Fr Herbert McCabe

John Ignatius (Herbert) McCabe, priest and theologian: born Middlesbrough, Yorkshire 2 August 1926; entered the Dominican Order 1949; ordained priest 1955; died Oxford 28 June 2001.

Anybody interested in the interrelationship of religious and social ideas in Britain, and particularly in the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, will have been affected by the death of the Dominican priest Father Herbert McCabe.

John Ignatius McCabe (that was his baptismal name) was born in Middlesbrough in 1926, the son of a doctor whose parents had been Irish immigrants. He went to Manchester University in 1944 to study chemistry, but graduated in philosophy. In 1949, after taking his degree, he applied to join the Dominicans. For a young man with an outstandingly powerful mind who wanted to live the religious life and yet was clearly fascinated by ideas and argument and the strength of words, the Dominican Order, the Order of Preachers founded by St Dominic, was a fairly obvious choice. In accordance with custom, his novice master gave him a new name: Herbert.

That same novice master of 1949, Father Columba Ryan, preached at his former novice's funeral, and one of the things he mentioned in his sermon was Herbert McCabe's "adolescent streak", his tendency to shock. It was the side of his character that could irritate some people immensely. Because of it many of them overlooked the fact that his theology was really remarkably conservative, being in fact always deeply rooted in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, though approaching Aquinas in an original way, as a contributor to present-day debate.

The men who taught McCabe theology at the Dominican House of Studies at Oxford were – with the exception of Jung's friend Father Victor White, who only taught McCabe for a year – not a particularly imaginative group, likely to respond to a mind like his. They were uneasy about him. So he was not sent abroad for higher studies, to equip him to teach in Oxford. Instead he was sent to work in the Order's parish house in Newcastle and then in Manchester.

This, however, was providential. He became an enormously successful teacher during the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council. He was not, though, an instigator of the ferment that swept across the Roman Catholic Church during the Sixties; rather, he set out to make people aware that the fundamental teachings of their religion spoke to their needs and the needs of their time.

All the same, in the course of doing this he became increasingly identified with peace and justice issues. He did this, though, primarily as a catalyst. Incidentally, though frequently called a Marxist, it was always his own conviction that "Christianity, not Marxism, is the really revolutionary creed".

In 1964 the Dominicans sent him to Cambridge, to help with the launching of a new monthly journal, New Blackfriars, that would consider theological issues and cultural and social issues closely together. He became its editor in 1965.

Yet it is most unlikely that McCabe's name would have become known to a far wider public if a well-known friend of his, Charles Davis, had not left the Catholic priesthood and the Church, triggering off what was to become a flood of desertions. In the February 1967 issue of New Blackfriars McCabe argued that the fact that the Church was "quite plainly corrupt" was no ground for leaving it. For saying this Rome promptly insisted that he should be sacked, and briefly suspended him from administering the sacraments and preaching. And so exploded what was called "the McCabe Affair". There was a lot of angry controversy.

In 1970 he was restored to the editorship and held the post for another nine years, but he never completely forgot that one or two Dominicans whom he had thought of as friends attacked him during the "Affair".

Herbert McCabe has been called a "bit of a bully" because he could bring opponents down so successfully in argument, but he also had a vulnerable side. Somebody who knew him closely has written about his "genuine humanity, trust, honesty, clarity of thought and an almost rabid desire to understand and preach the message of the Christian gospel".

During those three years at the end of the Sixties, when he had no significant regular appointment, he spent quite a lot of time in Ireland and this did to some extent alter him. He became more deeply aware of his Irish roots, and Irish affairs more and more filled his thoughts. In 1974 he took Irish citizenship and he talked to his fellow English Dominicans about "your government".

McCabe will, though, most probably be remembered best for his remarkable influence on two generations of young people. Writing on McCabe's 70th birthday, in 1996, the literary critic Terry Eagleton said:

Dismally few people when you come to weigh it up, really change your life, even those who are traditionally supposed to. My supervisor at Cambridge changed my life about as much as Vera Lynn did. But without my long friendship with Herbert McCabe I wouldn't be at all what I am. So you can blame it all on him.

Nearly all McCabe's close friends were outside the Dominican Order. He enjoyed immensely being the centre of a circle in a good pub. Whatever he was doing, he put an enormous amount of effort into the shaping of his words.

This was his strength but also his weakness. It was not solely because of his heavy drinking that he produced no heavy books. It has rightly been said that he was a thinker, not a scholar – a thinker who, it seems, needed the challenge of a waiting audience in order to write. He produced a mass of beautifully structured and often profoundly illuminating talks and sermons, and virtually all his books are made up of these – The New Creation (1964, on the sacraments), Law, Love and Language (1968, on the basis of ethics), and God Matters (1987, on the God question). The one book initially conceived as a book is his superb little catechism, The Teaching of the Catholic Church (1985).

When, in 1989, he was given the Dominican Order's highest accolade, the title of Master of Sacred Theology, he was profoundly moved. By then, though, major changes were taking place in the wider world and the aspirations of the young in Britain were becoming very different. Part of Herbert McCabe's world had gone.

A year ago he had a bad fall, leaving him a weak and sick man, but he did not lose his sense of humour. He said not long before he died: "There are three stages in life – infancy, maturity, and 'You're looking well today'."

John Orme Mills OP