Parents of girl missing in Portugal met in NZ

When Kate and Gerry McCann are at a low ebb they quietly murmur three words to themselves in Portuguese: esperança, força, coragem. The words mean hope, strength and courage and they were first addressed to them by a priest during the first Sunday Mass after their daughter Madeleine was abducted from their holiday apartment in Portugal.

The words were repeated to them by parishioners after the service and now are something of a mantra for the couple, evidence of the strength of their Catholic faith. That faith has been apparent in much of what the couple have said and done since four-year-old Madeleine disappeared on 3 May.

The couple agreed to talk to The Tablet, welcoming the opportunity to describe how their beliefs have sustained them. They arranged to meet me in Amsterdam, where they were spending a night before another round of interviews and meetings with officials connected with the campaign to find their daughter.

The pair are noticeably close, sitting together on the sofa unselfconsciously holding hands. Mrs McCann looks tanned after more than a month on the Algarve but is terribly thin. As always, she is holding Madeleine's favourite soft toy - a now rather bedraggled pink cat. She has taken out the green and yellow ribbons she usually wears in her hair but there are ribbons on the toy cat and she and her husband wear green and yellow plastic armbands, the colours that denote hope for the missing.

They begin by telling me their faith background. Both are cradle Catholics of Irish extraction. He is the youngest of five and was brought up in Glasgow. She is an only child from Liverpool. They were medical students at Glasgow University when they started going out and only later discovered that they came from similar backgrounds. He jokes that her Catholicism softened the blow when he told his mother he was going to marry an English girl.

Mr McCann says there were periods when he lapsed, and both concede that religion was not foremost in their minds in their teens and twenties. They nod in agreement when I suggest that their faith began to mean much more to them after their had children. As well as Madeleine they have two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie.

Two years ago, after spending a year living in Amsterdam, the family moved to Rothley in Leicestershire. Mrs McCann works there as a part-time GP and her husband is a cardiologist at Glenfield General Hospital in Leicester. They particularly liked attending the Catholic church in Rothley where Mrs McCann's aunt is a eucharistic minister and her uncle plays the organ. On Sundays, Mr McCann would stay at home caring for the twins while his wife would take Madeleine to Mass. At the age of three she had just started going to the children's liturgy.

Then came the week's holiday in a complex at Praia da Luz on the Portuguese Algarve coast. Madeleine was taken as she slept in the family's apartment with the twins while her parents dined in a restaurant close by.

In low tones Mrs McCann explains their first reaction: "There was a period of absolute fear and panic. We were both quite hysterical."

After calling their family in Britain, they spoke to Fr Paul Seddon, the priest who married them and baptised Madeleine.

"At one point I would say the only thing we had was prayer and at one point I remember just slumping in the bedroom. I phoned Paul and he asked, ‘What can I do?' And I said, ‘Just pray, please pray,'" said Mr McCann.

At first there was the fear that Madeleine was dead. Two things changed that. The first was a meeting with a psychologist sent from Britain to see them.

As Mr McCann explained: "We couldn't get out of heads that she was likely to be dead and we were truly, truly grieving. But then the psychologist said, ‘Is there any other possibility?' And then he started channelling negatives and saying, ‘Of course there are other possibilities.' And we started to see that."

The second was meeting the local parish priest, Fr José Manuel Pacheco. Fr Zé, as he is popularly known, is a great favourite with the McCanns: warm, genial and inspiring. He speaks fluent English and Mr McCann said he had worked hard to bring together the British expatriate community and Portuguese Catholics.

It was Fr Zé at that first Sunday Mass who exhorted them to have hope, strength and courage. That evening he came to say the rosary with them at their apartment and invited his parishioners as well. Was it all a bit much?

"Not at all, it was lovely. There were about 50 women and they brought the children. It was a huge comfort," she says.

The parish priest also gave the McCanns the keys to the church so that they could pray there alone in the evenings. It was while they were doing this early in the first week that Mr McCann had an extraordinary experience.

"When I was praying I started thinking of all the things that were happening. There were lots and lots of ideas in my head and how we could make things better and I was really feeling very down and not sure which way to proceed. I had this mental image of being in a tunnel and instead of the light at the end of the tunnel being extremely narrow and a distant spot, the light opened up and the tunnel got wider and wider and went in many different directions. I talked to you [Kate] about it and said, ‘I am not prepared to pursue one path. We are going to do everything in our power to influence things.'

"It was almost like something - I am not saying it was the Holy Spirit - came into me and gave me that image. That is when I really felt I had a clear path."

Was it a religious experience?

"I can't say it was a vision because I am not clear what a vision is but I had a mental image and it certainly helped me decide. I became a man possessed that night. The next day I was up at dawn, making phone calls."

A few days later the McCanns attended an evening vigil for Madeleine at Fr Zé's church organised by the local scouts. The service, in a church lit by candles, was, they say, the most uplifting they had ever been to. There came a point where the congregation was asked to unravel a large ball of green wool passing it from one person to another until it encompassed the entire gathering. The very memory of this service seems to give the McCanns a lift and they complete each other's sentences as they remember it.

"We sang a song, and we just kept singing the same verse, ‘Nothing will separate us', over and over again and the church was completely overflowing. The wool finally got all the way round and the message was ‘nothing will separate us and we are all united'. We were joined in this. As we were leaving the people just kept giving us flowers."

The McCanns' campaign has involved every possible avenue being used to raise the profile of Madeleine. There has been a certain resentment about it but Kate McCann says they have been careful to stress they are not the only parents who have suffered in this way.

"Madeleine is incredibly precious to us. Since this happened we have been made more aware of how many missing children there are. It is awful that we didn't know the scale of it before. Madeleine is as special to us as other children are to their parents."

Criticism of the McCanns' high-profile strategy followed their trips to Fatima, Rome and elsewhere. The couple were astonished that their request to meet the Pope was granted immediately after they contacted Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. The cardinal told them he would do the same for anyone in their situation.

"These comments from people like the cardinal really helped sustain us. We know the criticism is small but when you are clinging to positives and hope and prayer, criticism does hit home quite hard when you would normally shrug it off."

The visit to Rome involved the use of a private jet supplied by the retail multimillionaire Sir Philip Green. While the McCanns realised that using the plane could generate negative reactions they felt they had to be consistent in accepting every genuine offer of help, no matter how large or small. Private jets, they pointed out, shorten considerably the time they have to spend away from the twins.

The hardest thing to ask these parents who have prayed so fervently for their daughter is how they will feel about their faith if she is not returned. Mr McCann was first to respond. "If we don't get Madeleine back alive and well, I am sure our faith will be severely tested. At the end of it, we will still have our faith and we will also have comfort that Madeleine will be looked after. We haven't dwelt on that but I think that is what we will be left with. Our friends, our family, the Church have really rallied round. I think that's the key thing for me."

Then his wife spoke: "I have considered that as well and I have felt guilty asking, ‘Will this make or break my faith?' And yet at the same time you could argue that what's happened in the first place could make or break your faith and it hasn't. It's done the opposite. It has given us hope and strength.