DEATH COMES FOR A CARDINAL

...Atlhough he constantly spoke out against violence, he gradually lost credibility because his Church ap27 May 1977:326 peared more and more entrenched...

...Nor did the Mulrany renewal of the Church meetings bring the expected positive returns...

...It willbe left to historians to show that many Vatican, World Council of Churches, national and local efforts for peace and reconciliation were full of prospect until they were put in the Cardinal's waste-paper bag...

...JOHN COONEY (John Cooney o] the Irish Times, now stationed in Brussels, was until recently Commonweal's regular correspondent in Ireland...

...The Cardinal's awareness, however, of the need for the Church to assist the Third World was seen in his support of Trocaire, one of the most respected development agencies in the world...

...He was more open-minded than contemporaries of the Irish tradition such as Cardinal Heenan in England, Cardinal Gray in Scotland or Cardinal Spellman in the United States...

...At his home in Armagh he kept a notebook account of murders---and was much depressed by the growing volume of annotations in that book...

...This unwillingness to accept the religious element in the situation prevented him from fully cooperating with the Protestant Churches...

...Yet his attachment to the traditional system of church governance and to its devotional values, particularly the Rosary...

...In Northern Ireland he refused to accept that the Churches as institutions in society had contributed to the terrible social malaise that erupted in the violence which still persists there today...

...Faced with widespread public criticism of the role of the Churches, he did agree in 1973 to co-chair the historic Dundalk meetings of Catholic and Protestant churchmen, Accustomed to "authority," rather than "dialogue," he struggled hard to adjust to the new situation...

...In private too, he was always affable and splendid company...

...Yet such a document showed the extent of the gulf between both the young and the middle-aged in Ireland...

...This populism--the identification with the simple faithful--went side by side with his role as custodian of the Church's tradition...

...While he was not the worst exponent of ghetto Catholicism (Bishop Philbin in Belfast assumed that role with great earnestness) he was of that kind...

...Administratively, he leaves the Irish Church in a much more organized state than when he took over the chairmanship of meetings at Maynooth...

...However, at a time when Catholics and Protestants were being shot on the basis of denominational identity in the North and when a more educated generation emerged in the Republic, it was insufficient to reiterate the old pietistic slogans as if they were immutable formulae...

...The new questioning mood--promoted by the prosperity of the sixties and the early seventies--was summed up for him in the phrases "secularization" and "pluralism...

...Despite this mellowing, the Cardinal remained attached to the priorities of a faith which was hallowed in the canonization of Blessed Oliver Plunkett in Rome in October 1975...

...He could never understand the nature of unbelief and felt that "liberal" Catholics were less believing than a Camus...

...I t was not so much a failure on his part of nerve, but of understanding...

...In show biz terms, Dick and Dave have taken their eleven-o'clock-number and used it as the curtain raiser...

...Although he lost no sleep over the deletion from the Republic's Constitution of the Catholic Church's "special position," he used his energy vigorously to bolster up the traditional Catholic way of life in Ireland...

...The legacy of the Conway era could be the loss by the Irish Church of young people, particularly women...

...In his objective of controlling the pace of change, Cardinal Conway emerged as an archetypal prelate: after Pope Paul's Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1967 on birth control it became clear that the occupant of the Petrine See was endeavoring to contain as much as possible of the new tendencies emanating from the Council...

...After several key speakers--including members of the Canadian hierarchymin support of the ordination of women had pitched in for change, Cardinal Conway delivered what was to be the decisive speech when he warned that the admission of married clergy would change the whole structure of the Church: he saw-as did the majority of his colleagues--that a married clergy was the thin-end of the wedge that would end the system of celibate male dominance...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 IRISH PRDL~'I~ DEH TH COllIES FOR H CHRDINH It was the misfortune of Cardinal William Conway to preside over the Irish Catholic Church at one of its most transitional and turbulent periods in history...

...was a source of comfort to more hard-pressed administrators of the Church in Boston, in Glasgow, in Melbourne...

...In presenting--in my view---such a false view of the Northern crisis, Cardinal Conway failed to communicate to his churchmen the full sectarian dimension of the challenge that beset Christianity in the twentieth century...

...At one point, he got up into the passageway and ta!ked personally, at length to every passenger on the plane, particularly the sick...

...Commonweal: $27...

...Consequently, he could not appreciate the importance of giving up church privilege and of approving mixed marriages and integrated schooling...

...It got people into the theater, all right, but the house is going to seem mighty bleak about eleven o'clock...

...In remaining loyal to the tradition into which he was born, Cardinal Conway was no different from most mif not all--leaders of the Irish Catholic colonial world...

...Although the Cardinal perceptively recognized that the age of the Rolling Stones and Rory Gallagher was in search of meaningful values, he could not see why that same generation found the Church irrelevant and boring...

...His many undoubted abilities suited him for the traditional style of church leadershp that was fast becoming outmoded...

...But the old habits were too strong: he could not compromise on issues such as mixed marriage or the schools...

...Anyone who came into contact with him knew of his anxiety about the most recent killings...

...In this sense, he was in the mold of the CuUen era: his successor will have to guide the Irish Church more firmly in the direction towards Vatican HI...

...It marked the launching of a defensive by the bishops against what they viewed as the growing laxity of Irish moral standards, particularly among the young...

...He could not properly understand the importance for the Church to accept a pluralistic society so that he remained intransigent against the legalization of contraceptives, divorce and was utterly opposed to the integration of schools...

...and this lies at the roots of the appalling failure of the Irish Churches in the face of the sectarianism of the North...

...Yet, this virtue was the key to the man's weakness...

...I remember being in Rome as the correspondent of the Glasgow Herald in 1971 when there were still hopes that the liberal wing of bishops and theologians could get acceptance of married priests...

...confessionalism in the Republic...

...Being caught in this period of change caused the Cardinal deep pain and sorrow...

...Given the unprecedented crisis in the priesthood with massive departures, particularly in the United States, and with the awarehess of the acute shortage of clergy in the developing world, the arguments for change appeared convincing...

...Why should politicians bear all the blame when unelected representatives of the Catholic population would not budge from a privileged position in society...

...It was an attempt to pre-empt the politicians from going ahead with plans to legalize contraception or divorce...

...The other occasion was on an air-flight to Rome via Lourdes...

...In particular, he did not come to terms with two of the main challenges to the Irish Catholic Church: that of sectarianism in the North...

...Two incidents sum up the personality of the man for me: at Mulrany in County Mayo we had lunch in the local hotel at which he spent the whole time discussing the existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus...

...His other major failure stemmed from his lack of sympathy--and understanding--for the new generation of educated Irish Catholics---a generation which based its self-understanding of Catholicism on reflection rather than on the inherited utterance of bishops...

...Liturgically, there has been a revolution--but it is ceremonial change that has a~ected the life of the clergy rather than involved the participation of the people...

...Whether the Irish Church can produce that type of leadership--skeptically--remains to be seen...

...He was essentially of the devotional era of Catholicism, and although he adapted more easily than many prelates to the new order of Vatican 1I, he failed to absorb the spirit of the post-Vatican II age...

...Yet in Rome at the Synod of Bishops in 1974, he continued to tell his fellow-bishops that the conflict in the North had nothing to do with religion...

...He was unwilling to accept that the Churches were as guilty as the Unionists in living in a closed world...

...This was seen in the four-part pastoral letter on "Human Life is Sacred," in 1975---a publication which used the modern techniques of the media .to sell the oldstyle Catholic morality...

...He had the knack of replying with a question--a technique that often side-stepped the journalist...

...Like other heads of national hierarchies the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh was sensitive to the mood of the Vatican, and was an influential figure in the movement to counteract the more dynamic features of the Council by adopting a watered-down but official view of the nature of the Council teaching...

...It was a side of the man where the pastoral instinct was most developed...

...While Ireland--until a few years ago--escaped much of the internal conflict that beset most national Churches, this was largely due to the slowness of the hierarchy to inform the people as to the nature of the new thinking aimed at ending centuries of intellectual stupor in Catholic circles...

...Sadly, he took fll at a time when he had begun to shift--however slowly--from his previous hard-line positions...

...Above all, there was the opening provided by Rome in the form of Vatican II---an opening that led to a divided Church...

...Anyone who sat opposite him at news conferences---as I did for four years---could not help but admire him...

...The cultural scene in Ireland had changed so radically that new responses from the Church were required...

...To many traditional-minded Catholics, these stances were strengths, not weaknesses...

...I don't think the upcoming installments will be as good as the opener, which indeed was originally scheduled as the closer...