Patrick Francis Cremin

Student 1928-37

Acting Librarian 1939-46

Professor of Moral Theology (1939-80) and Canon Law (1949-80)

 

When Patrick Francis Cremin died in retirement in his native county in 2001 at the age of 91, he was honored by not one but two obituaries in the Irish Times, a newspaper whose coverage of church matters did not accord with the eminent monsignor's idea of a responsible press. Those tributes were in themselves a tribute to the status of a man who had bestrode the world of Irish theology and moral teaching for more than a generation, his influence on bishops, politicians, clergy and students alike acknowledged in contemporary reporting, historical assessment and anecdote - as was his failure to reach the elevated ecclesiastical state of 'Ordinary'. The first obituary appeared on November 1 2001 over the initials D. Ó'H:

 

The first smiling face on the faded "class-pieces" or year photographs which hang in the cloisters of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, is that of Frankie Cremin - kindly, affable, yet greatly at pains that all should know the truth and be saved.

The college, where he occupied the chairs of both moral theology and canon law from 1949 until 1980 - albeit on one salary - was his lifelong home. His vast lecture notes, made freely available to all, are now in countless presbytery cupboards and attics, a neglected monument to his memory; and the ingenious marital predicaments of the hypothetical Caius and Bertha have, like his operatic arias, gone down in clerical history. Few Irish priests do not have a personal memory of Frankie and I have rarely known a levitical banquet where he was not celebrated.

Frank's radical, positive and generally unrecognised contribution to the Mother and Child scheme has been dealt with elsewhere; it perfectly demonstrates his fatal flaw - utter lack of (or disdain for) cuteness. While Archbishop Fogarty of Killaloe, intoxicated by the zeitgeist, was making anti-Semitic noises in the 1940s, Frankie, stubbornly arguing from first principles (his motto: "Obsta principiis"), was suspected of socialism; when the Hierarchy drifted to the left after the Second Vatican Council, Frankie, like his close friend Archbishop McQuaid, was left stranded on the wreck of orthodoxy.

As peritus or official theologian to Vatican II, Frank Cremin was above all homo conciliaris, a man of the Council. He personally drafted paragraph 35 of its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, and as a member of the post-conciliar commission on the revision of the Code of Canon Law he was deeply involved in rewriting the Church's legal constitution - a labour completed only in 1983.

Who could forget the cameo of Frankie in his prime with Hans Küng - both then with such promising futures! - sparring for the entertainment of the American bishops at the Ristorante Ulpia before being merrily driven back to the Irish College in Küng's Volkswagen?

It was left to Frank to present Humanae vitae to an already antagonised Irish media in 1968. Whereas others had been actively fomenting among Irish priests and people an attitude of "change", Frankie was by conviction, not conditioning, consistently against contraception both before and afterwards. His typically ineluctable question was: if the Church changed her mind on this vital issue, which was the true Church - the one that had opposed contraception or the one that now accepted it?

His career and achievements would have guaranteed any other priest of his generation the highest ecclesiastical preferment. It was not to be, however: thrice proposed, he was thrice blocked for election to the episcopate. Frozen out by a former junior colleague, then senior churchman, whose advancement Frank himself had had opportunity to spoil but forbore (when asked what he had said in consultation with the Nuncio about his ascendant rival, he replied "Veni, vidi Sensi" - nothing, in other words), and isolated by the trend away from doctrine and towards populism, he became redundant. At last even his own native diocese of Kerry was awarded to - Eamonn Casey.

But Frankie survived to see it all fall out - and fall apart. Critical but forgiving, he witnessed the demise of his victors, the decline of his alma mater and the collapse of Catholic Ireland. He could be glimpsed himself, like the sleuthing Fahter Brown, a small, bespectacled, rotund figure in a black soutane, interviewing seminarians, lay students, visitors - anyone - in St Mary's Square, Maynooth, or in the afternoon at Our Lady's altar in the Gunne Chapel saying his daily Mass. People came from all over the country to seek his advice and guidance, which was ever practical, humane, nay liberal.

His appetite for life, food, music, knowledge and fun was robust, his memory prodigious, his stamina immense, his candour and humour childlike. He could hold forth for hours - exhaustive in detail, exhilarating in clarity. He never left an error unchallenged but never belittled the corrected. Tirelessly searching, undaunted to the end and without a shred of malice, he fought the good fight, he kept the Faith. He went to God on the feast of All Saints in his 92nd year. The light of Heaven to his soul.

 

John Horgan*, the longtime Religion Correspondent of the newspaper, and latterly member of Seanad and Dáil Éireann, Professor of Communications at DCU and Press Ombudsman, wrote this obituary, which appeared two days later, on November 3rd.:

 

Mgr. P.F (Frank) Cremin, whose death has taken place in Co. Kerry, was a theologian of the old school whose classically orthodox life and career concealed one of the most fascinating episodes in twentieth century Irish history – his crucial role as a secret adviser to Dr. Noel Browne in the Mother and Child controversy of 1950-51.

Born in Kenmare, Co. Kerry, on 10 October 1910, Frank Cremin was a member of an extraordinarily gifted family – a brother, Con Cremin, spent many years as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, where he wielded huge political influence over a succession of governments. The young Frank shared a bench, in his local primary school, with another talented son of Kerry – Noel Hartnett. The two went on to be close contemporaries at St. Brendan’s, the diocesan seminary in Killarney. Their paths were to cross many years later when the two Noels, Browne and Hartnett, engineered the implosion of Sean MacBride’s Clann na Poblachta party and the collapse of John A. Costello’s 1948-51 inter-party government.

In Killarney and in Maynooth, Cremin was a brilliant student, securing his doctorate in two years in Rome before being appointed as a professor of theology at Maynooth at an unusually early age. He combined a classical approach to the teaching of theology with a robust personality, which did not particularly endear him to some of his elders, regardless of how much they would have shared his views.

His role in the Noel Browne affair came about effectively by accident. He was friendly with Brian Walsh, later a judge of the Supreme Court but at that time a young barrister who taught French part-time at the college.  A casual conversation between the two men about the Mother and Child controversy, then beginning to take shape, led Walsh to suggest that Cremin might like to meet Browne, with whom Walsh was friendly. This led, in turn, to one of the most unlikely friendships in Irish politics. As late as1968, Browne, who had by then become a byword for agnosticism if not for atheism, declared – without identifying Cremin – that he owed what faith he had to his encounters with the theologian who had advised him during the crisis.

Cremin’s view on the morality of Browne’s scheme, which bore a close resemblance to aspects of the National Health Service then being introduced in Britain, was that if the NHS was acceptable to Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland, what was morally wrong with something similar on this side of the border? It was impossible for him to express such views in public, but some of their colleagues were aware of a brief altercation he had with Mgr. William Conway, another Maynooth professor, on the wisdom of the bishops statement condemning the scheme. In Cremin’s view, it was a bad day for the Church; in Conway’s view, it was the opposite. History was to prove Cremin right.

When Conway was appointed Archbishop of Armagh in 1963, Cremin’s career was, as he began to perceive himself, moving into a kind of limbo. Bright young Maynooth theologians often got bishoprics, but Cremin found himself passed over for preferment again and again. He became a trusted peritus, or private theologian, to Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin for the duration of the Second Vatican Council, but this resounding guarantee of his orthodoxy (it is fascinating to speculate as to whether McQuaid was aware of his earlier role, and it is not impossible that he did) was not enough to secure his promotion. He saw the see of Kerry go first to Kevin McNamara, and then to Eamonn Casey, his sense of frustration undoubtedly intensified by McNamara’s translation to Dublin and by Eamonn Casey’s subsequent disgrace in Galway.

His problem now was not that he was not orthodox enough, but that he was too orthodox. Conway’s subtle approach to the re-shaping of the Irish hierarchy during his period as Primate of All Ireland had no room for a man who now saw dangers, rather than opportunities, as the key factor facing the Church in the modern world, and who, had he become bishop, would not have hesitated to speak out against anything he considered temporising or weak-kneed on the part of his fellow clerics. In Conway’s finely balanced strategy for Church-State relationships, not least in the context of the developing Northern crisis, he would have been too much of a loose cannon. In such a situation, his pastoral instincts, which were strong, withered on the vine, and he became known to a new generation of more questioning Catholics principally as the man who was chosen by McQuaid to proclaim the virtues of Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical which maintained the Church’s condemnation of artificial contraception, to a bemused collection of journalists in Dublin in the summer of 1968.

Almost 20 years later, when Noel Browne’s book “against The Tide” was being written, there was briefly question of whether he would allow his name to emerge at last. Brian Walsh’s advice, offered in Cremin’s best interests at a private meeting which also involved Browne and Hartnett, was that he should keep his involvement secret. For Cremin, this decision was a continual source of regret. He felt, especially at around the time Browne died in 1997, that had he allowed his name to become public he could have maintained both an intellectual and spiritual relationship with the former Cabinet minister, and perhaps blunted the edge of Browne’s later bitterness towards the Catholic Church. It was a Church which, he felt by then, was in grave danger of losing its way in a morass of relativism, ill-advised appointments, and theological confusion, a Church in which only his old-fashioned Kerry faith continued to sustain him.

 

*John Horgan later related how in researching his book on Noel Browne, he decided to approach Monsignor Cremin, then living in retirement in a Maynooth nursing home, about the exact nature of his interaction with the former Minister for Health. Received with a fatherly query by the Monsignor, who was in decidedly informal nursing home attire, he was astounded by the relaxed and extended nature of their conversation ('We got on like a house on fire'), and even more astounded by the controversial cleric's revelation that at the time of the Mother and Child crisis, he had believed that “If it (birth control) was accepted by the Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland, why was it wrong down here?”

 

The Brandsma Review, an Irish journal of conservative Catholic opinion, carried this obituary by its editor, Peadar Laighléis, in early 2002: