McCabe, Edward (1816–85), catholic archbishop of Dublin and cardinal, was born 14 February 1816 in James's Street in the Liberties district of Dublin. Of his family nothing is known, unless his father was the Edward McCabe of James's Street, who was admitted to the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union (24 May 1841). After attending a classical school in Dublin conducted by the Rev. Michael Doyle (1780?–1844), he entered St Patrick's College, Maynooth (1833), where, however, his student career ‘was not very brilliant’ (Healy). His ordination to the catholic priesthood for the Dublin archdiocese (24 June 1839) was followed by a curacy at Clontarf. In 1852 he was moved to a curacy, and later to the administratorship, of the pro-cathedral parish. He was nominated vicar apostolic of the eastern district of Cape Colony (30 January 1855), but declined the appointment (equivalent to a bishopric). In 1856 he became parish priest of St Nicholas, Francis Street, a canon of the cathedral, and a vicar general of the archdiocese. In 1865 he moved again, to Kingstown, Co. Dublin, where he remained after being appointed bishop of Gadara in partibus infidelium and auxiliary bishop of Dublin (26 June 1877). He was consecrated at Kingstown (25 July) by the cardinal archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen (qv), who preferred as his assistant an auxiliary (who had no right of succession) to a co-adjutor (who had such a right), as he wished his nephew Patrick Francis Moran (qv), bishop of Ossory, to succeed him as archbishop. McCabe's qualities as a priest – discipline, diligence, and conformity, but not initiative or originality – were qualities that may well have endeared him to Cullen.
When Cullen died (1878), McCabe and Moran emerged as the two most likely candidates for the succession. McCabe, popular with his colleagues, no doubt because he was transparently honest, amiable, and generous, had the votes of a large majority of the diocesan clergy (43 to 7) and the support of the English cardinal, Edward Manning. He was formally appointed archbishop by papal brief on 4 April 1879. The appointment coincided with a worsening agricultural recession in the west of Ireland that gave rise to an agrarian agitation and the formation of the Land League, whose president, Charles Stewart Parnell (qv), after the parliamentary elections of April 1880, became leader of the Irish home rule party in the house of commons. McCabe sympathised with the distressed farmers – he allowed collections in their aid at chapel doors in his diocese (4 January 1880) – but, alarmed at the violence that went with the unrest and at Fenian influence in the Land League, he was hostile to the agitation and to Parnell and his followers. He would not allow Dublin diocesan priests to take any part in the movement and issued several pastoral letters against it. One of these (10 October 1880) appeared on the eve of the trials of Parnell and thirteen other Land Leaguers on various charges connected with the agitation, and when the archbishop of Cashel, Thomas William Croke (qv), was in Rome. Croke challenged McCabe by publicly contributing to a defence fund. Another pastoral letter (13 March 1881), denouncing the newly formed Ladies’ Land League (‘this attempt at degrading the women of Ireland’), resulted in criticism of McCabe by several of his confreres at a bishops’ meeting two days later, and in a letter from Croke (who was fortified by this meeting) to the editor of the Freeman's Journal, published in the issue for 17 March, defending ‘the good Irish ladies who have become Land Leaguers’ and challenging ‘the monstrous imputations cast upon them by the archbishop of Dublin’. Only after Parnell was arrested and issued, from Kilmainham jail, a no-rent manifesto (October) did the disagreement between McCabe and Croke subside.
The height of McCabe's career was his elevation to the cardinalate (27 March 1882). As his predecessor in the Dublin metropolitan see had been a cardinal, McCabe's elevation was hardly surprising, but it was probably due in part to the unofficial diplomacy of George Errington (qv), an Irish home rule MP, who dissented from Parnell's leadership and who regarded participation by priests in agrarian agitation as an abuse. Although McCabe's opposition to Parnell brought him much credit in Rome, it brought him little in Dublin: small public attention was paid to his return from Rome, and the city corporation was unrepresented at his first pontifical high mass as cardinal.
Throughout 1882 McCabe managed to restrain his clergy from political agitation, and at the episcopal meeting of 10 June a resolution was passed prohibiting clergy from attending public meetings without the permission of the local parish priest; this effectively prevented priests from rural dioceses speaking on Parnellite platforms in Dublin. Early in 1883 McCabe had an almost fatal heart attack – a premature report of his death and an obituary were published in The Times on 14 February – and did not fully recover until late July. At the episcopal meeting held earlier that month to consider the papal circular of 11 May condemning the raising of a testimonial fund for Parnell, the chair was taken by the archbishop of Armagh, Daniel McGettigan (qv); instead of endorsing the circular, the bishops blamed the government for agrarian distress. McCabe's illness recurred a year later. At the next episcopal meeting (1 October 1884), presided over by McGettigan, a resolution of Croke's, entrusting the promotion of catholic educational demands exclusively to those MPs led by Parnell and his party, was carried. The cardinal had lost his influence.
McCabe died 11 February 1885 at his house in Eblana Avenue, Kingstown, and was buried at Glasnevin cemetery, where an imposing monument to his memory was erected in 1887. He was only the second Irish bishop in modern times to be made a cardinal; but, unlike Cullen, he ‘failed to effect Rome's will in the Irish church’ (Larkin (1975), 236). His obituarist in the Irish Catholic Directory acknowledged that ‘agricultural Ireland was a sealed book to him’. A portrait of McCabe hangs in Maynooth College.