Monsignor Denis Faul was a dogged, courageous and contrarian representative of the Catholic people of Northern Ireland, whom he served as a priest, teacher and defender of human rights.
His death this week recalls a life of public involvement. It straddled the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, the resistance to internment and abuse of prisoners during the 1970s, the hunger strikes and violence of the 1980s and the evolution of the peace process culminating in the Belfast Agreement of the 1990s.
Monsignor Faul consistently opposed violence throughout these years. This did not deflect him from insisting that those who used it, or were interned on suspicion that they would do so, any the less deserved to have their rights respected. He applied this principle most effectively in defence of those interned in 1971, by patiently documenting with Father Raymond Murray the "cruel and degrading treatment" of prisoners, later condemned as such by the European Court of Human Rights in good part because of their work.
A similar admirable spirit of determined investigation informed his advocacy for Irish emigrants wrongly convicted of terrorist offences in Britain - the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven.
Monsignor Faul refused to support the H-Block hunger strikers in the Maze prison, where he was chaplain, incurring the bitter hostility of Sinn Féin activists and supporters in 1981. He agreed with those who said the deaths were cynically exploited and extended to facilitate that party's entry into electoral politics. But he supported the subsequent efforts to substitute political involvement for paramilitarism over the next 20 years - arguing that logically this must include participation in a reformed Royal Ulster Constabulary.
The other consistent thread through Monsignor Faul's life was the pride with which he defended traditional Catholicism and institutional church structures in Northern Ireland.
His 40 years as a teacher in St Patrick's Academy in Dungannon, including 15 years as its principal, led him to oppose integrated education and insist on the right of Catholics to have their own system and culture in a segregated and discriminating society. This was an uncomplicatedly authoritarian vision, to which he held firm, despite growing pluralism and dissent in his own community and dramatic changes in Catholic belief and mores south of the Border. The tributes paid to him from leaders of his own and Protestant churches fully recognised his enduring integrity and spiritual strength.