unemployment. He even frowned on the work of Father John Hayes and the Muintir na Tire movement, because they operated as a Christian rather than as a purely Catholic body. McQuaid's sectarianism was highlighted in his boast in 1941 to a nun about how he had blocked a holiday camp for young people of all denominations run by Trinity College; and three years later he included in his Lenten Regulations the ban under pain of mortal sin on attendance by Catholics at Trinity College unless they had received permission from him. Although McQuaid insisted that he was merely applying a statute adopted by the Maynooth Synod in 1927, he reinvigorated the ban with a fanaticism that appalled de Valera - and swung that appalled de Valera - and swung de Valera's support to John D'Alton for the cardinal's red hat in 1953.
From his "soul-mate" correspondence with Finbarr Ryan O.P., the archbishop of Port-ofSpain in Trinidad, there is confirmation that McQuaid was not without his enemies at the Vatican from as early as 1947. "You have been in Rome. I hope your visits to the Pope and others gave you satisfaction, and that you were able to counter any hostile propaganda in high places." This opposition derived from McQuaid's exalted sense of his own office and the rows which he indulged in with the Apostolic Nunciature and other bishops over protocol disputes at services in the Pro-Cathedral.
Yet, despite all these personal defects, McQuaid's place in history would be relatively uncontroversial had he died before "the swinging 1960s" exploded the closed society that had existed since 1922. The artist Derek Hill, whose portrait of McQuaid in St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin captures his insecurity, concurs with the view that if McQuaid had lived in another period, he would rank as a truly great churchman. Certainly, had Pope John never summoned the Second Vatican Council, or if McQuaid had died in 1961, he would be rated as the outstanding prelate of 20th-century Ireland. The watershed date which divides McQuaid's reign into two distinct periods - of phenomenal success and tragic failure - was October 11th, 1962. "The bells of Your Grace's diocese are even now ringing out their prayerful peals in union with the sentiments of the absent Chief Pastor of Dublin," Monsignor John O'Regan wrote that day to McQuaid, who was in Rome for the Council's opening.
"The Press, Radio and Television coverage of events so far has been most impressive, but nothing to the scenes and events which are now such a part of Your Grace's life. We are all very proud that the diocese has such a very distinguished and worthy representative at this great Council and I know that your work in Rome will shed further lustre on the great achievements of Your Grace for the Church and for this diocese."
This masterpiece of sycophancy by O'Regan, the diocesan chancellor, indicates the expectation that McQuaid would dazzle the Council Fathers with his mastery of Virgilian Latin, his profound grasp of the theology of St Thomas Aquinas and his diplomatic skills in compiling church documents. McQuaid wanted condemnations of the errors of the modern world such as evolution, polygamy, existentialism, situation ethics, socialism and communism. By the closure of the Council in 1965 McQuaid had become internationally notorious as an ecclesiastical Canute, unable to cope with changes accepting the spirit of the times and the Christian credentials of Protestantism. By 1970 he appeared in Donald S. Connery's book, The Irish, as the foremost symbol of the Irish church's behind-the-times character. An embarrassed Vatican secured his resignation in 1972 and his successor Dermot Ryan hastened McQuaid's death by the worry he caused him on account of claims in newspapers of presiding over the mismanagement of the archdiocese's finances.
Twenty-five years later, McQuaid remains the most significant churchman of 20th-century Ireland. At the height of his power, he personified the authoritarian triumphalism of Irish Catholicism. His fall came about because of his disastrous pastoral failure to adapt to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The Irish Catholic church today is paying a heavy price for the McQuaid legacy.
A biography of McQuaid by John Cooney will be published in the autumn
On Monday: John Cooney on Archbishop McQuaid, Dr Noel Browne and the Mother and Child Scheme