A marriage for life

During the six years Cardinal Cahal Daly led the Irish Catholic Church, his fellow-bishops claimed not to know him very well. Several used to remark on his nickname in Belfast - E.T. - with its connotations of otherworldliness and benevolent wizardry.

Many of the keys to understanding the most important Irish churchman of the late 20th century lie in his childhood. He devotes a large part of the autobiographical section of Steps On My Pilgrim Journey - his just-published book of "memories and reflections" - to his early life in Loughguile, Co Antrim. In an otherwise unsurprising compilation of thoughts and homilies, this is by far the most revealing section.

In almost poetic language Cardinal Daly recalls a rugged but often idyllic upbringing in a close rural Catholic community during the inter-war years. This is a northern transposition of Alice Taylor's west Cork to one of Ireland's loveliest but least-known areas, the country between the Glens of Antrim and the lush lowlands of the Bann and Main valleys.

However it was a life different from that of comparable communities in the rest of Ireland in one vital respect: the proximity of large numbers of Protestants. Here is the first key to what makes Cahal Daly different. His childhood and youth were full of Presbyterian friends and neighbours. Ironically, his earliest memory is of being being burned out of the family home - which shared a building with quarters commandeered by the Auxiliaries - in an IRA attack. But the sectarian strife which was a feature of life in Belfast in the 1920s was largely absent from north Antrim.

Indeed, much of what Cardinal Daly writes about the lifestyle and attitudes in that long-ago village could easily have been written by a God-fearing Presbyterian: the shame and stigma attached to being in debt; the deeply-ingrained "waste not, want not" philosophy; the careful husbandry of the land; the strict moral code.

The cardinal, without adducing much evidence, believes that despite the ravages of materialism and the communications revolution, Irish rural culture can preserve many of those "core values".

The second key to understanding both the man and the church leader is his deep piety. This came from both his parents, but particularly from his mother. "Her life, for as long as I can remember, revolved around the Mass." She fasted for two days a week, and when she could not manage to do the stations of the cross in daylight hours when the church was open, she would walk around it in the dark outside.

From his father, he learned how to explain and defend Catholicism in argument, a lesson that would later make him a powerful apologist for a conservative church in a fast-changing, increasingly irreligious world. The Daly household was a deeply devout and prayer-filled one. "There was a real liturgy of the home, with prayers at the bedside night and morning, the sign of the cross with holy water on leaving and entering the house, prayers at the beginning of every journey and the rosary during it, and, naturally, prayers before and after meals."

Given such a background, it is not surprising that Cardinal Daly cannot remember a time when he did not think of becoming a priest. It was also clear from an early age that he would become an intellectual, a classicist, and a lover of words. There can be few 80-year-olds who can recall the "small boy's thrill" at receiving a teacher's praise for being the first in the class to use the genitive absolute in Greek!

Another key to Cardinal Daly's character is his ascetism, not an admired attribute in this indulgent age. The temptations of sexual love appear not even to have occurred to him. At Maynooth in the austere 1930s, a place he remembers fondly, he notes that the spiritual training of the time "gave a special importance to mortification".

He wonders whether "the ascetic dimension of spirituality may not be due for revival". He suggests that most of what priests preach lacks credibility "unless the Cross of Christ is somehow reflected in our lifestyle, in the form of a certain restraint and simplicity, a disregard for personal wealth and worldliness, and an avoidance of love of power or misuse of authority." One of the men who made a huge impression on the young Cahal Daly was his headmaster at St Malachy's College in Belfast, Father James Hendley. His description of Hendley almost serves as an auto-portrait: a strict disciplinarian, personally austere, fair and impartial, practising what he preached, with an ascetic personal life and a deep piety - "in time, we came to appreciate the kind and compassionate heart which beat beneath the somewhat rugged exterior".

Cardinal Daly's most exciting period of intellectual formation was his time as a young academic on sabbatical leave in France in the 1950s. Here he discovered the existentialism of Sartre and Camus; sat and read in Paris's Left Bank cafes; mixed with leaders of the radical worker-priest movement; and attended lectures by the spokesmen of post-war French Catholic renewal, de Lubac, Congar and Danielou, then under suspicion from a reactionary Roman Curia.

He himself never became too radicalised. He emphasises the "love and fidelity to the church" of these erstwhile rebels - all of whom were to become post-Vatican Two cardinals - which he calls "a silent rebuke to the bitterness" of some contemporary radical theologians.

Many of the arguments which he would later use in his defence of the Catholic Church in the secularising, scandal-ridden Ireland of the 1990s he learned from Catholic theologians coming to terms with the upheavals of post-war French society. One of these was to emphasise the need for the church to return to its untarnished roots in the first centuries after Christ, so it could learn the lessons of how Christians can evangelise a surrounding pagan culture - then of Greece and Rome, now of an indifferent "post-modern" Western world. However when he comes to write about the 1990s, the cardinal has disappointingly little to say about the decline in Irish church-going and vocations, and the impact of the clerical sex abuse and other church scandals. Quite correctly, he says that the main causes of alienation from the church are deeper than the scandals, and gives a long, albeit unanalysed, list: economic prosperity, population mobility, materialism and consumerism, family instability, a breakdown in sexual and public morality, the undermining of the absolute values of religion by relativism, the anti-authority attitudes of young people, and the growth in influence of the secular media.

But in the Irish context, while warning against complacency, he cites 1998 poll findings which show that 72 per cent of Catholics still rate the work of their priests as good, and 63 per cent say the scandals have not affected their confidence in priests or bishops. "In spite of everything," he says, "Ireland remains an outstandingly religious country."

ON the scandals, he has little to offer. He admits to sharing the "general sense of bewilderment" when he heard about Bishop Eamonn Casey's resignation and flight only two days before it was publicly announced. He has nothing to add to what he has previously said about the rash of clerical child sex abuse cases, and his thoughts on the Father Brendan Smyth case are a repeat of an earlier statement absolving himself of any blame.

There is little indication that he has realised, even at this late stage, what a cataclysmic effect this deeply shocking abuse of trust by some priests had on so many people's faith. More surprising is the lack of any account of how personally shocking the whole episode must have been to him, coming as it did only a few weeks after his long years of work as an outspoken advocate of non-violence in Northern Ireland appeared finally to be bearing fruit with the first IRA ceasefire.

It is hardly surprising that a leader like Cardinal Daly, after a lifetime of loyal service to six Popes, should not be able to stand back and look at Rome and Armagh's shortcomings with a dispassionate and critical eye. He may say that his life has often been a struggle for faith. But there is little evidence of any significant late 20th-century doubt in these pages.

Cathal Daly is one of those fortunate men - rare in these sceptical times - who has had a lifelong, loving and largely unquestioning marriage to the Catholic Church. He has never been afraid to engage with, and challenge, the modern world on its behalf, but he does it from that position of enormous confidence and certainty.

"Prophets today are not what they used to be," he quotes one post-Vatican Two cardinal as saying. "In the old days they had a deep sense of the church and a deeply rooted faith." He certainly has both.

Steps on My Pilgrim Journey, by Cardinal Cahal Daly, is published today by Veritas at £24.99