John Charles McQuaid - Personal Qualities

Personal Qualities

The late John Feeney, published in 1974 "John Charles McQuaid – The Man and the Mask". This critical essay on the archbishop presents McQuaid as living outside his time but as a "first class bishop of the old school" who, had he lived fifty years earlier "would have no critics worth speaking of and would hardly be remembered today except by those who benefited from his quiet, personal charity" (page 78/9).

Feeney also evaluates his role in a negative light under the headings 'schoolteacher' and 'medievalist'. Yet, he was also for Feeney a Christian and 'a diligent, sincere and absolutely honest man who did his duty as he saw it".(page 79).

Examples of the archbishops "quiet personal charity" are rarely supplied in John Cooney's biography, "John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland". He quotes McQuaid's secretary (from 1940 onwards) Father Chris Mangan as recording that "after supper at night, six nights a week he would go out visiting hospitals" (page 144). However Cooney then passes quickly on to the archbishop's administrative methods. There is no discussion on how this regular visiting of the sick, fits in with Cooney's portrait of a power hungry Renaissance style prelate.

Behind his formidable exterior the Archbishop was an extremely shy man who was ill at ease at social functions. In 1963 after the first session of the Vatican Council, Dr McQuaid set up a secret all-priests Public Image Committee "to examine what is now called the public image of the Church in the Dublin Diocese". The Archbishop insisted that the committee members should pull no punches and they obliged. The committee reported that his public image "is entirely negative: a man who forbids, a man who is stern and aloof from the lives of the people, a man who doesn't meet the people (as they want him to) at church functions, at public gatherings, or television or in the streets, who writes deep pastoral letters in theological and canonical language that is remote from the lives of the people". One of the committee members noted that the archbishop was "somewhat disappointed" after the first meeting. "He felt the discussion centred too much on him personally. The image of the church was not the same as that of the archbishop."