Philosopher archbishop of conservative bent is to get a red hat

In his poem No Second Troy, W.B. Yeats said of Maud Gonne that she was of "a kind/ That's not natural in an age like this/ Being high and solitary and most stern". He might have been writing about Archbishop Connell, who receives his cardinal's red hat from the Pope next Wednesday, as it is how he is widely perceived.

That impression does not do him full justice, but it has enough of the truth not to be a distortion. His is a cerebral world, where concepts are realities. He is a man who apparently, and like Plato - to quote Yeats again - sees nature as "but a spume that plays/ Upon a ghostly paradigm of things".

In person he can be charming, kind, gentle, humorous, always intelligent, while not being beyond wagging a finger or two in angry qualification at an errant - possibly - journalist.

He is of a different world, one almost gone. It remains a formal place of clear-cut structure and exact behaviour, where courtesy and deference are common currency. It is a stable world built on the certainties of God, nationality, religion. It is also mainly a drawing-room world, away from the madding crowd and its ignoble strife.

Not that Dr Connell would find the crowd madding or its strife for the necessities ignoble. One of his most basic and strongly-held convictions is his belief in the dignity of the human person. It is what has allowed this most conservative of men proclaim himself a socialist where housing is concerned. It is what allowed him to lead the way on the refugee issue and why, again and again, he has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the poor, the old, and the sick.

Unlike most of his colleagues on the Irish Bishops' Conference he is a Dub, and a true blue northside Dub at that. He is exceptional in another way too, as one of the very few Irish bishops from an urban, middle-class background.

Born in Phibsboro on March 24th 1926, his father John was the son of an RIC sergeant from Moycullen, Co Galway, while his mother Maise was from Dublin. She was working in the GPO when the Rising began in 1916, and was shepherded to safety by the O'Rahilly.

John Connell was a civil servant in the Department of Industry and Commerce, where he became a close friend of the minister, Sean Lemass, who appointed him managing director of Bord Siucre Eireann.

John Connell ran a religious household. "Very much so," Dr Connell has recalled, "we had the family rosary, the little objects of piety." And his parents abhorred irreverence.

Connell snr died in 1939 from an infected ulcer, and the family of three boys moved with their mother to Ballymun Road. There was no Civil Service pension then. "It was tough, very tough," Dr Connell has said, "but it coincided with the war, when everybody was suffering hard times."

He attended Belvedere College before going to Clonliffe, and was ordained in 1951. For six months afterwards he served as a chaplain at the Mater Hospital in Dublin - this was to be the totality of his pastoral experience.

From there he went to Louvain and secured a doctorate in philosophy before joining the philosophy department at UCD in 1953. He was dean there in 1988 when it was announced he was to be made Archbishop of Dublin.

His theological conservatism and lack of pastoral experience were the focus of comment by people suspicious of the appointment of a philosopher-archbishop. One parish priest said at the time that Dr Connell had "not a clue about life at the coalface and lived in a world of Kant and the older philosophers". To which criticisms Dr Connell replied that he had lived "not exactly in a teapot".

He has also denied being hostile to modern thinking, while pointing out that since the time of Descartes, philosophy has seen man as the measure of all things. "I have always seen reality as very much richer than can be measured by human thinking," he said. In his belief, true reality is complete only in the perception of the divine, while man's perception is just partial.

Former pupils - "who included half the country's stand-up comedians such as Dermot Morgan", as one put it - invariably speak of him with personal affection, while having mixed views about his beliefs, to which some are openly hostile.

Others are among his strongest supporters, including one former pupil who said he was "a quiet, long-suffering man" who was "trying to live a theology of obedience, poverty, and chastity . . . in a time of frantic change".

He said that in the Ireland.dot.com of today Dr Connell was keeping people in touch with the old Graeco-Roman world and what was worth saving in it. "The sage will always be found walking behind humanity picking up the great things it has discarded," he said, paraphrasing an old adage.

But while Dr Connell has his supporters, he has his opponents too. Many of his priests and laity greeted news of his elevation to the College of Cardinals with less than enthusiasm, believing it may mean he will stay on in his current role for years to come.

They had hoped his resignation would be accepted by Rome when he is 75 next month. These people believe his tenure has been disastrous, alienating so many people and damaging relations with the other churches.

Dr Connell's handling of the Ivan Payne loan; his reaction to the President, Mrs McAleese, taking communion in Christ Church; his description of a Roman Catholic doing so as a "sham"; his saying children whose parents used artificial contraception were less loved; his enthusiastic endorsement of Dominus Iesus, a Vatican document many Protestants and people of the non-Christian faiths find deeply offensive: all these stands have driven many Irish Catholics to despair. And from there to indifference.

But his stance on such issues, as well as on women priests, divorce, contraception, homosexuality, and so on, plus his work on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and its Congregation of Bishops, have deeply impressed the Vatican.

So it's payback time. A great honour is to be bestowed on Dr Connell next Wednesday. It is an honour he did not expect and which, on a personal level, seems to have overwhelmed him somewhat.