Prince of the church – Brian Maye on Cardinal Michael Logue

Michael Logue was the first archbishop of Armagh to be made a cardinal. Born five years before the Great Famine, his long life spanned the land war, the Home Rule campaign, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, partition and the Civil War. He died 100 years ago on November 19th.
He was born on October 1st, 1840, in Kilmacrennan, Co Donegal, the second of six children of Michael Logue, an innkeeper, and Catherine Durnan. After private tutoring and attendance at a private school in Buncrana, he entered St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where he was ordained deacon in 1864. He was ordained in Paris in December 1866, having been appointed professor of dogmatic theology at the Irish college there. Failing to get the theology chair at Maynooth in 1874, he returned to Donegal as a curate in Raphoe diocese. His chief concern became the effects of emigration on the county and he became involved in ways to combat it, including promoting afforestation.
Made dean of Maynooth in 1876, he taught Irish there for a time before succeeding to one of the vacant theology chairs. Becoming bishop of Raphoe in 1879, he immediately undertook fundraising in America to mitigate the famine conditions in Donegal, as well as promoting temperance. He supported the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in their Home Rule campaign and land struggle but although he sympathised with tenants’ demands, he cautioned against violence being used.
Appointed archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland in late 1887, he declared a duty of care for his flock’s temporal as well as their spiritual needs. “Although dexterous and shrewd, Logue was by no means the most intelligent or administratively competent of bishops,” according to Diarmaid Ferriter, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and he described him as slow and indecisive at times, with a tendency to state the obvious.
He condemned Charles Stewart Parnell, and any priests who continued to support him, following the O’Shea divorce case and was lukewarm about the IPP’s alliance with the British Liberal Party. One of his major concerns was Catholic control over schools and he felt that the educational provisions of the 1893 Home Rule Bill were inadequate in this regard. His appointment as cardinal in 1893, in preference to archbishop of Dublin William Walsh, the most obvious candidate for the position, Ferriter ascribed to likely British pressure on the Vatican due to Walsh’s more ardent nationalism. A native Irish speaker himself, Logue supported the Gaelic League and the promotion of the Irish language and culture.
He often visited Scotland to look after the welfare of Ulster emigrants there and, indeed, travelled widely. The completion of Armagh cathedral in 1904, for which he raised some £50,000, was one of his principal projects as cardinal. He was sympathetic to the British monarchy and empire and received Queen Victoria in 1900 and Edward VII in 1903 at Maynooth. Critical of the anti-Catholic language of some involved in the growing trade-union movement, he was also wary of John Redmond at times. Logue supported Britain and France in the first World War but didn’t encourage recruitment and opposed extending conscription to Ireland.
Strongly opposed to the prospect of partition, he declared it would be “infinitely better to remain as we are for 50 years to come than to accept these proposals”. Although he denounced the British reaction to the 1916 Rising, he also condemned republican violence and considered Sinn Féin members and republicans as pursuers of dreams. In the 1918 general election, he preferred IPP to Sinn Féin candidates but mediated an agreement between the two sides so that seats wouldn’t be lost to unionists.
The War of Independence caused him much unease and he condemned the violence from both sides but the killings on “Bloody Sunday” in November 1920 provoked more forthright criticism from him of the British. He strongly supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, believing it offered everything necessary for Ireland’s future prosperity but he was deeply disappointed that it hadn’t achieved the end of partition. The growing anti-Catholic violence in Northern Ireland greatly perturbed him, as did the discrimination against Catholics inherent in the new laws there, and he was himself often the victim of B Special harassment.
A humble man who led a simple life, with no secretary and few servants, he was a keen sailor and skilled yachtsman and also very much enjoyed birdwatching, especially earlier in his life. He died of heart failure in Ara Coeli, the official residence of the archbishop of Armagh, and was buried in the grounds of St Patrick’s Cathedral. A portrait of him by John Lavery is in the Ulster Museum in Belfast.