To acknowledge the positive contribution of the former Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, is to run the risk of being derided, according to an editorial in the winter issue of Studies, the Jesuit journal.
In today's liberal society Dr McQuaid had become a "symbol of the bad old days when church and state were linked in an illiberal alliance", the journal comments. However, to dismiss him on such ideological grounds was itself to exhibit "gross ideological bias".
The former Archbishop's limitations were those of his times, it says. "He was certainly autocratic, but that was the way of eminent ecclesiastics. He grew to maturity during the age of dictators - Franco, Salazar, Mussolini, Hitler - on some of whom the Church looked benignly."
It was a time when Vatican staff, on answering the telephone from the Pope's apartments, were expected to kneel. Dr McQuaid's own style had "reflected something of this attitude". His theological training had been in the "stifling" intellectual atmosphere inherited from the time of the modernist crisis. "Consequently, a poverty of theological thinking characterised his writing and preaching."
His understanding of ecumenism, the journal says, had not been dissimilar to that of Pope Pius XI, whose attitude to other Christian communities had been described as `come in slowly with your hands above your heads'.
This "narrow and rigid theological vision" had left Dr McQuaid ill-equipped to cope with the winds of theological change which swept through the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. "In short, he was a product of a world with which his values, attitudes and vision were in harmony. Only at the end of his life was he out of kilter with a changing Church in a changing society."
The journal describes Dr McQuaid as intellectually gifted and as a man who would have made a "first-class scholar" in any one of many disciplines. "He was an inspiring teacher, an effective administrator with an exceptionally broad and detailed knowledge of religious, educational, social and political issues, who had a keen insight into the needs of the Irish Church and society.
"To meet these needs, he worked tirelessly and successfully. He was forward in his thinking. Where his views diverged from the mainstream, he was usually ahead of his time, as in the case of his support for the national teachers in 1943 (during a national strike) and for parental representation on school boards of management."
The journal says that Dr McQuaid's influence on the 1937 Constitution has been "exaggerated", while in the controversy over the Mother and Child Scheme he had "simply expressed the position common to all the bishops", which was the mainstream theology of the day.
To acknowledge his attainments and abilities did not imply that one accepted his ideology, the journal says, nor did it blind one to his personal deficiencies. "Despite cultural, theological and personal limitations, he was indeed a most remarkable figure in post-Independence Ireland", the journal concludes.
The current issue of Studies is given over almost entirely to a major reassessment of Dr McQuaid.
