The lifetime of Monsignor Feichin O'Doherty, who has died aged 80, coincided almost exactly with the lifetime of the Irish State. Feichin's parents worked for de Valera in America, and Feichin first attended school in Philadelphia. Later, at Colaiste Mhuire, Feichin became bilingual in Irish and English. All his life he was a lover of languages, with a particular fondness for Italian.
As a seminarian and a young priest of the Dublin diocese, Feichin studied in Dublin, Rome and Cambridge. His fields were philosophy and psychology.
At the core of his working life were the professorships he held at UCD over 40 years. He published many books, was chaplain to a convent, and was available as friend and adviser to countless individuals. He undertook groundbreaking projects, often with an ecumenical dimension, in which his world-class qualifications as a psychologist were brought to bear on social issues. Feichin put together an important collection, now in UCD, of religious paintings by Irish artists. A number of UCD colleagues were closely involved with Feichin in all this work.
Feichin attached extreme importance to fidelity to church and bishop. In the same spirit, he did not seek recognition for himself in the many fields in which he was active. Aristotle and Aquinas, Montaigne and Dante were familiar friends, but Feichin's writing was focused and direct. In pastoral work he gave informed and practical advice and kept a sense of proportion. God did not want to see happiness denied; He wanted you back on the playing field.
All his life, Feichin remained close to his many relatives - including, of course, his elder brother Kevin, who survives him. Feichin loved nothing better than time off in Rome with two fellow priests of the diocese, Con and Jack, whom he had known since Clonliffe. They favoured a trattoria called I Tre Amici - named after themselves - and would look forward to lunch there after a late morning Mass, and to talking in the sun. They looked forward more to this than to visiting basilicas or to repeat attendances at papal audiences. In such company Feichin loved short sayings in Latin that said things not often said (or understood) in modern tongues: fides quaerens intellectum, digitus dei, nemo ad impossibile tenetur.
When the time came to retire, Feichin retired, to a small flat near UCD. He kept not many books - and more of P.G. Wodehouse than of the great philosophers. At the end of his life, he recalled a conversation he had had in the 1940s with a young girl in hospital. The girl had been blind from birth. "God," she said, "is a wheel spinning, and I can touch the wheel with my finger."
Feichin was a man of personal warmth, artistic sensibility, and a great gift for original thought, who persevered on the straight path of the life he had chosen. Of his reasons he spoke little. When Feichin did speak of faith, he hinted at a personal response or judgment perhaps inevitable at the beginning, perhaps difficult over time. It was an area in which Feichin allowed neither argument nor emotion to have the final world. He would mention "the promise we have been given."
Feichin would not want elegies at his passing. He would want us, in the silence death imposes, to reflect on that promise. Ni h-e bas ach ath-fhas.
P.McD.