He’s still kind of a Catholic.  Kind of.  At any rate, he’s inspiring:

The allusion to the church of his boyhood is significant. While Heaney is no longer a believing Catholic, he acknowledges Catholicism as a continuing influence, above all on his sense of the value of “passive suffering”: “But the idea that your own travails could earn grace for others, for the souls in purgatory, for instance, was appealing: my mind worked on those lines all right, my sense that there was value in selfless endurance.” Indeed, the “discipline” at St. Columb’s, “when all’s said and done, was essentially a preparation for religious vocation.” Even in the more worldly environment of Queen’s College, Belfast, Heaney recalls ruefully, “everybody was provided with their own inner priest.”

The inner priest survives in Heaney the poet not in any dogma or doctrine, but in his sense that it is his duty to fortify, to offer consolation. His strongest statement of this principle comes in his essay “Joy or Night,” where he considers Philip Larkin’s exceedingly unconsoling poem “Aubade”: “Being brave/Lets no one off the grave./Death is no different whined at than withstood. ” Heaney endorses Miosz’s criticism that Larkin has defaulted on the poet’s obligation to be “on the side of life.” “‘Aubade,’” Heaney writes, “does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favor of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld.”