Catholic strongman who was finally laid low by the sexual revolution

ONE of the ironies of the career of John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin from 1940 until 1972, and the towering figure of 20th century Irish Catholicism, was that for someone who had such presence and domination, he was a poor communicator.

As Francis Xavier Carty points out in his new book — Hold Firm: John Charles McQuaid and the Second Vatican Council — one of the main challenges thrown down by the council was in the field of communications and the requirement that the “public image” of priests and the church be tackled though such initiatives as the appointment of press officers.

Carty observes that McQuaid, probably through gritted teeth, established a secret all-priests Public Image Committee at the end of 1963.

The committee certainly did not pull any punches and reported that McQuaid’s public image was “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 pastoral language that is remote from the lives of the people”.

McQuaid, of course, was not remotely keen on Vatican II reforms and Carty has correctly identified his insecurity as he grappled with change and the new combative questioning from journalists. McQuaid wanted historians rather than contemporary journalists to assess him.

On more than one occasion he reminded those seeking to interview him that there would be plenty of time after his death to put him into focus, and that his archive would contain many surprises. I buried myself in it for a few months last year to try and make sense of how he coped with the 1960s and discovered that his insecurity was actually very pronounced.

Vatican II was only one of the challenges that made him vulnerable and often angry and, for some, confirmed the stereotype of him as prehistoric and an enforcer of what today is often depicted as a suffocating, repressive and authoritarian church by those who began to experience intellectual disenchantment in the 1960s with ‘traditional’ Ireland.

Novelist John Banville summed this attitude up well when he wrote in 1995 of an Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s that was “a demilitarised totalitarian state in which the lives of its citizens were to be controlled not by a system of coercive force and secret policing, but by a kind of applied spiritual paralysis maintained by an unofficial federation between the Catholic clergy, the judiciary, the civil service and politicians”.

In contrast, historian Deirdre McMahon, in a perceptive overview of McQuaid’s time as archbishop published in 2000, warned against the “crude caricatures of hidebound Catholic reaction with which McQuaid has become identified since his death in 1973”. As McMahon points out, many benefited from his welfare and educational initiatives and his public and private charity, and she argued his life and career “cannot be understood without encompassing this context of change in the life of his church and his country”.

Those changes were about more than Vatican II. Arguably, it was on the issue of sex that McQuaid was finally defeated in the 1960s. It is possible, by delving deep into his archive, to get a sense of an archbishop and a church under siege, particularly from women, as theological and legal arguments that supplanted the personal testimony of women with regard to contraception were critically challenged. Television, new perspectives on marriage, publications with a sexual content, and the fact that the church was being more closely scrutinised than ever before, also contributed to McQuaid’s frustration.

His siege mentality was summed up in McQuaid’s exasperated response to a particular query from the media in March 1970. He wrote to Oscar (Ossie) Dowling, his faithful and often fawning press secretary: “I am very tired of RTÉ’s attention to bishops and priests. I do not understand why they do not pay attention to the army, the law, medicine and especially journalism — all fruitful fields for investigators. They are not anxious to promote the Kingdom of God”.

Herein lay the weakness of McQuaid in face of the changes of the 1960s — he was still refusing to grasp or accept the fact that sex sold and one of the reasons why so many journalists wanted to ask so many questions was because the church (and McQuaid) were struggling with sexual issues, if not delusional about them.

In April 1965, for example, journalist Tim Pat Coogan requested replies from McQuaid to a questionnaire he had asked him to fill in for a forthcoming book.

McQuaid wrote to Dowling: “I shall not meet Mr Coogan; the questions are impertinent intrusions with my personal life or tendentious misrepresentations in several cases. Only yesterday the bishops warned me that this man is going to write a flaming book of criticism”.

Nonetheless, McQuaid did draft replies to the questions (which were never sent to Coogan), including the boldest one which read: “Is it fair to say that the Irish church is obsessed with sex and fails to concern itself sufficiently with things like poverty, lack of equal educational opportunity for all, the level of widows’ and orphans’ pensions?”

McQuaid’s reply was as follows: “No. There is probably a saner attitude to sex in this country than almost anywhere else. Family life is stable, women are respected and vocations are esteemed”.

COOGAN and others were well aware, of course, that this was a complete fallacy, and the myth that the Irish were the most sexually pure race on earth was beginning to wear thin.

McQuaid was aware of this too, but there was little he could do to stop it. One woman wrote to him to complain that “the Late Late Show has developed into a sex orgy. The fact is that you have all fallen down on your job and raising a family in a Christian atmosphere is an impossibility … we are no better than all the other countries of the world. No longer Christian, just masquerading under the name. Over to you”.

In response, McQuaid suggested viewers had to publicly protest as television was “sensitive to public criticism”, and he added, “I have my own way of reaching these offenders”.

But the truth was that he did not have as much power as he claimed. As director general of RTÉ, Kevin McCourt admitted to McQuaid in February 1966: “Not infrequently, to my frustration, I cannot be the policeman of all I want”.

Neither could McQuaid.

A few years later, he was informed that a group of activists in the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) were planning to protest about church teaching on contraception at the laying and blessing of the foundation stone for a new church in his diocese.

McQuaid’s defiant response was “let them all come”, but the fact that the women were prepared to confront him publicly was yet another sign that his domination and unquestioned obedience to his church’s teaching was coming to an end. To a large extent, McQuaid’s Ireland was dead and buried before he vacated his post.