John Charles McQuaid
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John Charles McQuaid (July 28 1895-April 7 1973) was a Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland between December 1940 and 1971.
John Charles McQuaid was born in Cootehill, County Cavan in 1895. He joined the religious congregation, the Holy Ghost Fathers, where he taught at the highly regarded school Blackrock College in Dublin, which had educated many senior Irish political and business leaders. As Fr. McQuaid, he was close to former Blackrock College teacher and President of the Executive Council (prime minister) Eamon de Valera, and influenced de Valera in drafting the modern Irish constitution (Bunreacht na hEireann).
In 1940, he was made Archbishop of Dublin. As Archbishop, he proved to be a highly influential political figure. In the early 1950s, Noel Browne, the First Inter-Party Government's Minister of Health, - shocked by the absence of ante-natal care for pregnant women, and the resulting infant mortality rates in deeply-Catholic Ireland - proposed providing free access to health care for mothers and children in a new Mother and Child Scheme. The Archbishop's criticism of the scheme, compounded by political misjudgments by Browne, as well as tensions between Browne and Sean MacBride, his political party leader, and Browne's behaviour towards other ministers, helped pave the way for the government's decision to withdraw the scheme.
There was continuing conflict between McQuaid and de Valera. In 1946 he supported the national teachers’ strike, to de Valera’s considerable annoyance.
McQuaid was never made a cardinal. Joseph Walsh, the Irish minister to the Holy See, had warned the Vatican that if McQuaid was elevated “the Nuncio would have endless difficulties, with every sphere of his activities, owing to this deplorable weakness in
McQuaid was critical of post-Vatican II Catholicism. When making his automatic offer of retirement from his see to Pope Paul VI, he was stunned to have it accepted, and further stunned when one of his internal church critics, the liberal Dermot Ryan, was appointed to his post instead.
McQuaid died in his private residence in Killiney in Dublin in 1973. He is buried in St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop.
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References
- John Whyte – Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923-1979
- Bernard J Canning – Bishops of Ireland 1870-1987
- Patrick Corish – The Irish Catholic Experience
- Dermot Keogh – Ireland and the Vatican. (1995)
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