favourite operas were the few indulgences he allowed to interfere with his duty-driven routine.

Now free of much of those duties, he will have to spend some time adjusting to a new life. There are the practical considerations of moving out of his home and headquarters of 16 years to a new house in the diocese for a start.

It is not yet clear whether he wishes to reside alone or will request assistants; whether he will maintain his involvement in the many diocesan organisations in which he has been active or how he will fulfil his continued duties as a cardinal.

Since offering his resignation to the Pope three years ago at the age of 75, as church regulations require, he has been in a kind of pre-retirement purgatory, unable either to withdraw from the job in hand or plan with any precision for the future until the word came that he was free to go.

But he will have known that the clock was ticking loudly. His 78th birthday came and went in March and the first anniversary of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin's appointment as coadjutor was looming.

Pope John Paul II was aware of the timing too and the announcement yesterday that he was at last accepting Cardinal Connell's resignation came just days ahead of the May 2 date commentators were tipping. So, mentally at the very least, he will have been packing his bag.

Were he to look back on his career by writing his memoirs, the resulting manuscript would be notable for its chronological imbalance. If it followed the cardinal's story faithfully, most of the chapters would be taken up with the last 16, or even the last dozen, years of his service to the Roman Catholic Church.

Before he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1988, he led a worthy, interesting, but unremarkable life, as a lecturer in philosophy and metaphysics at University College Dublin.

His appointment to the Archdiocese was as much a shock to him as it was to be for his successor.

But if he found the job an uncomfortable honour, he didn't seek to make it fit any better by taking the easy way out and just going through the motions until his time was up.

In 1992, he departed from the Church's tradition of neutrality on public plebiscites and told Catholics how to vote in that year's abortion referendum.

Three years later he embarked on the dogged defence of the diocese against child abuse allegations that was to become the hallmark and, many would say, biggest mistake of his term in office.

He insisted no diocesan funds had ever been used to make secret compensation payments to sex abuse victims only to hear the courageous Andrew Madden tell the world how he had been paid £30,000 for his suffering at the hands of the paedophile priest Ivan Payne.

He would spend the next nine years struggling, and often failing, to take the right approach to the problem of paedophile priests. The archbishop eventually reached the point of apologising openly and often but never quite unconditionally.

Throughout this difficult and damaging period, Cardinal Connell would also make life harder for himself by insensitive although theologically sound criticisms of contraception, IVF and Bertie Ahern's relationship with Celia Larkin.

He also became embroiled in a series of ecumenical rows, criticising Mary McAleese for receiving communion at a Protestant service, declining an offer to share St Patrick's Cathedral with the Church of Ireland and suggesting that his then C of I counterpart, Archbishop Walton Empey was intellectually his inferior. He later apologised for those remarks.

The past year has been one of the quieter spells of his tenure, though he has tackled the Government about its commitment to alleviating poverty and has intervened in the debate on embryonic stem cell research.

The former was the kind of issue he would have liked to have concentrated much more on during his time in the palace. The latter makes for the kind of complex philosophical debate he would love to engage politicians, church-goers and the public at large in if only everyone else shared his firm convictions.

The Cardinal's retirement presents possibilities for him to become the voice for the marginalised and the brains interpreting the Church's teachings that he wanted to be all along.

He just has to sort out the removal vans and a few farewell parties first.