Then-Archbishop Cassidy in 1984, by Sjakkelien Vollebregt - Nationaal Archief, CC BY-SA 3.0
The man who would become Cardinal Cassidy came into the Church at a tender age, attended night school to complete his secondary education, and went on to a surprising ecclesiastical career. By Philippa Hitchen Australian Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, who died on April 10th at the age of 96, was a skilled diplomat and visionary ecumenist, but also a man of great simplicity and authenticity, who inspired trust and promoted reconciliation among the divided Christian churches. Born in 1924 in Sydney, Edward Cassidy seemed a most unlikely candidate for the priesthood, let alone a member of the elite College of Cardinals. “I was the child of parents, neither of whom were Catholic,” and who divorced when he was a year old, he recalls in his 2009 autobiography My Years In Vatican Service. He was placed in the care of his paternal grandparents and it was his grandmother who arranged for him to be received into the Catholic Church, after earlier baptism into the Church of England. At 15, when his grandfather died, he left school and got a job as a clerk in the New South Wales Department of Transport. Yet despite his “unsuitable” background, the dream of training for the priesthood was never far from his mind. He attended night school to complete his high school education and was accepted into the seminary, receiving his priestly ordination in Sydney in 1949. After two years in parish ministry, he was sent to Rome to study canon law and then became the first Australian to be accepted at the prestigious Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy which trains priests to serve in the Holy See’s diplomatic corps. Nobody was more surprised than Cassidy himself, who had never imagined a career outside of his native Australia. In his autobiography he reflects on his feelings of trepidation, mixed with a deep sense of service to the Church:
