Father Enda McDonagh was professor of moral theology at Maynooth for 40 years until his retirement. During all that time he represented liberal, progressive views on theological and moral issues, invariably at odds with his employers, the Irish Catholic Hierarchy.

That he could take positions on contraception, on tolerance towards gays and lesbians and on human rights generally, and emerge unscathed, challenges the assumption that, throughout the 1950s, 1960s and onwards, the Irish Catholic Church was intolerant, unwilling to permit dissent, unwilling to countenance challenge to its own authority.

He was born in 1930 and reared in Bacon, a small village in Mayo. He went to the local national school and then to St Jarlath's College in Tuam. He went to Maynooth, where he was ordained a priest. He was professor of moral theology from 1958 to 1995.

He is chairman of the governing body of University College, Cork. He is formerly president of the National Conference of Priests in Ireland. He has written more than 20 books and is currently working on a book provisionally entitled The Risk of God.

With two other priests, he started a magazine some years ago, Ceide, which has published commentaries on politics, current affairs and religious subjects, but has struggled commercially.

This interview was done in his apartment at Maynooth College. It is a small bachelor flat: a bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen and an annex, which is part of the adjoining corridor. It was donated to him by a former president of Maynooth, Jeremiah Newman, to house his extensive library.

There are photographs of his father and mother and of friends around his chaotic living room. The most prominent of these photographs - because it is placed on the television set - is that of Joan FitzGerald, the late wife of Garret FitzGerald, who is among his closest friends.

VB: Why did you become a priest?

EMcD: When I was growing up in Mayo, I suppose I was one of these relatively idealistic people who thought I ought to do something about society and came to think that the way to do it was through the priesthood. I came to Maynooth after secondary school and did a science degree, which I found very stimulating. I went on to do theology, which, I suppose, confirmed the decision to become a priest. My intention was to get involved in pastoral work rather than in intellectual work, but after my ordination my bishop asked me to continue with theology.

VB: How did you end up as professor of moral theology here in Maynooth?

EMcD: I did a doctorate in theology and got a year off to do philosophy. Then the chair of moral theology became vacant when the late Cardinal William Conway was appointed auxiliary Bishop of Armagh in 1958. My bishop asked me to apply for the position. I did and I was appointed. At the time it was a joint chair in moral theology and canon law, so I was sent off to do a doctorate in canon law. I spent the year in Rome and thought that I would like to go to pastures new, and I went to the canon law faculty at the State University of Munich and there I did a dissertation on church/state relations.

I didn't really feel drawn to the kind of moral theology that was being taught at the time. Anyway, I was pushed into teaching it and decided that one of the best things I could do was to try to change it. I did try to do that. I gave a lecture at a summer school on "Moral Theology Renewed" which dealt with the limitations of the moral theology tradition which I inherited. This was accurately reported in the Irish Independent and it elicited a very strong reply from Michael Browne, then bishop of Galway and former professor of moral Theology here.

That created a bit of a stir in the Irish church at the time. I myself thought it a good thing that the bishop would write to the newspaper rather than try to otherwise discipline me. So I replied very courteously, maintaining my position, and to some extent I was a marked man from the early 1960s on.

VB: What was the issue between yourself and Bishop Browne?

EMcD: I maintained that moral theology, as it had been taught over the past decades, was really a combination of canon law and a rather limited scholastic ethics. I said there was no real theology in it.

VB: What is moral theology anyway? What is the difference between it and moral philosophy?

EMcD: Moral philosophy is a very important component of moral theology, but theology in the end is related to the question of God and to the moral insights of the Bible, especially the New Testament. That appeared to have disappeared from what we call the manuals or textbooks of moral theology. It has been replaced by chunks of canon law.

VB: The Bible would seem to be a very problematic source of moral guidance.

EMcD: Absolutely problematic. Therefore, it has to be used quite critically.

VB: But, to use it critically, you have to have a standard by which to criticise it, which means coming to a view on morality independently of anything in the Bible.

EMcD: Of course we have a capacity to distinguish good from evil independently of the Bible, but coming to a view or morality involves moving between narratives, and we have to be critical of all of them. Anyway, we can't stand outside the Bible, in the same way as we can't stand outside Irish history. It is part of our narratives.

VB: What did your thesis on church/state relations conclude?

EMcD: My conclusion was that the older models of a formal relationship between church and state were irrelevant to the modern world; that it was the protection of religious freedom that was important and that the church could do its own pastoral work but it shouldn't have any privileges or any particular recognition.

VB: That would have been a very minority view, and a colleague of yours in Maynooth at the time, Jeremiah Newman, took a very different line in a book he wrote around then called Studies in Political Morality.

EMcD: Yes, he disagreed profoundly, and we had many heated arguments. In fact, it was from lectures he gave here while I was a student that I first became interested in church/state relations. I began to read works by a Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, whose books had been banned by the Holy Office, and that influenced the line I took. I had concluded as a student that Jeremiah was wrong.

VB: Did he take kindly to this?

EMcD: Oh, he'd get upset and annoyed and angry, but the next day he'd be back to you, he was very generous that way. He never held it against me.

VB: Was Maynooth a claustrophobic place in the 1950s, '60s, '70s?

EMcD: In the '50s, when I was a theology student, Irish society was relatively closed and becoming increasingly depressed because of all the emigration and the economic depression. But there were enough bright sparks around. Maynooth gave you a loose enough rein. We had a very good dramatic tradition in the college. People like Ray McAnally used to come in as producers. Then, when I was a postgraduate student for two years, I got quite involved in Tuairim [a think-tank established in the 1950s by Donal Barrington, recently retired from the Supreme Court, and others]. It was actually Donal Barrington who said to me that I should do some work on the Irish Constitution with a view to examining relations with Northern Ireland. He said that to me in about 1956, long before there was a hint of movement on attitudes towards the North. Then, once Vatican II began, Maynooth became very lively and we had a very interesting time for about 12 years or so from the early '60s.

VB: Vatican II must have been quite upsetting for Maynooth in many ways.

EMcD: My general impression, as a very young member of staff at the time, was that people were pleased about it. But, on the other hand, many of the older people probably thought it wasn't going to change very much.

VB: A famous Maynooth theologian, Mgr Frank Cremin, was very much involved in Vatican II. What message was he bringing back about the Council?

EMcD: He was the only member of staff who was out at all the sessions, all the time. I think his own bishop brought him out. Some of us were out for short periods. He was utterly untouched by it at the time. Afterwards, he was more disturbed, I think. He didn't realise that it was going to have such an impact and he was disturbed by those who took it seriously. One of the extraordinary things is that it was he who was the secret theological adviser to Noel Browne during the church/State crisis in 1951. John Horgan [in his recent biography of Noel Browne] tracked it down. Very complicated people these, you know.

VB: Did you know Archbishop John Charles McQuaid at all?

EMcD: Very, very slightly. I had just two encounters with him. The first involved a famous liberal theologian, Gregory Baum. He wrote to me and said he would like to come to Ireland on his way back to Canada from Rome. I went to the president of the college and he agreed to have him invited.

Two weeks later I got a very nasty letter from John Charles saying: "I understand that you are responsible for inviting a Father Gregory Baum to speak in my diocese. I take the strongest possible objection." You see, he was very clever with words. He couldn't forbid it, because we took the line, even though Maynooth was in his diocese it was under the bishops as a whole. Anyway, he wrote: "I take the strongest possible objection to your inviting an alien without my consent." Terrible language. But, you know, he didn't forbid it. So I wrote a letter back and said we had got the permission of the president.

The only other time I encountered him was at the last session of the council, when I was out. I went up to him in the corridor and said: "Archbishop, I'm Enda McDonagh." He said something like: "Hello Father." Then, for something to say, I said: "How do you think the council is going, Archbishop?" He replied: "We will keep the faith."

VB: Did you have much to do with Cardinal Conway?

EMcD: Much more to do with Conway, partly because I was the successor in the moral theology chair and partly because we had a good relationship. He didn't agree with me, but he was very kind to me. When I got into trouble with bishops and things, Conway's line was "I'll talk to Father McDonagh". There were a couple of difficult instances - one after I spoke at the first public meeting of a gay and lesbian group in Dublin in 1972. There were a lot of objections.

VB: Who objected?

EMcD: Bishops, priests and lay people. No hotel in Dublin would host the meeting and we ended up in Trinity College. A number of people came over from England for that first meeting and they went a bit wild. Conway deflected a lot of the outrage.

VB: Did you like Cardinal Conway?

EMcD: I did. I thought he was the only real leader in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the last 50 years. He was a politician. He had a sense of goals and strategy and he worked at it.

VB: You must have known Tomas O Fiaich quite well?

EMcD: I did. He was now a much more affable companion than Conway. He really knew no theology, so when he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh I think he felt a bit at sea.

VB: Did you have the sense that Cahal Daly had an overall strategy for the church?

EMcD: He had, but I never found him very convincing in the way that I found Conway convincing. Conway was more his own man. Cahal was moving with Rome and other things.

VB: Sean Brady seems a fairly anonymous leader of the Irish church.

EMcD: I think he's a very decent man. He is open, but perhaps was too long out of Ireland.

VB: The running is made now, of course, by Cardinal Desmond Connell.

EMcD: Who is a very strong man. His own man, but I think mistaken about what's needed. He has an old vision of the church which goes back to his student days. He is not easily in touch with people or priests.

VB: Would you agree that perhaps the turning point in the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland was not the reaction to the various scandals but the papal encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, in 1968? It seemed that that was the first time people conscientiously decided to ignore the moral teaching of their church.

EMcD: I would say it was certainly a turning point. It might be too much to say that they conscientiously decided to ignore the moral teachings. They certainly rejected that moral teaching, and probably were therefore sceptical about teaching on broader sexual issues. It was a turning point not just in terms of that particular sexual teaching but maybe more broadly in regard to the exercise of authority generally.

VB: You disagreed with Humanae Vitae yourself. Why?

EMcD: I thought the case wasn't proven. I could see the validity of an argument of relationship between personal commitment and sexual intercourse. I couldn't see how that applied to individual acts of sexual intercourse within the context of marriage. Especially as we were accepting that families could be planned, should be spaced.

VB: Are you in disagreement with the church's line on abortion?

EMcD: On the general issue of abortion I think the church has a very strong position. However, there are difficulties at the margins.

VB: How about the constitutional prohibition on abortion? Do you think that's right or wrong?

EMcD: I don't think it's practical. I've always thought that you can't devise a formula that would allow us to deal with particular exceptions and rule out just abortions of convenience. In '83 I was against constitutional prohibition, and I haven't changed by mind on that.

VB: In general, do you think it's right to criminalise women who, for reasons that seem to them to be practical, refuse to give their bodies to the propagation of another human being for the duration of the pregnancy?

EMcD: I would be very opposed to criminal sanctions. But I do feel we are in danger of losing the kind of respect for life generally, respect spread over much larger areas than abortion.

VB: You are about to complete a book entitled Risk of God. What is the risk of God?

EMcD: Well, it's a two-fold risk. First of all, I think there is the risk that people too readily invoke God in all kinds of arguments without tending to have regard to the presence and call of God as mediated through so many different layers. There is a risk that the invocation of God closes off the kind of exploratory argument that ought to go on about so many conflicts and moral issues. It's the risk that God closes things off. And therefore, if you don't accept the God thing, you opt out. Or, if you insist on the God thing, there's no further discussion possible. That's one.

The other one, I think, is that much of what is going on in our world, the Western world, certainly is a search for a certain kind of spirituality. That's healthy and necessary, but I think a lot of people see it as a way of self-perfection at best, or self-satisfaction at a lesser level, but don't want the challenge of God, of a God who takes them out of themselves or a God that has been manifested to Jesus Christ and so on. That's too costly to go that way.

VB: What do you mean?

EMcD: Well, if you were to follow the line of Jesus Christ to see what the love of neighbour involves, it might demand too many sacrifices.

VB: What's the love of neighbour got to do with Christ? Lots of people, including those in the Judaic tradition, came up with that idea independently of Christ.

EMcD: Well, I think that's a fair objection in some respects, but you wouldn't come up against the Cross in reflection of moral values.

VB: What did you lose thereby?

EMcD: Well, I think that there is, at a certain stage, the kind of call upon us to follow the truth or justice. It is a demand to surrender ourselves in that kind of way that Jesus did on the Cross.

VB: You mean that the demands of justice would be overwhelming?

EMcD: That's right. Or the demands of truth. It keeps us open to that.

VB: What's it got to do with God?

EMcD: I think what has to do with God is that there's the idea that there is a transcendent being to which we attend and surrender that drives that self-sacrifice.

VB: Firstly, you say, the risk of God is that the invocation of God closes down possibilities. Secondly, it opens us up, the risk of God.

EMcD: To open up too much, demand too much. The risk of God can demand too much. The third thing is a different kind of thing altogether, it's the way I read the New Testament, in particular. But the way I read the Bible generally is that the story of creation and of salvation is a story of God risking Godself. Opening Godself to creation and to the emergence of humanity, and this proves a bad risk to set up a new kind of community to God. It fails over the history of humanity and then, last of all, God sends his own son, and that proves a disaster. That's the risk God takes. That's how I read the history of creation and salvation and of humanity.

VB: I don't know what you are talking about.

EMcD: There are two aspects to our belief in God: one, God as creator, and the other, God as lover. And any understanding we have of God must be based on our understanding of the human realities of creating and loving. Both these, as any human artist or human lover will tell you, involve real risk. In this way, I am trying to understand God as risk, taking in his creating and loving.

VB: What do those of us who don't believe in God miss out on?

EMcD: People who don't believe in God miss out, it seems to me, on a certain meaning and a certain driving force. A certain meaning in that life has a final meaning. It's not about collections of atoms and molecules; there is a kind of presence in the world that is enormously enriching and transforming. I think that people who don't identify that presence, who honourably say that they don't believe in God, yet get some indications of a mystery and a meaning beyond themselves and even beyond the world. It was for that reason that, in his recent work, George Steiner, in Grammar of Creation, put his wager on transcendence as a fulfilling and liberating reality.

VB: Do you ever have a suspicion that, fundamentally, the belief in God is a conceit?

EMcD: Well, I certainly have to examine that and struggle with that, and when I say it's a struggle it's not that I struggle to believe in the sense that I simply want to believe. But so many things happen to you in the course of your life that raise very serious questions, including the question of conceit. But here, I am with Steiner and predecessors like Pascal, that the wager on a transcendent mystery and meaning is liberating and fulfilling.