This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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Among the historians taken to task by Winning’s research was Sir John Connell, and advocate and procurator of the Church of Scotland, who in 1850 had published a book entitled A Treatise on the Law of Scotland respecting Tithes. Winning was dismissive of his work, accusing him of ‘fundamental errors’ in the very nature of tithes. While Connell argued that it was not clear who received the money, Winning corrected him, insisting that it was for the care of souls. Withering lines such as ‘had the writer been more conversant with Church law’ appear with increasing frequency. Another error pointed out and corrected with visible relish was the belief that tithes were first introduced in Scotland and then England, when in fact the chronology was reversed with Scotland among the last countries in Europe to adopt the tithe system. Although Winning conceded abuses had taken place, he disagreed with his Protestant counterparts on the extent of them. ‘There were abuses [but] all medieval religious and clergy were not as rapacious as Scottish historians would have us believe.’ Winning was also to reveal a mild disregard for the monastic orders; the feelings were common among diocesan priests of his day, who felt they were consistently being compared unfavourably to their more ‘saintly brethren’ in the orders. At the time he wrote: ‘Perhaps Scotland has never been able completely to restrain her love of monastic institutions, a weakness which in earlier centuries had retarded her development as a Christian community.’ Winning was to end his thesis with a clarion call: ‘Nevertheless, an institution Catholic in origin and Protestant in fact, survives today to remind thoughtful men of how the Protestant Church robbed the True Church of her temporal possessions in Scotland … We trust that this work will be a modest contribution to the ever-increasing volume of information on the past glories of Catholic Scotland.’

His examiners obviously agreed. When combined with his successful completion of a final exam and a forty-five minute talk in front of five professors on a subject chosen only one day previously, Winning once again emerged from the Gregorian University cum laude. In the previous three years Dr Winning, as he was now known, had further demonstrated his abilities. As he left Rome, bad news waited at home: his mother was dying.

FIVE (#ulink_a8ec4ef9-9b63-50c5-ae33-c8eb23ba591e)

A Time to Die (#ulink_a8ec4ef9-9b63-50c5-ae33-c8eb23ba591e)

‘When I was walking behind the coffin, I felt very proud that she had been my mother.’

THOMAS WINNING

When the specialist emerged from his office, having just seen Agnes Winning, and approached her son, his first few words told the whole story: ‘Excuse me, are you the next of kin?’ Winning rose from his seat in the waiting room of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where his mother had been booked for a series of tests the results of which, judging by the doctor’s expression, were not good. He had returned from Rome in July 1953 to discover his mother looking pale, weak and suffering severe lower-back pain. It had been a persistent problem since she returned from a trip to Lourdes with her daughter Margaret in May. As the local doctor had admitted to being baffled at the cause, Winning had urged her to seek further medical attention.

The cause, he was told, was a cancerous tumour growing in her rectum. Exploratory surgery was now required to determine how far the disease had spread, but the description the doctor used was ‘hopeless’. The operation was scheduled for the following day and as Agnes had no wish to spend an unnecessary night in hospital, they travelled home to Craigneuk by bus and in silence.

Winning, with the doctor’s agreement, had chosen not to reveal the diagnosis to his mother and she had not asked. Cancer was treated like a curse in the 1950s, the word was rarely uttered. The operation the following day was pitifully swift: no sooner had the surgeons opened her up, than the decision was made to close on the grounds that there was little they could do. When told by a lady in the neighbouring bed that she had been absent scarcely an hour, Agnes Winning took this as a sign that nothing had been found. Winning and his father had no intention of disavowing her of such comfort, even after Patrick Macmillan, the son of the doctor who had treated Winning as a child for pneumonia, and who was now working as a registrar at the Royal, explained that she might last no longer than three weeks. He explained that all they could do was administer a colostomy in an attempt to relieve the pain from the tumour pressing on the nerves of her legs.

Agnes Winning was to live for one more year, lulled for the first six months by the belief that the colostomy had corrected the complaint and for her final few months cushioned by the new happiness her daughter had discovered. The truth of her mother’s inoperable cancer had been hidden from Margaret by her father and brother and she was left under the delusion that Agnes would one day recover. At twenty-six, Margaret was now a qualified schoolteacher and had recently fallen in love. Edward McCarron, or Eddie to all, had been a fellow pupil with Margaret at Our Lady’s High School, he had worked as a lorry driver for the armed forces during the war and was currently working as a grocer. The couple had first met through the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS) where Eddie was a member and Margaret belonged to the Associates of the CYMS, a women’s group which organized dances and prepared any food the men might require. It is an indication of the exalted position in which Winning was placed that prior to his return home, she had been fretful about his opinion of Eddie. Since childhood, her brother had been her hero; even when the truth emerged about her mother’s condition Margaret was not angered by the deception, believing instead that her brother had been protecting her from unnecessary anguish. Her fears over Eddie were to prove groundless as both men struck up a firm friendship, with Eddie agreeing to teach his future brother-in-law how to drive. An evening excursion with Eddie at the wheel was to constitute the Winnings’ final outing as a family. On Easter Monday 1954, Agnes and Thomas senior were joined by their son and daughter on the back seat of a hired car for a short trip to Largs, a scenic little town that looked out on to the Firth of Clyde and boasted the finest Italian café in the country. Nardini’s Café was owned by a family of Italian immigrants and drew visitors from across Scotland to sample their unique blend of ice cream and revel in the culinary delight of their knickerbocker glories. Winning impressed his family by ordering in Italian and together the five scraped their glasses clean and watched the sun set.

Agnes Winning was to die hard. After the outing to Largs, she was unable to leave the house again and was confined to a bed made up in the living room. Although Ellen Donnelly, a cousin who was a night nurse, visited each morning to administer morphine injections, the pain in her legs proved interminable and the distress turned her dark hair white. Agnes knew she was dying but refused to discuss her condition or even acknowledge the colostomy; all she did was plead for the pain to cease. Winning found his mother’s slow, unsightly death to be a crucifixion. Where possible he visited every day to bring her Holy Communion and each day off or week’s holiday was spent by her side or supporting his father, for whom the experience was equally unbearable. On 22 August she slipped into a coma and one week later, on 29 August 1954, she died at the age of sixty-two while surrounded by her family. In a curious twist that sustained the family’s belief that she had at last found peace her hair, once so white, turned back to black and the lines that riddled her face faded. ‘It was weird,’ remembered Margaret. ‘But then I suppose all the pain had gone.’

While father and daughter wept openly, Winning remained stoical. ‘Thomas didn’t cry. He was devastated, but he didn’t cry. I guess he thought he had to do it for my sake,’ said Margaret. Emotions, though painfully felt, were left unexpressed as he attempted to support his father and sister in the manner of a priest as well as that of a son and a brother. It was he who organized the funeral at St Patrick’s, the church his mother had supported for so many years, and it was he who, in a remarkable feat of self-control, presided over the funeral Mass, something he described as a ‘great honour’.

I can remember the funeral well. It is a terrible experience [the death of your mother]. The gap is never filled. I felt very proud that she had brought me up because I could not point to anything other than she had done her level best. By all the social standards we were poor, but you never knew it. I never had a patch on my trousers. When I was walking behind the coffin I felt very proud that she had been my mother.

His mother’s death marked the conclusion of a difficult year in which Winning’s life both personally and professionally had seemed to conspire against him. When not fretting over her health and the terrible toll it was taking on his father, Winning was consumed by his work which over the past twelve months had been less than comforting. Monsignor Alex Hamilton, who had been parish priest at St Patrick’s while he was an altar boy, had suggested to Gerry Rogers, the Vicar General, that Winning join him at his new parish of St Mary’s in the neighbouring town of Hamilton and serve as one of his three curates. On paper, it appeared a perfect plan, one that conjured the image of an old mentor taking a young charge under his wing, and so Rogers agreed but Winning was to find the new dynamic extremely difficult. The problem was that Hamilton’s view of his former altar boy had frozen with Winning still in short trousers. While he had gone on to develop into a determined, opinionated and ambitious young priest, the monsignor continued to treat him in the dismissive manner of a child. Winning came to believe that the older priest was emotionally stunted, unable or unwilling to either give or receive affection; a characteristic he attributed to Hamilton’s loss of his mother while he was just an infant. As parish priest, Hamilton kept a similar distance from his parishioners. A shy man, he rarely made home visits and relied heavily on his curates for information. Winning said: ‘You were a functionary for him. You did not get the feeling that you had a personable relationship with him. He never gave you any great support or enthusiasm.’

Sharing the parish house and the task of home visits, daily Mass and the organization of community groups such as the CYMS were two other curates – John Murray, an older priest in his late forties who was desperate for promotion to a parish of his own, and John Boyle, a chubby pioneer, who as a member of the Irish temperance movement was sworn to abstinence for five years. Winning did not bond with Murray, but developed a great affection for Boyle, with whom he would later holiday among the vineyards of France once his ‘sentence’, as Winning described the pledge, was complete. Hamilton had little time for tittle-tattle or parish gossip so the dinner table where the four dined each evening became a forum where discussions on theology, politics and the morality of nuclear weapons were passed around with the green beans and boiled potatoes. This was one aspect of Hamilton’s cold character that Winning enjoyed and it was here that his strong lifelong opposition to nuclear weapons hardened. By 1954, the Second World War was scarcely a decade past but fears of a new nuclear holocaust were growing.

A mini-mushroom cloud had risen over the diocese in February 1954 when the announcement was made that Bishop Edward Douglas was to retire on health grounds. Douglas’s leadership of the diocese had been little short of disastrous; he was nervous, inarticulate, and wore a perpetual frown of concern. He had also developed a drinking problem in response to the pressures of office, and Gerry Rogers had increasingly been forced to deputize on occasions when Douglas was physically unable to perform his duties. Although his vicar general remained as supportive as possible, the situation was untenable and the farce collapsed when the bishop was found drunk on the kitchen floor by the Apostolic Delegate, who had agreed to pay a visit to the diocese to quietly review his continuing suitability for office. Douglas was swiftly removed from the diocese, appointed titular Bishop of Botri, an ancient Holy Land diocese, and retired to the diocese of Aberdeen, where he attempted to recover through attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, an American society that had arrived in Scotland only a few years earlier.

The true reason for his departure was hidden from the public but remained an open secret among the clergy and was another destabilizing factor in Winning’s work. He had only met Bishop Douglas once but the loss of a bishop was always preceded by an air of uncertainty and unease prior to a new appointment. And then there was the marriage tribunal: two days each week, Monday and Wednesday, Winning joined John McQuade at a detached redbrick villa in the more salubrious end of Bothwell, an attractive and leafy suburb of Hamilton. Between nine o’clock in the morning and six o’clock at night when they returned to their respective parishes, Winning and McQuade attempted to convert the theory learned in Rome into what was an often difficult practice. There are few areas of Catholicism as misunderstood as the Church’s prohibition of remarriage after divorce without a declaration of nullity, better known as an annulment. To the unaware, there exists a troubling double standard, but to the Church, the procedure remains utterly consistent with her belief in the indissolubility of a true marriage. The key is to understand that marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church is a sacrament made between two people and witnessed by God; it is a knot tied by two willing individuals who promise to accept children if so fortunate and to nurture one another until death. The indissolubility of marriage is predicated on the words of Jesus in St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Whomsoever My Father has united, let no man put asunder.’ Annulment is based upon the fact that the exchange of consent brings marriage into existence. Therefore if consent is faulty, no marriage occurs. If it can be shown, for example, that consent was obtained by force or given by someone who was incapable of doing so, or given with conditions affecting permanence, children, fidelity, or the nature of marriage itself, then it might be possible to obtain a declaration of nullity. So, while a marriage may have taken place, a ceremony held, and vows and rings exchanged, the sacrament may not necessarily have occurred and God has ‘united’ no one. If a girl was forced to marry against her wishes there could be no consent; if a man knew he was homosexual there may be no consent; if demands or conditions were placed on the marriage by either party, a common occurrence in Italy where a husband would often make his wife promise that her mother would never live with them, there could be no true consent. The same principles applied if a wife agreed to marry on the condition that the couple not have children: once again there could be no true consent. One of Winning’s jobs was to sift through a marriage that had collapsed for any evidence that would support an application for annulment.

The work taught me about human nature. It opened up a completely different world about people’s behaviour and how they think and act. I would be wrong if I said it didn’t shock me. You can be disappointed that people can be so twisted. It gave you an awful strong compassion for people who had to suffer at the hands of other people, especially the women. There were some bad cases. What I could never understand was how someone could love a woman so much that he wanted to marry her and then turn out to be a right swine. You developed a tremendous sympathy for people who had to live with people who were abnormal.

At the time, very few cases involving two Catholics constituted grounds for annulment. If couples could not live together they were expected to live apart with no hope of remarriage in the Church, and if they should marry outside the Church, in a registry office or within another denomination, they were barred for ever from receiving holy communion and were viewed by the Church as ‘living in sin’; any sexual relations with their new husband or wife were branded as ‘adultery’. On many occasions, Winning had to turn away desperate women (there were few men) who wished an annulment but for whom no chinks in their marriage could be found, both partners having been baptized Catholics who had willingly entered into the marriage which was considered sacramental. Winning had compassion for their situation, but lost no sleep over their plight; the Church was powerless and unable to defy or change what was understood to be God’s law. On one occasion, a woman visited Winning at St Mary’s parish house and refused to believe his statement that there was no case. She finally accepted Mgr Hamilton’s agreement with Winning after she sought what she described as an ‘older and wiser head’.

A more palatable part of Winning’s work was issuing approvals for mixed marriages. At the time, a marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic was permitted but not supported; a bride or groom were more likely to fall away from their faith in such a marriage and so, in an attempt to prevent this, certain agreements were secured before permission was granted. The non-Catholic partner was required to swear an oath that any children born of the marriage would be raised as Catholics; this was in operation until 1970, when the onus and oath were switched to the Catholic partner. The marriage itself usually took place at a bare side altar on a weekday morning, as if God had agreed to attend but did not wish for any witnesses.

Yet another part of his towering workload involved the dissolution of a non-baptized person’s previous marriage to allow him or her to remarry a Catholic and therefore for the Catholic to be able to continue to practise their Catholic faith. This was achieved using a rule known as the Pauline Privilege and hinged upon the previous marriage being viewed as ‘non-sacramental’ by proving that neither party had been baptized at the time of the ceremony. In order to prove this point, cases evolved like mini-detective stories with Winning having to track down and interview the petitioner’s parents and those of his or her former spouse as well as check Church records. If one member of the couple was baptized, the dissolution could still take place using a second rule, the Petrine Privilege, however, while a local bishop could act on the first rule, the second rule was at the discretion of the officials of the Holy Office – now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The preparation for even the simplest case involved bulging files and a myriad reports that had to be rendered into Latin, which remains the Church’s official language. Two days each week was never enough and the work sloshed into Winning’s evenings and flooded his weekends.

It was not uncommon for cases to involve a spouse from another country and this meant liaising with that nation’s appointed tribunal and then translating witness statements back into English. One such case led to Winning being introduced to a teacher who would become one of his closest female friends. Susan McCormack was a language teacher who specialized in German and Italian and taught at a small private school, run by some Franciscan nuns in Bothwell. A diminutive figure, she possessed a determined character which surpassed her height and intelligence which Winning came to admire especially as she refused to pander to his position as a priest, an outlook he found distinctly refreshing. They were introduced by John McQuade, whose own family in Ireland were friendly with Susan’s parents, and who was a regular visitor to their council house at 25 Alexander Avenue in the Viewpark area of Hamilton, where Susan (who was and would remain unmarried) also lived. After assisting with a complicated translation, Susan and both priests became regular dining companions. ‘The basis of my friendship, and this is going to sound snobbish, was that we were educated and interested in educational things,’ explained McCormack. In order to protect their reputations from gossip, neither priest dined alone with her and if one was visiting without the other it was always at her parents’ house.

The diocese of Motherwell had been leaderless for over a year when in May 1955 a new bishop was appointed. During the intervening period Archbishop Donald Campbell of Glasgow had visited once a week to ensure diocesan affairs progressed, but now his presence was no longer required. Bishop James Scanlan, the former Bishop of Dunkeld, who was based in Dundee, was the new leader, a promotion which found no favour with Gerry Rogers. Tensions had existed between the Rogers and Scanlan families drifting back a generation when both men’s fathers had vied for the title of first family of Glasgow’s East End. Frank Rogers was a talented sports journalist while Thomas Scanlan was reportedly Glasgow’s first Catholic doctor. Each family had a different view of the faith; while the Rogers supported their son in his vocation, Scanlan’s father was so critical of the clergy that his son travelled to Westminster to pursue his vocation.

Both men were opposites: Rogers had little time for airs and graces and no desire to separate himself from parishioners, and in comparison, James Scanlan would become known as the ‘last of the prince bishops’, never setting foot in public unless dressed in the finest purple robes, complete with gloves and elegant ring of office. To signify his influence, he had Ronald Knox, then one of the most celebrated Catholic speakers in Britain, lecture on the role of the bishop at his enthronement on 8 September 1955. Winning was impressed, as he was already an admirer of Knox’s work. Rogers was less so. Shortly after Scanlan’s arrival, he moved Rogers from his home in Bothwell, which he took himself, and placed him in charge of the cathedral parish. Previously, Rogers had been free to run the diocese unhindered by the responsibility of a parish, but the arrival of a confident bishop had redressed the balance. Both men went on to work well in partnership but there was no doubt who was in charge.

Winning’s admiration for Rogers grew when the priest was billeted at St Mary’s for three months while his new quarters at the cathedral were prepared. Both men spent hours in conversation on matters of canon law, parish business and the role of the priest, and Winning became quite taken with Rogers’ relaxed, off-the-cuff manner. Rogers had an innate ability for problem solving which permitted him to cut through bureaucratic difficulties, and intelligence which saw him juggle his workload as vicar general with the completion of a degree in civil law at Glasgow University.

Winning’s first encounter with the ‘prince bishop’ was in the confines of Bertrand’s Barber Shop in Hamilton’s town centre. Scanlan had never tired of the traditional short, back and sides he wore as a young soldier and was seated for his fortnightly trim. As Winning stepped through the door he recognized him and said, ‘Hello, my lord.’ Scanlan replied, ‘Hello, Father.’ Then added, ‘You are just the very man I have been looking for. Come tomorrow at four o’clock.’ He then turned back to his paper. The invitation was a concern as bishops were distant figures to fear. Winning had only met the previous bishop once, when Douglas told him that he did not expect to see him in his office ever again or, as he explained, ‘it will be for a very unpleasant reason’. Douglas believed the only reason to meet his priests in person was to discipline them. Scanlan’s reason was actually benign. When Winning arrived, he was presented with a paper on marriage and canon law which the bishop had written and which he now wished edited and subbed down to size. Winning returned the paper two days later suitably corrected. Rogers had already spotlighted Winning for Scanlan as a talent to watch and for once the two men were in agreement.

The late Derek Worlock, Archbishop of Liverpool, who died in 1996, once described the role of the bishop’s secretary as follows: ‘A good, efficient secretary is a priceless jewel. He must be a diplomat, magician, martyr, mind reader and psychologist. He must be able to spell, punctuate and write correct English. He must have the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon and the physical endurance of a mule.’

(#litres_trial_promo) When in 1958 Thomas Winning was asked to take on the role of secretary to Bishop Scanlan, he was unaware of the attributes required, but would have three years in which to learn. Worlock, however, had missed one crucial characteristic: the bishop’s secretary must be able to drive. Scanlan had never mastered the skill, believing the idea of driving oneself to be vulgar. So initially, while Scanlan’s gardener was taking driving lessons, it fell on Winning’s shoulders to act as chauffeur. The job was claustrophobic. For the first three months the new secretary lived with the bishop at his Bothwell home, a situation that was to have a lasting influence on Winning’s future living habits. ‘It was such a bind. It’s why I would never have another fellow living with me,’ he explained. He found it impossible to relax; although the housekeeper was civil to him, he felt that his presence jolted the smooth running of the house. When Scanlan asked for his ‘usual’ drink after work, Winning agreed to the same, imagining a fine Chardonnay, but instead tasted tonic water for the first time. The next night Winning simply asked for a glass of milk.

Even a birthday visit to his sister offered no relief. Just as he was sitting down to dinner and his favourite dessert of clootie dumpling, the phone rang with Scanlan asking Winning to collect him and his friend Mgr William Heard and to drive them around the district visiting elderly friends. Margaret advised him to tell the bishop to take ‘a running jump’, but instead Winning collected his car keys and left. He had sworn an oath of obedience at his ordination and he would never break it, regardless of how tedious or inconvenient the request. ‘I had always felt that a priest was ordained for people and for pastoral work, not to be a flunky for a bishop.’

The majority of Winning’s work was desk-bound, collecting statistics for Rome, answering letters, and putting forward requests for marriages. Scanlan could be difficult to deal with. He had a strong temper and he would threaten those who displeased him by saying he would ‘blow out their brains’. He could also be deeply insensitive. When a priest of the diocese – who had been a close friend of Bishop Douglas – died, he issued instructions that his predecessor not attend the funeral on the grounds that it would cause embarrassment to the diocese to be reminded of past mistakes. The decision was reversed when Fr Vincent Cowley, a friend of both Douglas and the deceased, strode into Scanlan’s office against Winning’s protestations and berated the bishop for his behaviour. Douglas subsequently attended the funeral.

Winning was soon sent to stay at the cathedral house alongside Gerry Rogers, before he was given a more permanent appointment as chaplain to the Franciscan convent in Bothwell where Susan McCormack taught. The work was low maintenance, requiring only Mass each morning in the oratory, confession, and regular visits to the school. The position also offered accommodation in a small flat above the lodge gate at the entrance to the school. The role of bishop’s secretary was an education for Winning. ‘I learned you should treat your fellow priests with concern and that you are there to help, not to boss them. There was an opportunity to store up these experiences. You can become too bureaucratic and autocratic. You can treat people like bits of paper with no more importance than a form.’

The 1950s were a decade characterized by loss and success. The death of his mother had been followed by Winning’s promotion to bishop’s secretary, and further advancement would follow the death of his father. Thomas Winning senior had repeatedly said after his wife’s death that he wished God would take him to join her. Instead he remained alive to witness his daughter’s marriage (officiated by his son) in 1955, and the birth of his two grandchildren, Agnes, born on 26 August 1956, and Edward, born on 3 January 1958 – three events which brought a great happiness to his twilight years. He would regularly stroll with each child in its pram and commented that he had never spoken to so many women in his life as when he was accompanied by his infant granddaughter or grandson.

His daughter and son-in-law and the two children had moved into the family home and as Thomas Winning suffered from angina, he was encouraged by Margaret to stay in bed each morning while she fed and dressed the children. On 2 March 1959, he had been suffering from flu, and when Margaret came up to his room with a breakfast of porridge and toast, she found him confused and distressed; Agnes was playing on the floor and the window was wide open. ‘He kept saying: “When will Thomas be here?”’ said Margaret. ‘Every time I spoke to him it was “When will Thomas be here?”’ He knew it was his son’s day off, but Winning, as usual, had been delayed. He had popped into the office to check if everything was satisfactory and had been sent to the bank. Meanwhile, Margaret had visited her cousin, who lived next door, and asked for assistance in shutting the bedroom window but when John Canning climbed the stairs he found Thomas senior unconscious. Scooping Agnes from the floor he ran downstairs to call a doctor and a priest from a neighbour’s telephone. After returning from the bank, Winning received a telephone call urging him to return home at once.

By the time I got home he was dead. He had died of hypertension.

It was a brain haemorrhage. It was quite upsetting that I was not there when he died. I had quite a lot of time that morning. I could have been round at Scanlan’s earlier and then got over to the house. I don’t feel guilty, but I wish I had been able to speak to him before he died. He was a stout wee fellow and we used to tell him to go easy because of his heart, but he would just start to laugh as I got angrier and angrier with him.

That day the anger was directed at himself and internalized. When Margaret told him how his father had been pleading for him, he felt nauseous with grief and regret that, however unwittingly, the Church had taken him from his father when he required him most. As with the death of his mother, Winning pulled down the shutters and grieved for his father in privacy and silence. The following morning he was standing at the gates of the church speaking to parishioners as they arrived for 7.30 a.m. Mass and Susan McCormack and her sister, unaware of his loss, approached and exchanged idle conversation for a few moments before moving inside. ‘His father had died the day before and he never said a word. He was so full of hurt he could not say so to anyone.’

It was not until later that day when McCormack passed him in the school corridor that he broke the news. ‘I could have dropped dead myself. I said, “Why didn’t you tell us? May and I would have just been so sorry to hear it.” But he never gave it away.’

Unable to be at his father’s deathbed, Winning took what little comfort he could in providing the funeral he had always wanted. Born illegitimate in a dingy Edinburgh tenement, Thomas Winning wanted to depart a gentleman under the guidance of a bishop, and Scanlan was only too happy to assist in his young secretary’s wishes. The funeral took place at St Patrick’s, where the pews were packed with men young and old who remembered with affection Thomas Winning’s kindness and Christian charity.

Less than a year after Winning lost his father, he lost, for the moment, his mentor. Gerry Rogers was now bound for Rome to replace Mgr William Theodore Heard on the Roman Rota following Heard’s elevation to the college of cardinals. Originally a priest of the English diocese of Southwark, Heard had been born in Edinburgh and is now known as Scotland’s forgotten Cardinal. He had been rewarded with a red hat for his decades of service to the Vatican, latterly as Dean of the Roman Rota, a role that involved weekly meetings with the Pope to brief him on recent cases and disputes. The Catholic population of Scotland was delighted, though few had ever met him, that a Scottish cardinal had been appointed, the first in over four hundred years since the assassination of Cardinal Beaton in 1546. Scanlan was overjoyed and travelled to Rome for the consistory, where it was also announced on 6 February 1960 that Rogers would take his place in Rome. At a private farewell dinner in Motherwell, Rogers explained his doubts about the task ahead: ‘You can imagine a dedicated life of this kind cannot go on with human resources alone. These brilliant men who are among the best jurists in the world have given themselves completely to this work. The atmosphere is one of complete self-sacrifice. That is why I ask for your prayers so that I can persevere and that I may not let anyone down.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Winning raised his glass and said a prayer.

By 1960, Winning was still employed as the bishop’s secretary and spent his dwindling free time organizing Catholic scout troops. The extent of his interest in Baden-Powell’s organization could have been stitched on the back of a first aid badge, but Scanlan believed the Scouts were crucial to integrating Catholics back into the ranks of the establishment and so encouraged his secretary’s work. The life of the outdoorsman failed to enamour Winning who, despite taking part in a variety of weekend camps, failed to secure the required number of badges. The Scout work remained a source of great amusement to his friends. Susan McCormack remembered taking the salute from his troop and stifling laughter at Winning ‘in shorts with the nobbliest pair of knees you’ve ever seen’.

At the time, Winning was living alone in a small flat at the entrance to the convent, a situation he never wished for and did not enjoy. A gregarious person by nature, he missed the camaraderie of the seminary and parish house and would feel lonely and disspirited when he returned each night. One evening, as he sat by the fire, he began to feel queasy and rushed to the bathroom and was violently sick. In the dim light the toilet bowl appeared black and he cursed the Bovril he had taken earlier in the day; it was not until he came back into the living room and noticed how weak he felt that he realized he had vomited blood. The doctor confirmed his ulcer was bleeding again and he was advised to adjust his diet. Stress seemed to exacerbate the condition and though his health improved over the next year it collapsed in October 1961 following his latest promotion.

A vacancy had emerged at the Scots College in Rome for a spiritual director and Mgr Conway, who worked in the diocesan office alongside Winning, said he had discovered the name of the new appointment. Winning regrettably insisted that he be allowed to guess and fired a series of names at Conway who shook his head at each suggestion. ‘So who is it, then?’ asked Winning, to which Conway pointed his finger at him. His appointment had been requested by his old vice-rector, Mgr Flanagan, and Scanlan had agreed. Initially Winning was asked to fly out the following week, but he requested, and received, almost a month to prepare himself and say goodbye once again to friends and family. The appointment was a terrible blow to Winning for it targeted his Achilles’ heel, his spirituality, and was compounded by the decision, made a condition on his release by Scanlan, that he complete extra studies at the Roman Rota. Almost immediately, his health began to falter. ‘I do believe it was the pressure and the strain of wondering how I would cope,’ he reflected.

The night before his departure for Rome, Margaret and Eddie invited him to dinner and to stay over in an attempt to calm his nerves, but after dinner Winning became so weak and sick the doctor was called and he was advised not to fly. Unwilling to delay his departure any longer, Winning insisted he be driven to the airport the following morning, where he took off towards the largest storm in the Catholic Church’s recent history: the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) was now beginning to unfold.

SIX (#ulink_33d20fc5-d88d-5072-89a5-daeb16f9132e)

No One is Far Away (#ulink_33d20fc5-d88d-5072-89a5-daeb16f9132e)

‘We were the Church of Silence.’

FATHER JOHN FITZSIMMONS

‘I was out of my depth.’

CARDINAL GORDON GRAY

On 11 October 1962, Pope John XXIII was carried aloft on the Sedia Gestatoria, to the blasts of silver trumpets. Slowly, the Swiss Guard in plumed steel helmets and yellow, blue and red striped uniforms bore the Holy Father up the central aisle of the Basilica of St Peter. Tracing the sign of the cross in the air, he gazed around at a sight last witnessed ninety-eight years ago: a Vatican Council. But where in 1870 the attendance was just 737, this time the 2,600 bishops drawn from the farthest corners of the globe had turned St Peter’s into a forest of mitres; a living testament to the growth and power of the Roman Catholic Church.

The fact that they were now here, sitting on giant tiers of seats on either side of the main aisle, like so many spectators at a baseball game, was evidence of the power of the new pontiff who had been elected in 1958 after the death of Pius XII. Cardinal Angelo Guiseppe Roncalli, the Patriarch of Venice, was seventy-six years old and considered a caretaker whose sole role was to keep the Sedia Gestatoria warm for Giovanni Battista Montini, the Archbishop of Milan. Roncalli had other, very firm ideas. Just six months after his election, on 25 January 1959, he announced to the world that there would be a second Vatican Council, ‘to let some air in’, as the Pope later explained, gesturing to the open windows. His predecessor, Pius XII, had considered a second Council, but he allowed himself to be dissuaded by the cardinals of the Roman Curia, the senior civil servants of the Church by whom all change was to be resisted. John XXIII, a Vatican diplomat for twenty-five years, was aware of their Machiavellian ways and had sprung the announcement on them, instructing key people to applaud on cue. The Pope now wished the Holy Spirit to circulate through the lead-lined windows of the Vatican City. During his career, he had perceived the Spirit’s ‘pneuma’ in changes such as the end of the great empires of Britain and Germany, the freedom of the working classes and increased rights for women. The time was now right for the Church to succumb to the Spirit’s grace.

The previous twenty-one general councils of the Catholic Church had principally righted perceived wrongs, defined dogmas, overthrown emperors and condemned heresy. In the mind of John XXIII, the Church needed to dispense not severity, but the medicine of mercy. The approach fitted the personality of the new Pope who would become beloved as ‘the good Pope John’ for what was perceived as his charming ‘peasant’ ways. He was in total contrast to his predecessor. If Pius XII was a regal figure, John XXIII was a jester who teased children and asked them to think why God had made him so ugly. Yet the Pope was no fool: with steely determination he pushed through plans for an ecumenical council that would be witnessed by other faiths and would be, most importantly, pastoral – every attempt was to be made to express the essence of the Catholic faith in new, more accessible ways. The key word was to become aggiornamento, Italian for ‘updating’.

The preparations for the Council began almost immediately with ideas for the main agenda sought from every bishop, the head of each religious order, each member of the Roman Curia and staff at Catholic universities. Over nine thousand three hundred proposals were gathered, sorted, and repetitions removed and distributed to the preparatory commissions who were appointed by John XXIII and charged with the responsibility of producing over seventy documents. These documents were reduced to twenty texts and reduced again by 1962 to seven documents to be circulated among the world’s bishops for the opening in October. The topics of discussion were sources of revelation, the moral order, the deposit of faith, the family and chastity, liturgy, media and unity. As they had been unable to prevent the council taking place, the curial officials took heart in at least being able to restrict the topics of debate.

When Pope John XXIII finally climbed out of his chair and sat on the papal throne, he addressed the gathering and explained that a path lay ahead along which the bishops must walk. In his heart he knew he would be unable to join them beyond the first leg as he had been diagnosed as suffering from inoperable stomach cancer. Yet in a thirty-seven-minute speech in Latin he urged the council to work towards the unity of mankind. ‘The earthly city may be brought to the resemblance of that heavenly city where truth reigns and charity is the law.’ He vocally rejected those who he said ‘can see nothing but prevarication and ruin’, were ‘always forecasting disaster’ and were ‘prophets of doom’. It was a speech that left many a curial cardinal skewered to his seat. Worse was to come.

Two days later, during the first session, the rails on which the curia had designed the council to run buckled. Power at the council lay in the hands of the leaders of the ten commissions who would draft and regulate the decrees and constitutions. The curia had provided each bishop with a list of names of cardinals and bishops, drawn from their ranks for the job. The gathered bishops were expected to vote for them, a simple rubber-stamping of their authority. Cardinal Lienart of Lille in France spoke out: ‘We do not know the men proposed as candidates and for membership of the commissions. The Episcopal conferences must be given time to consider their suitability and make their own suggestions.’ The Cardinal’s intervention was seconded by Cardinal Frings of Cologne, and instead of voting immediately, the bishops broke into regional groups to decide the best-qualified candidates. The applause that broke out around St Peter’s was more than a warning shot; it was a burst of gunfire.

So where were the Scottish bishops during what would become the greatest turning point of the Catholic Church since the Reformation? In truth they were present in body but not in mind. Their contribution to the Vatican Council was minimal and illustrated not only a lack of interest but also the timidity of their native land. They lacked confidence and were content to nod along in the back row. When Archbishop Gordon Gray first heard the announcement of plans for the Vatican Council on the car radio, he thought to himself: ‘How nice, a month’s holiday in Rome.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Divisions within the Episcopal Conferences led to a lack of rigorous preparation. While Archbishop Campbell of Glasgow attended the preparatory commission as president of the Bishops’ Conference, incredibly he did not seek the views of his brother bishops or even report on what had been discussed. Even more bizarrely, when invited along with every other bishop in the world to contribute suggestions for the agenda, Campbell never replied. Out of Scotland’s eight bishops, only Archbishop Gray and Bishop Walsh of Aberdeen made any suggestions. While Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow and future John Paul II, contributed a seven-page essay on the need for the Church to tackle the distinctive spirituality of the human person, the two Scottish bishops, like so many others around the world, dealt with housekeeping. Among Gray’s ideas was a six-year limit on parish priest postings, after which time priests would return to the role of curate and could be easily moved around.

When the time came to fly to Rome in October 1962, the bishops, like the Royal Family, flew separately, in case an instrument failure robbed Scotland of their spiritual leadership. While Bishop Scanlan, Bishop Hart and Bishop McGee flew with Aer Lingus from Renfrew to Rome, Archbishop Gray and Bishop Stephen McGill of Argyll and the Isles flew in a few days earlier. They were innocents abroad, unable to speak Italian or (except McGill) Latin, and were severely hamstrung from the early days. Gray and McGill were at least anxious to sample the international flavour of the council and booked into a small hotel, the Globe Palace, suggested by the Vatican and popular with the Latin Americans. Despite its proximity to the railway station, it was clean and comfortable and eventually the envy of their fellow Scots bishops. Scanlan, a man lost without his chauffeur, had booked the grand Columbus Hotel, but was forced to move out after a few weeks as the Scots party was unable to afford the cost of bed and board for the three-month stay. Instead they were forced to move to a smaller pensione, which Scanlan derided for serving ‘horse flesh for lunch and dinner on meat days’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Bishop James Black of Paisley, who was admitted to hospital in Rome, personified the lame-duck image of the hierarchy. He was diagnosed with a fractured shoulder, the legacy of an injury collected on an earlier trip to Lourdes. The lack of ambition or indeed preparation was demonstrated by the fact that the Scots were, along with South Korea, one of only two countries not to bring an official peritus or theological expert. Gray had invited Father John Barry, a professor of moral theology and the rector of Edinburgh’s seminary at Drygrange, to accompany him to Rome. Yet as he was not designated as a peritus, he was unable to enter St Peter’s and left after ten days.

The Scottish bishops could only watch as the Catholic Church swung on its great axis. The Vatican had already rejected Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston’s offer to fund the installation of a simultaneous translation system as used at the United Nations. From their seats among the rafters, the Scots bishops could only look down at the great debates whose repercussions would rip through their dioceses in the years to come. It was in the two cafés set up at the back of St Peter’s and dubbed Bar Jonah and Bar Mitzvah that the bishops could glean what was going on.

On 22 October, as the outside world held its breath and watched as America and the USSR nudged each other to the brink of nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis, a battle began inside the Vatican over the language of the liturgy. A great movement of Churches from Western Europe such as France, Belgium, West Germany and Holland wished to see the Mass celebrated in the vernacular. History lay on their side: in the early days of the Church the liturgy was celebrated in Greek with Latin adopted as the language of the people when the Roman Empire embraced Christianity as their official religion in the third century AD. The traditionalists were of the view that the Latin Mass continued to unite the global Church and that any change would lead to a fracturing of that unity. The Scottish bishops listened, for the liturgy was the one area in which their Latin was almost passable, as a great defence of the old tongue was raised by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Secretary of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office. Wielding Latin like a rapier, he attempted to slice through the argument of those who advocated change, but while he was sharp he lacked brevity and drastically overran the ten-minute time limit set for all ‘interventions’. After repeated warnings from Cardinal Alfrink, the Dutchman who was presiding over the session, were ignored by Ottaviani, the presiding officer disconnected the microphone. The assembly burst into applause as Ottaviani, enraged at such discourtesy, stormed from the floor and refused to return for a number of days. The Holy Spirit, it seemed, had directed Latin towards the exit signs. The debate ran for over three weeks but the conclusion was that part of the liturgy could be converted into the language of each nation.

On three occasions during the course of the Council’s four years, Cardinal Gray steeled himself to speak. His Latin was polished by a couple of students at the Scots College including John Fitzsimmons. Then Gray dosed himself with Phenobarbitone, a relaxant drug, before heading to St Peter’s. Yet still he was unable to rise to the occasion. Relating the occasion to his biographer, Michael Turnbull, Gordon Gray said:

On the first occasion, my name was called at the beginning of the Assembly [for me] to speak. I went over my text. Each time I read it, I was more ashamed of my classroom Latin. I got cold feet and told Cardinal John Krol, who was a member of the Secretariat, that I would hand in my script, but would not speak. He was annoyed and twice came back to me in that aula (hall) to insist that I should. I still refused. Lately, I read my three prepared interventions in the acta (proceedings) of Vatican II and regret that I did not voice them publicly.

In his undelivered speeches, he had made valid points about the problems that the topic for debate would give rise to in Protestant Scotland. The only other member of the Scottish hierarchy to involve himself in the proceedings was Francis Walsh, a priest of the order of White Fathers who was made Bishop of Aberdeen. He contributed what was regarded as a fine paper on the topic of indulgences, the Catholic belief that certain prayers and good works while on earth can assuage punishment for sins in the afterlife.

Unfortunately, Bishop Francis Walsh would not return to the Second Vatican Council after the first year. In 1963, the Bishop became a source of scandal that would be echoed thirty years later in the case of Bishop Roderick Wright, when the wife of a Church of Scotland minister, Mrs Ruby MacKenzie, moved into the presbytery with him. Walsh insisted the arrangement was innocent and that it was one born of necessity, as her husband had evicted her because of her decision to convert to Catholicism. When his housekeeper left, Walsh compounded his error by taking MacKenzie on drives when he visited various parishes across the diocese. The situation was untenable and members of the diocese reported the case to the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop O’Hara, in London.

In an attempt to broker a peace deal and convince Walsh of the damage he was doing to the Church, a meeting was set up between the errant bishop and O’Hara at St Bennet’s, the home of Archbishop Gray. The meeting began badly as both men tried to convince Walsh to get rid of Mrs MacKenzie, with Gray even offering to make financial provision for her. When Walsh and O’Hara continued the meeting in private, the estrangement grew until the point when Walsh stormed out and O’Hara demanded that Gray call the Vatican that night and explain that Walsh should be ‘retired’. Gray pleaded for more time to convince Walsh, and the bishop was given until July to remove Mrs MacKenzie from the house. Walsh refused and on 22 July he ‘resigned’. On this day Scotland lost two bishops as the Archbishop of Glasgow, Donald Campbell, died the same day while leading a pilgrimage in Lourdes.