Cardinal Ó Fiaich leading an ecumenical Way of the Cross with his Anglican coiunterpart on Armagh
in the 1980s Archbishop Robin Eames.
Photo: PA The ripple-wave of memory for the late prelate is still strong, and his example continues to motivate and inspire writes Fr Michael Murtagh
While wandering through the streets of Lourdes recently, I noticed a photograph on sale in Viron’s photographic shop. I thought it had disappeared in recent years, but it appeared in the same position on the display board that it has taken up for almost thirty years now. The photograph is one of the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, taken while he was celebrating Mass at the grotto, just hours before he died on May 8, 1990. That his photograph should still be in demand almost 30 years later says a great deal. I spoke with the lady in the shop about the photograph and she told me, typically, that her father “had a good relationship” with the cardinal.
I took to thinking why it was that the late cardinal was considered by many to be an exemplary Churchman and leader, and why his image was still in demand. This had been on my mind for many years, as the thorny subject of leadership is analysed and debated as never before. On the tenth anniversary of his death, I had written:“In this age of tribunals and revelations we have grown accustomed to becoming disappointed by our leaders. The much sought-after spotlight of public notice can be cruel. It searches every crevice of a person’s life for hidden flaws, shadows, and secrets. Only the utterly transparent survive the test. The cardinal virtues and demands of leadership now are those associated with integrity.Accountability, transparency and openness are the demands of our time and culture. They are also the hallmarks of the consistent personality or administration. The acceptance of authority is no longer automatic and depends on authenticity. You must live what you proclaim and be what you seem. Those who may accept authority or leadership demand a seamless garment”.
To try to understand what some psychologists call the ‘mental glue’ that binds leaders and followers together, I took to re-reading what I regard as the best contemporary book on leadership (The New Psychology of Leadership. Identity, Influence and Power. Haslam, Reicher and Platow). In some of the opening remarks in the preface of the book, I found what I regard to be the key to understanding, in however limited a fashion, the dynamic of the cardinal’s giftedness or charism in leading his flock. Most leadership books focus on the ‘secrets’ of the uniquely gifted leader, without reference to social context or changing relationship. As I studied the book and absorbed its insights, I tried to identify the key markers that made the cardinal’s reputation rise so high and last so long. Some of the key insights, as written in the preface of the book, concentrate on the importance of the leader being seen as ‘one of us.’
“Effective leadership is always about how leaders and followers come to see each other as part of a common team or group, as members of the same in-group. It therefore has little to do with the individuality of the leader and everything to do with whether they are seen as part of the team, as a team player, as able and willing to advance team goals. Leadership, in short, is very much a ‘we’ thing.’”
Winning hearts and perhaps to a lesser extent, minds, was the gift of the cardinal. I’m sure that most of what he did was unstudied and unconscious in terms of leadership, but it was none the less successful in terms of public relations. He was not the most efficient of personalities, but he was very effective in communicating a message. He did this in a number of ways that I would like to explore. The theorists posit four key rules to effective leadership:
- Leaders need to be ‘in group’ prototypes. The more representative an individual is seen to be of a given social identity, the more he or she is clearly ‘one of us,’ the more influential he or she will be within the group;
- Leaders need to be ‘in group’ champions. They must be seen to be working for the group;
- Leaders need to be entrepreneurs of identity. They work hard to construct identity;
- Leaders need to be embedders of identity. The sense of who we are and how we believe the world should be organised needs to be translated into social reality.
Using this paradigm, it is easy to give examples of the four points from the lived life and the later ministry of the cardinal. His proto-typicality, his being, ‘one of us,’ was probably his greatest strength, even if it may have been somewhat contrived on occasion. One of the more common observations is that there was such broad range of people who ‘knew the cardinal well,’ or who claim to have been on friendly terms with him. This identification with him does justice to his success in cultivating the proto-typicality principle above. His social identity was as ‘one of our own,’ in so many ways.
In Co. Louth, where they had relatives, the Ó Fiaich family were known by the family nickname, ‘champion.’ Tomás was an in-group champion, perceived to be on the side of the people, especially the nationalist population of the North of Ireland. The context, as always, was important and the backdrop to his ministry as bishop was the dark scenery of violence and the political upheavals of the 1980s. On the tenth anniversary of his death, in a homily, I observed: “The cardinal renewed his people in what were some of the darkest days of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. He not only gave individuals a name, a place of origin, and an identity. He also gave his people a communal identity.
“For a people who had been told in subtle ways that they were nobody, it was a source of strength and dignity to know that we were a people, with a language and a literature and a history; a communal memory which had shaped us. He gave his people strength”.
As a constructor of identity, the cardinal’s strength became his weakness in the eyes of detractors. He was undoubtedly a romantic nationalist and this was interpreted by some as feeding into the culture of violence or at least identifying with it. Though he made the Church’s position clear many times, the perception developed among powerful elites that he had constructed an identity that was historically naïve and currently unhelpful. Most of his flock thought otherwise.
As an embedder of identity, he was adept at using symbolism. His use of the Irish language was gentle and inclusive. His liturgies at Mass-rocks and places of historical interest caught the public imagination. His love of Gaelic games was well-known and his ability to connect name and place has become legendary. The particular personality traits that helped him to carry people along included his linguistic skills. He was a skilled linguist, but it was as much the cadences in his delivery; the unpolished accent with which he spoke and the depth of knowledge and affection that he expressed, linguistically and non-verbally, that appealed to his audience. He used the ‘symbolic reserve’ of the past to enrich the present.
He was gifted with an approachability in public that bordered of the disinhibited. He moved towards people both symbolically and physically. His rustic gait; his open expression; the warmth of character that he exuded and his ability to bond with strangers were uncontrived. He often expressed himself in a tactile or disarming manner. The non-verbal cues were immediate and positive. People ‘warmed to him’ because they sensed warmth being exuded. The love of God’s people, PobalDé, for their deceased cardinal can be explained, I believe, by seeing it as a mirror-image of his own love for them. This love of people was the greatest gift the cardinal possessed. He really only came alive in the presence of others. His charism was his ability to excite and enthuse people by the exuberance and enthusiasm of his personality. Cor ad corlocquitur, as the recently canonised Cardinal Newman’s motto expressed it. Heart speaks to heart.
No book on leadership is complete without a list of secrets, or as this work calls them ‘principles.’To sum up and to aid our reflection, I finish with the four principles enunciated in the preface to the work cited. However helpful or unhelpful they may be, it is important to note that 30 years after his sudden death in a Toulouse hospital, the ripple-wave of memory for the late cardinal is still strong, and his example continues to motivate and inspire. That, in itself, is sufficient testimony to his qualities of leadership.
Four principles:
- Leaders must be seen as ‘one of us.’ They have to be perceived by followers as representing the position that best distinguishes our in-group from other out-groups. In order to be effective, a leader needs to be seen as an in-group prototype;
- Leaders must be seen to ‘do it for us.’ Their actions must advance the interests of the in-group;
- Leaders must craft a sense of us. They should be actively involved in shaping the shared understanding of who we are. Good leaders need to be skilled entrepreneurs of identity;
- Leaders must make us matter. The point of leadership is not simply to express what a group thinks, but rather to take the ideas and values and priorities of the group and embed them in reality.
Fr Michael Murtagh is parish priest of Dunleer, Co. Louth. This article first appeared in the May 2020 edition of Intercom and is reproduced by kind permission.