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This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning
Stephen McGinty


The life of the spiritual pugilist and eminent Scottish Cardinal Thomas Winning, leader of Scotland’s Catholics until his death in June 2001.Stephen McGinty tells for the first time the full life story of Cardinal Thomas Winning, arguably the most controversial and pugnacious archbishop in recent British history.Cardinal Winning’s father was an unemployed miner in Lanarkshire, whose illegitimate birth remained a family secret Winning took to his grave. Raised in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, Winning – as priest, bishop and cardinal – set about moving the Catholic Church, by sheer force of his own personality, out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. His stated ambition was to build the City of God on the streets of Glasgow, but his pastoral plan for spiritual renewal fell on somewhat stony ground – partly because of problems with his priests, partly through his own impatience. As Archbishop of Glasgow, he almost bankrupted his diocese with a debt of £10 million, yet still found the funds to offer cash to dissuade women from having an abortion.Cardinal Winning never ceased to be an outspoken and unashamed champion of traditional Catholic values, fiercely anti-abortion and anti-homosexual acts. Too conservative for the Conservative Party yet too socialist for New Labour, he picked fights with both, while his sympathy for the poor remained constant.Before his death in 2001, Cardinal Winning gave dozens of hours of exclusive interviews to the author, who has also enjoyed the assistance of Winning’s family, friends and colleagues. In exploring the complicated and conflicting character of the cardinal, Stephen McGinty reveals the vulnerable, prejudiced and quietly spiritual man beneath the red hat and the new Scotland he helped to forge.













This Turbulent Priest

A LIFE OF CARDINAL WINNING










STEPHEN McGINTY












DEDICATION (#ulink_6d8e841f-3c70-50f2-80b8-cbeaffcc9f81)


For Lori, my ‘Elektra’




CONTENTS




Cover (#u835c5945-d569-5859-a477-17817ad098d6)

Title Page (#uca2a1bdd-a5a3-5697-8b5a-14b052686229)

Dedication (#ulink_57be2274-031e-566e-9109-21edfb226c79)

Introduction (#ulink_00a30e0d-3658-5fa8-b2c0-a1eee680ed81)

PART ONE THE PRIESTLY YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)

1 In the Beginning … (#ulink_5cba6bae-15b5-5fef-9ef5-faf021de8c7b)

2 Blairs Bound (#ulink_54812f42-efab-5f4d-8b6f-cbea39f63453)

3 To the City by the Tiber (#ulink_49f43241-7936-56be-9502-ee8b521f9aae)

4 A Curate’s Tale (#ulink_29a97500-1017-5106-b355-7de0ce75ec2c)

5 A Time to Die (#ulink_5bc1d742-618f-51a2-be35-a1098189870c)

6 No One is Far Away (#ulink_00d3365c-ae26-5b72-9ab3-c683ad07739a)

7 A Better World (#litres_trial_promo)

8 A Battered Mitre (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO THE ARCHBISHOP YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)

9 The New Archbishop (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Glasgow’s Miracle (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Tough Talking (#litres_trial_promo)

12 When Peter Met Andrew

13 The City of God

14 The Collection Plate

PART THREE THE CARDINAL YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)

15 The Red Hat (#litres_trial_promo)

16 The Affair of the Errant Bishop (#litres_trial_promo)

17 The Thorn on Labour’s Rose (#litres_trial_promo)

18 A Right to Life (#litres_trial_promo)

19 The Spin Doctor Who Came Unspun (#litres_trial_promo)

20 The Opinion that Dare Not Speak its Name (#litres_trial_promo)

21 A Twilight Moment (#litres_trial_promo)

22 A Good Fight Fought (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




INTRODUCTION (#ulink_e93e09a3-b92c-5cb1-b2a8-3bb09c12407c)


If ever an incident encapsulated the character of Cardinal Thomas Joseph Winning, it was a meeting with Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor. The Archbishop of Glasgow had travelled to London in 1999 to meet Britain’s most powerful lawmaker, in order to raise concerns over the issue of bioethics. After a long wait in the outer chambers of the Lord Chancellor’s office at the House of Lords, the Cardinal spotted Irvine striding towards him, woollen wig flowing, ruffled shirt tucked in place, breeches and silk stockings meeting neatly at the knee, and patent leather shoes buffed to a brilliant shine, offset by silver buckles. As Irvine breezed past, offering the Cardinal the briefest of nods, Winning nudged Ronnie Convery, his current affairs adviser, and said: ‘If that’s the Lord Chancellor, can you imagine what God looks like?’

So much of this anecdote gives a flavour of the man: he was a humorist who pricked pomposity with wit, he was an outsider, suspicious of the corridors of power, and he was a critic of the government, whether it came wrapped in the blue ribbon of the Conservative Party or wore the red rose of New Labour. As a Prince of the Church, Winning possessed a wardrobe of scarlet robes and red birettas capable of matching the Lord Chancellor stitch for embroidered stitch, but instead he preferred the anonymity of a dark suit and white collar, the garb of a common priest. Derry Irvine famously proclaimed himself in the mould of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, whose power and pomp in the early sixteenth century was legendary. Winning, in comparison, was closer to St Thomas à Becket – ‘this turbulent priest’, as Henry II christened his Archbishop of Canterbury, so painful had he become to the government of the day.

Yet Cardinal Winning was no saint. He could be arrogant, a bully and a sexist. He disliked homosexuals, distrusted many politicians, and considered Donald Dewar, then First Minister of Scotland and ‘Father of the nation’, a ‘bigot’ – a charge to which he himself lay open. In financial matters, he was at best woefully uninterested, and at worst incompetent, and his tenure as Archbishop of Glasgow coincided with the creation of a £10 million debt that almost bankrupted the diocese. On the flip side of the coin, he was warm and personable. He cared deeply for his priests and his people and, throughout his career, he fought both poverty and social injustice. In a secular age, he managed to make the Church relevant. He battled against Prime Minister Tony Blair over the issue of abortion and startled the country by offering money to women in crisis pregnancies. This is the story of a miner’s son, raised in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, who went on to become arguably the most powerful religious leader of his day in Britain.

I was a six-week-old infant cradled in my mother’s arms when I first met Thomas Joseph Winning. He was then an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Glasgow who had been sent, against his will, to the parish of Our Holy Redeemer in my hometown of Clydebank, the shipyard town that bequeathed the world the Singer sewing machine and the QE2. A reluctant parish priest, he appeared to spread the misery around by decreeing that all baptisms be carried out before nine o’clock Mass on a Sunday morning. I was born in the January of a bitter winter and my mother feared I would catch pneumonia if brought out at such an early hour. Winning never actually baptised me – he was too busy fighting a turf war with his fellow auxiliary bishop – but he did peer into my swaddling clothes and I repaid his interest by praying for him every Sunday until the day he died.

It was customary during the Eucharistic prayer of the Mass for Catholics in Glasgow to pray ‘for our bishop Thomas’, but I was unaware of him as public figure, looming larger than his five feet six inches. Later, as an altar boy, I served at Masses at which he concelebrated. My interest in him deepened once I had exchanged the soutane of an altar boy for a journalist’s mackintosh. I literally bumped into him on the Glasgow-Edinburgh train shortly after he had received the red hat of a cardinal, and I was surprised that he was travelling alone, without a bag carrier or assistant. We chatted for an hour and I marvelled at his approachability.

It was not until I returned to Scotland after eighteen months working for the Sunday Times in London that I began to consider him as a subject for a biography. The idea flowed from a profile of the cardinal I wrote for the Scottish edition of the paper in May 1998. I flew to Rome to speak with Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. The previous year, Winning had launched his pro-life initiative and became a cause célèbre, and I expected steady praise from the leader of the Vatican department on which he served. Instead I received nothing. In a strange, almost jealous turn the Colombian cardinal refused to discuss Winning at all, in spite of my varied attempts to lever him into the conversation. After a particularly blunt segue he simply stood up, offered me a chocolate from a box on his desk, kissed both my cheeks and showed me to the door. ‘Winning is one man,’ he said and shrugged.

True, Winning was one man, but a man rapidly growing in stature and influence. If Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, was for the Establishment the soft, pious face of Catholicism, then Winning was the hard man, a poster boy for the traditionalists who welcomed his fight back against a secular society. The Sunday Times profile left me nursing more questions than answers. Why did he provoke such extremes of emotions? What drove him on? Had he ever fallen in love? What did he think about when alone in the dark? I began to see his role less as a spiritual leader than as a minister in a world government, pushing through policy, dealing with egos and jealousies, juggling crises, attempting to keep the faith in an uninterested world. To touch his soul is too melodramatic a phrase; instead I wished to prise open the armour Thomas Winning had constructed around himself during a half a century as a priest.

When I first approached the late Mgr Tom Connelly, then press spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, with the idea of a biography, he was enthusiastic. ‘It’s got to be warts and all,’ he explained over lunch at his favourite Italian restaurant. He viewed previous books on Scottish Church figures as anaemic hagiographies, well intentioned but principally the efforts of fans with typewriters. I planned a more robust and in-depth project and the idea was discussed with Ronnie Convery, Winning’s adviser, before being pushed up the line to ‘the Boss’. After both men prepared the way, I was invited to lunch in the Cardinal’s private dining room in the diocesan offices in Glasgow, overlooking the River Clyde. Winning sat at the head of the table, ladled out the spaghetti, and listened to my pitch. After five minutes he agreed: ‘I’d have no problem with that, Stephen,’ he told me, and once lunch was over, we walked to his office to inspect his diary and plan the first of over forty interview sessions which would spread out over the next two years.

The going was tough, the terrain unfamiliar. The Catholic Church in Scotland has for so long been ignored or reported simply at face value. Winning was a natural raconteur, an experienced interviewee, but the key was to strip away the tired and worn answers and somehow reach a deeper truth. It was not easy. Painful memories were shuttered behind ‘I can’t remember’, personal feelings required careful teasing out – and even then were swiftly converted into the third person and immediately generalized, so that ‘you would feel’ took the place of ‘I would feel’. Friends, family, politicians and old foes provided an alternative record and a process of checks and balances distilled the facts from fondly remembered fiction. I was the first journalist to enjoy access to Winning’s sister Margaret, who explained their childhood. His niece and nephew described the various visits, dinners and football matches that comprised their uncle’s only relaxation.

My interviews were regularly one hour long. I would arrive at The Oaks, the wonderful Arts and Crafts-style villa in the leafy suburb of Newlands on Glasgow’s south side, promptly at 9.25 in the morning. I discovered that arrival any earlier disturbed his daily recitation of the divine office, the prayers of a priest which he performed each morning in the small oratory just off the hall. Our discussions took place in the living room, he on the sofa, myself in an armchair, and the glass table that lay between us became the net over which questions and answers were batted. At ten-thirty, Mrs Mclnnes, Winning’s housekeeper of thirty years, would arrive with tea and biscuits and a further fifteen minutes would be idled away on current events or personal pleasantries.

We wrestled with the years from his birth in 1925 to the present day, arguing, me prodding and he resisting. For the majority of our sessions we were alone; only when we crossed into his years as a cardinal (1994–2001) was he joined by Ronnie Convery. Far from blocking or fielding questions, Convery sat, listened, and even assisted as we discussed Winning’s duels with the government, the launch of the pro-life initiative and the Roddy Wright affair, when the errant Bishop of Argyll and the Isles abandoned his post for a divorcee.

The rules for the book were clear from my first approach. I wished to enjoy the access of an ‘authorized’ biography but none of the controls or manipulations often inherent with ‘official’ status. I happily agreed that I would allow Winning to read the finished book before publication to allow the correction of factual errors. Any views, opinions and matters of interpretation were to be mine alone. I knew this would be difficult. Winning was a man unschooled in the acceptance of constructive criticism. He shared an attitude with Margaret Thatcher, his bête noire, during the 1980s for bracketing people either as ‘one of us’ or ‘one of them’. Those who were not for him, he felt, were against him. At one point our relationship skittered over an icy patch when I arrived for an appointed interview and was presented with a formal letter that insisted he receive a written document and be given the opportunity to read the work completed so far; the continuation of any further interviews hinged upon my acceptance. A compromise was reached when I wrote a letter, putting our previous oral agreement on paper. Winning was a clever manipulator. ‘Stephen,’ he said, smiling his crinkled Robert de Niro smile, ‘I want you to be as welcome in this house once the book is published as you are today.’ I knew this would be unlikely and steeled myself for the inevitable battle which would take place once the book was completed.

It was a battle never fought. Winning’s death on Sunday, 17 June 2001 closed our collaboration, but not our relationship. When the news editor of the Scotsman called me at home, alerting me to the announcement by the Press Association, I felt physically sick. The Cardinal had suffered a heart attack eight days previously but had returned home and was described as ‘recovering well’. A ‘get well’ card and a wrapped present rested on my kitchen table. That afternoon I sat in the Scotsman’s offices and wrote a lengthy appreciation with time spent in the toilet in tears. I was troubled by the turbulence of my emotions, and it took a few days to trace the source to the obvious: an obsessional analysis of a life now lost. As any man in a public and powerful position, Winning had a number of sides, one witnessed by family, another by friends; priests saw a third, brother bishops a fourth, and so on. For two years, I had attempted to meld these separate sides, like frames on a negative, into a single, moving picture. The early summer of 2001 was to be a curious time. His death had occurred during my sabbatical when I was finishing a first draft of the book. A strange sensation occurs when you witness a man in his coffin, then return to your study to re-animate him on the page.

When I first embarked on the writing of this biography, I was aware that a previous book by Vivienne Belton, a Glasgow school teacher, had been completed, but had as yet been unable to find a publisher. When in March 2000 the Daily Record first revealed that Winning’s life was to be the subject of a ‘controversial’ biography by myself, it had the fortunate effect of galvanizing Ms Belton into asking for Winning’s assistance in finding a publisher for her manuscript. Cardinal Thomas Winning: An Authorised Biography by Vivienne Belton was published by Columba Press in the autumn of 2000. The Cardinal: An Official Tribute, published by the Glasgow archdiocese and the Scottish Catholic Observer, joined it on the shelves a few months after Winning’s death, together with Always Winning, a book of tributes and photographs published by Mainstream. I have read all three books, yet the principal source for my account remains the hundred hours of interviews with Winning, his friends, family, colleagues, contemporaries, priests and politicians: all buttressed by newspaper reports, both secular and religious.

In the jargon of Hollywood, every story has an arc and progresses through ‘action beats’, dilemmas and troubles the hero overcomes which fuel him through the next phase of his development. Thomas Winning never overcame all of his troubles. He remained a poor judge of character and was let down by a number of close associates; his director of social work ran up large debts in highly ambitious but slackly managed projects, his spin doctor was unspun by a love affair, a court case and a bawdy limerick, while his beloved Pastoral Plan was at one point in the hands of a priest later revealed to be a drunk who hired a former topless model as a housekeeper and paid the inevitable price. The popular view propagated first by the Scottish media and latterly by the British media, was of Winning as the man of the people. This was a convenient pigeonhole, grounded in truth and weary with repetition, but one which ignored Winning’s inevitable loneliness. He was a man severed by the weight of position and responsibility from the people. As a young teenager, he had undergone a harsh transformation to become a priest when there was little room for the personal. What constituted Winning the priest and Winning the man was to be a dilemma with which he wrestled for the rest of his life. The garb of a priest was a suit of armour in which he clanked uncomfortably. He found the expression of love beyond the strict confines of his family to be difficult, afraid that the emotion might veer from the platonic.

If the suit of armour retarded his emotions, it lent him protection during his long campaign to drag Catholicism in Scotland out from under the parapet and into the mainstream. This was not to be achieved by ducking issues or diluting dogma. In his twenty-nine years as a bishop, Winning branded Britain a nation of ‘spiritual dwarfs’, accused Prince Charles of ‘woolly theology’, wrestled with the Conservative Party over nuclear weapons, condemned the Gulf War, and spent the last six years of his life staring over a ‘no man’s land’ littered with issues such as abortion, student fees and bioethics, at Tony Blair, the Labour leader and pseudo-Catholic who had the potential on paper to be his greatest ally.

The life of Thomas Joseph Winning, a journey from poverty to a position as a prince of the Church, is an inspirational tale of one man’s struggle with himself and his surroundings to achieve what he genuinely believed was God’s will, in an age when self-will has increasingly become the only currency which counts. At the height of his popularity Winning was to be touted as one of the papabile – a candidate for Pope. Although it was a ridiculous suggestion – he lacked both the intellect and standing in Rome – and he was already too old, he was flattered by the suggestion. On one occasion, when I accompanied him to Rome, we walked across St Peter’s Square late in the evening after dining in the Via Condotti. Winning was dressed in an anorak from C&A, while the Roman clergy were elegant in their long black frock coats. As we both looked up at the light burning from the papal apartment, I asked if he was not proud to have climbed up to be a candidate.

‘Sure,’ he said, before triggering another vintage moment. ‘I wouldn’t want to score the goal, but I’m glad I’ve made it to the penalty area.’



The Priestly Years (#ulink_7449fbb9-3e32-5417-ae79-37dde3337308)




ONE (#ulink_f4b5225b-1823-5fa2-9e71-c129ab8719b2)

In the Beginning … (#ulink_f4b5225b-1823-5fa2-9e71-c129ab8719b2)


‘The papists [are like a] rattlesnake, harmless when kept under proper restraints, but dangerous like it, when at full liberty; and ready to diffuse a baleful poison around.’


(#litres_trial_promo)

JOHN ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY,

GLASGOW UNIVERSITY, 1770

It is not known exactly when Patrick Win arrived on the boat from Belfast at the docks of Glasgow in search of a better life and a fuller belly. Born in 1834 among the hills of Fermanagh in the counties of Ulster, he survived the terrible potato famine of the following decade that killed one million of his countrymen and emerged, like his father John, a hardy survivor and itinerant labourer. Ireland at the time was a ravaged country, where food was scarce and what little work there was offered scant prospect of betterment. Tired of farm work and the quiet desperation of his fellow workers, Patrick decided to strike out for a brighter future ‘across the water’. A lack of formal schooling had left him illiterate, a barrier which forced him to live on his wits and by the sweat of his brow.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland was a country in the grip of the Industrial Revolution. Railways, quarries, ironworks, mines, canals, docks and factories were consuming working men, women and children like so much coal in a furnace. The centres of heavy industry such as Glasgow and Dundee were drawing immigrant workers from Ireland at a tremendous rate. By 1851, Patrick Win was just one of over two hundred thousand first-generation Irish immigrants who had arrived in Scotland over the past fifty years, the majority bedding down along the west coast of the country. While most were Catholic, a proportion of the Irish visitors were Protestants from Ulster, whose ancestors had gone to Ireland to colonize the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many had been tempted back by the notices placed in Belfast newspapers looking for skilled workers to replace those Scottish employees drawn away to Canada, America or Australia. The owners of steelworks, ironworks and coal mines offered them sweeteners such as comfortable accommodation and education for their children. The Irish Catholics could expect no such welcome.

Those who arrived in Scotland were quickly saddled with several unshakeable problems, namely poverty and Catholicism; Scotland may have been expanding its industries, but wages were low and the city of Glasgow offered an example of both boom and bust. Shipbuilding on the Clyde was the cornerstone of its prosperity and accounted for a third of all the world’s merchant fleet before 1912. The flourishing tobacco and cotton trades only added to its success. Yet the city had a tradition of high death rates eclipsed by even higher birth rates. The population explosion had been fuelled by the influx of immigrants and refugees fleeing the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands. In 1850, over 50 per cent of the population of 400,000 were born outside the city, resulting in severe overcrowding over a long period in pitiful accommodation which, on average, did not extend beyond one room. Outside the houses open sewers flowed freely and so disease was rampant.

The distress caused by low wages and poor, unhygienic living conditions was compounded by the attitude of locals to Catholicism. In Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Catholic faith was abhorrent to the Protestant population. For over two hundred years, since the Reformation of 1560, Catholicism had been illegal. Priests were prosecuted and celebration of the Mass was forbidden; the remaining small outcrops of believers who refused to convert were despised. A relaxation in the law came with the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, once again allowing freedom of worship, and the Emancipation Act which followed thirty years later loosened the bonds further still, but the attitude of the public remained fixed.

Catholics were viewed as a problem to be contained, an attitude encapsulated by John Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1770. While debating with a colleague the merits of repealing laws against Roman Catholics, he compared them to a rattlesnake: ‘harmless when kept under proper restraints, but dangerous like it, when at full liberty; and ready to diffuse a baleful poison around’.

The population of Glasgow had always kept a watchful eye on their Catholic neighbours. It was claimed that during the 1790s the city housed forty-three anti-Catholic organizations at a time when the total Catholic population was just thirty-nine. By 1850, the Catholic population in the city had risen to over seventy thousand. In response, anti-Catholic organizations such as the Scottish Protestant Association formed and printed journals such as the Bulwark and the Scottish Protestant. Members and readers were of a view that Scotland was under attack by an ‘inferior race’ threatening disease, crime and degradation.

In a short, hard life, Patrick Win witnessed them all. After arriving in the city he moved to the south side of the river Clyde and settled in the village of Pollokshaws. The construction of the Glasgow, Paisley and Johnstone Canal in 1808 had brought a large number of Irish Catholic labourers, or navvies as they were known, into the area and Win was just another to add to their number. Instead of finding work with the large cotton mills, the principal employers in the area, he succeeded in obtaining a job as a railway surfaceman. In such a hostile atmosphere the Catholics invariably spent time with their own countrymen and women at the Irish clubs whose music and dancing offered an opportunity to forget for a few hours the misery of their lives. Win was to meet a young woman by the name of Ann Maguire, a bleacher by profession and a fellow exile from Fermanagh, and on 19 October 1855, the couple wed.

The location for the service was an old smithy in Skin-mill Yard, named after the nearby chamois factory that had been quietly purchased in 1849 for use as a church. Previously, Catholics in Pollokshaws had been forced to walk en masse into the city centre to attend Sunday services at St Andrew’s Church by the banks of the Clyde, a six-mile return trip that invariably involved being showered with stones by bigots aware of their destination. In 1840, the city council granted permission for Mass to be celebrated in Pollokshaws and an upstairs room on the village main street became the first venue. The converted smithy that opened nine years later was an improvement by comparison.

The marriage was conducted by Fr Adam Geddes, who at the age of twenty-five was just three years older than the couple clasping hands before him. He was privately furious at such a humble structure and had vowed to see an impressive church replace it. However, a fatal dose of typhus fever contracted the following year ensured that he would never live to see one built. Three close friends, Thomas McGovern, Charles Reilly and Ann MacManus, who took on the role of bridesmaid, witnessed the ceremony.

Patrick Win’s work on the railways was enough to pay the rent on a small one-room flat on Main Street for himself and his wife and three years later, on 3 October 1858, the couple’s only child, a boy called James, was born. Following his birth, a generous clerk called Will Sewell in the local Registrar’s office added an extra ‘n’ to the family name, a note of little consequence to his illiterate parents who spelt both their names with a humble ‘X’. The family name, in fact, was probably Wynne, but it was very likely rendered in the most remedial manner as they were unable to spell it themselves. Anxious that their child achieve a modicum of education, Patrick and Ann enrolled James in the local school. In 1868, by the time he was ten and could read and write, his mother had died. She was thirty-five, and had lived five years beyond the city’s average life expectancy, so teeming was Glasgow with tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid. Her husband Patrick lived a further seven years as a widower, looking after his son between long shifts in a variety of jobs including quarry labourer and coal pit roadsman. A nervous cough that began in 1874 developed over the next two years into phthisis, a wasting disease that attacks the lungs in a manner similar to tuberculosis. For his final few months, Patrick Win was bedridden in their tiny flat, tended by his son who would view his father’s passing on 14 October 1876 as a blessing.

The death of his father severed any ties that held James Winn to Glasgow, the city of his birth, at least for the next twenty years. At the age of seventeen, he headed to the town of Motherwell in the blasted landscape of Lanarkshire, and the life of the pit. The town lay twelve miles south-east of Glasgow, with the river Clyde to the west and the river Calder to the north, and while the town’s name may have been derived from the Celtic expression for ‘the level place above a river’, its modern identity was less romantic and came caked in soot and coal dust. Motherwell was a mighty industrial town at the heart of an extensive array of coalfields, and James Winn was to find employment at Parkhead colliery.

The work was brutal, back-breaking and extremely dangerous. Subsequently, the men took their brief pleasures where they could, primarily in the alehouses that lined Motherwell High Street. Winn, meanwhile, had an alternative form of recreation. In the spring of 1889, when he was thirty-one, he began a relationship with Mary Weir, a twenty-six-year-old domestic servant. Mary Weir discovered she was pregnant in the late autumn of 1889 and, faced with the prospect of being dismissed from her work and expelled from her home, as they were one and the same, she turned to her lover for support. In such circumstances, the most convenient solution was a swift marriage in front of a frowning priest before the bride’s condition began to show. The mother would be saved the shame of being labelled a ‘fallen woman’ and the baby would be spared the ignominy of being born a bastard. Why this did not occur is unknown, but James Winn’s subsequent behaviour in the years that followed intimate that he was a feeble character, unable or unwilling to take on the burden and responsibility of parenthood. Abortion, though available in the crudest of forms from midwives of dubious reputation, was not considered an option.

As a result of her lover’s initial reluctance to marry, Mary Weir had little choice but to abandon her job, leave her hometown and travel fifty miles to Edinburgh where in the anonymity of the capital her ‘disgrace’ was more tolerable. There, in a small rented room at 382 Lawnmarket, an anonymous tenement block a few hundred yards from Edinburgh Castle, she awaited her child’s birth. On 15 July 1890, the father of Cardinal Thomas Winning was born. He was named Thomas Weir after his mother, and marked by the registrar, as was the tradition, illegitimate.

Mother and child returned to Motherwell a few weeks after the birth to be greeted by a man transformed. James Winn, perhaps moved both by the sight of his infant son and guilt that the child’s mother had suffered as a result of his own unwillingness to wed, now attempted to mend Mary’s reputation. The couple were married on 10 September 1890 at Our Lady of Good Aid, the local Catholic Church. The ceremony was small, attended only by two close friends, Maggie Brown and Felix Mullan, who acted as the legal witnesses, and the bride’s mother, Agnes Weir. Her husband, a miner like her son-in-law, was long dead. By the following year, the couple had moved to 9 Camp Street, a solidly working-class area of Motherwell, and when the census collector visited, Thomas, now nine months old, finally received his father’s name. The illusion of a happy family was enhanced in 1892 by the birth of a daughter, Anne, but it was not to last: five years later, the death of Mary Weir robbed the children of their mother while James Winn’s fecklessness was to deprive them of their father. Shortly after burying his wife, Winn deposited Thomas, then seven, and Anne, five, into the care of his mother-in-law, departed for work, and never returned.

Why Winn chose to abandon his two children when they needed him most is not known. He was certainly a reluctant candidate for marriage and fatherhood, but it is unimaginable that a deep bond did not exist at some level between this insecure, dithering Irishman and his young children. Yet any such tie was severed for ever in 1897 when he abandoned his family in Motherwell and returned to Glasgow, the city of his youth. The next three generations of his family – his son, grandson and granddaughter, and great-grandson and great-granddaughter – all believed that he died shortly after his departure. When his own son Thomas finally wed in 1924, James Winn was listed as dead on the marriage papers.

There is evidence however, that Winn was alive and living under an assumed name in his native Glasgow. At some point after the abandonment of his family, he appears to have changed his name from Winn, a name that was uncommon and eminently traceable, to Mullan, an exceedingly common Irish name, and one he now shared with his former best friend. Fifteen years after the death of his first wife, his new name allowed him to marry for a second time, but as a bachelor, as opposed to a widower. This new identity spared him any awkward questions from Mary Wylie, the fifty-year-old woman he chose as his new wife. Winn subsequently spent the remainder of his life working as a labourer in a lace factory, and his true identity was only discovered long after his death at the age of seventy-five in 1933.

The childhood of Thomas and Anne Winn was fraught with death and change. The demise of their mother and departure of their father were followed by death once again when, a few years later, their grandmother passed away and they were passed, like inherited heirlooms, into the care of their mother’s two bachelor brothers, James and John Weir, with whom they grew to adulthood in relative contentment. The final element of change arrived courtesy of the classroom. Just as the family had seen their name mutate from ‘Win’ to ‘Winn’, it now reached its final apotheosis when, according to family tradition, an inattentive schoolteacher misheard young Thomas at primary school and wrote the corruption ‘Winning’ on the blackboard. The new name increased the distance between the children and the father who had abandoned them, as now they no longer even carried his name, but by now neither did he.

Thomas Winning grew into a young man who embraced his responsibilities where his father had shirked them. When his sister’s new husband died in a railway accident while working in Canada, leaving Anne without a pension, Thomas moved into their small room and kitchen in John Street, Craigneuk, and provided for her by working as a miner at the Camp Street Pit in Motherwell. It was during this time that he met Agnes Canning, a local girl who worked in the jam factory in nearby Carluke. Agnes was a quiet, shy girl whose introspective personality mirrored Thomas’s own but whose long dark hair, which she wore in an elegant velvet bow, ensured she attracted her share of admirers. The second youngest of thirteen children from an Irish Catholic family, Agnes had the distinction of being the daughter of one of the most successful Irish immigrants in the district.

Charles Canning was a handsome man who dressed in a dark three-piece suit; a white hankie sprang from his breast pocket, and the ensemble was completed by an elegant tie pin and silver watch and chain. He wore a full beard and walrus-style moustache that was draped long over his mouth like the ventriloquists of the day. He had every reason to take pride in his appearance for, despite the extreme prejudice prevalent at the time, he had attained the position of Bailie in the Wishaw Parish Council. The title accorded him the right to sit in judgement over those who came before the parish court on charges of drunkenness or debt. He also owned a popular pub on Dryborough Road in Wishaw, an irony not lost on the locals, who coined a saying. ‘Canning gets them drunk on a Friday night and sentences them on a Monday.’ His achievement was all the more impressive for his background. Canning had arrived in Scotland in the late 1870s after his family had lost their farm in Kilmacrenan, County Donegal. His father had paid his rent, but either failed to obtain a receipt or lost it on the walk home from the landlord’s. When the landlord appeared and demanded Canning repeat his payment, he refused, and so was forced from the home which had been in the family for generations. The eviction forced the family to pursue a new life in Scotland. In one of the Irish clubs in Glasgow, Canning met his future wife, Margaret Boyle, an immigrant from Ramelton, ten miles south of his parents’ former farm. Together the couple moved to Lanarkshire where Canning swiftly rose from miner to pit contractor and later a local councillor.

The Canning family home was tiny for such a large family, but it was located in an area of relative respectability. The Whitegates was named after the coloured gates that closed off the road to allow the trains laden with coal to crawl from the pits to the main connection line at Wishaw. The house sat at 515 Glasgow Road and this was where Thomas Winning would collect his intended before the pair would stroll down to the parish hall for a dance on a Saturday night. Agnes Canning’s weekday evenings were quietly taken up baking, knitting and embroidering table covers. It was from her home in 1914 that she bid farewell to the man who was now her fiancé as he embarked for the Great War.

The outbreak of World War One was viewed by Thomas Winning, as it was by so many of his generation, as an opportunity to exchange his soot-smeared clothes for the glamour of the military uniform – in his case, the pleated kilt and black tam-o’-shanter of the Gordon Highlanders. As the British government urged every able man to do his duty and defend his country, the call to arms was given a dramatic impetus across Scotland by the leaders of the Catholic community. The archbishops of both Glasgow and Edinburgh urged men to sign up for active duty, an attitude questioned by many for whom Scotland remained a nation that had so long treated their community with an intense disrespect, yet the hierarchy believed the war in Europe offered a wonderful opportunity to unite the country’s disparate groups and fuse them together. Catholic or Protestant would soon lose their distinctions in the muddy trenches of the Western Front.

Thomas Winning was to return unwounded and with little visible display of the mental trauma that comes with witnessing such carnage. For the duration of his military career, he kept in close contact with his fiancée through regular postcards from places such as Mons, the Somme and Ypres; locations that would become synonymous with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers but whose postcards arrived with a lace trim and cartoon effigies of moustached Germans, and caricatures of tanks and guns.

Winning did not drink, so he would accept the traditional ‘tot of rum’ given to the men before the officer’s whistle urged them over the top, and would exchange it for cigarettes or chocolate. During one military push along the trenches, Winning and a comrade crawled out into no man’s land to retrieve a wounded officer. Afterwards, both soldiers tossed a coin to see who would receive a decoration. His colleague won the toss but later lost his life in the Dardanelles, while Winning escaped bullets and bombings and the only injury he received was from an attack of mustard gas.

In later years, Thomas Winning senior never discussed the bleakness of his role in the war with his children. When they asked him to take down the old tin containing the dozens of postcards he told humorous tales of his fellow soldiers and their attempts to be discharged as shell-shocked – how they would unfurl their Balmoral hats, stare into space and blow on the ribbons that hung down. A silly tale to a young boy and girl unaware of the horrors their father had experienced. Even the darkest tale was very funny to a child, and it involved the soldiers marching down the line after a big push, past a dead German soldier lying with his hand outstretched, into which someone had wedged a tin of bully beef.

Thomas Winning was discharged after the war but despite his feelings for Agnes he felt unable to return directly and marry her. He regarded himself as unworthy. She was the daughter of a man of property and respect while his father existed in only the vaguest of memories, and despite his heroic labours in the trenches, he was now unemployed, and Lanarkshire had little to offer. Instead, he was determined to better himself so as to provide for his fiancée and set sail from the Glasgow docks to Chicago and the promise of the American dream. It was a strange and difficult time for Thomas. He spent four years travelling, from low-paid job to low-paid job, from the city of Chicago to Canada and Alberta and Winnipeg.

By the time he left, all he had accrued was a familiar nickname: Scottie. Fortunately, it was still enough to secure the hand of Agnes in marriage and so, on 17 July 1924, after more than twelve years of courtship, they were wed in a ceremony at St Patrick’s Church in Shieldmuir. After a decade of conflict, travel and broken dreams for Thomas Winning, the time had come to raise a family.

The couple moved into a small room and kitchen near the railway in the village of Craigneuk, and, in among the din of the trains, they were happy together. Thomas had secured himself a job as a miner and Agnes would prepare the tin bath for his arrival home after a twelve-hour shift. Eleven months later their son Thomas Joseph was born on 3 June 1925 and baptized two weeks later at St Patrick’s Church. The birth of their son was followed eighteen months later by the birth of a daughter, Margaret, by which time her father was already unemployed, a victim alongside thousands of others of the General Strike of 1926. He was to remain unemployed for more than twenty years.

A younger sister was to provide Winning’s earliest memories, for when he was just four, Margaret was stricken with scarlet fever: ‘My mother was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, cradling Margaret who was bawling, and I remember trying to console her, trying to stroke her little head.’ Around this time a photograph was taken of the pair of them and an older cousin, Lucy Canning. Margaret is propped up in a wooden armchair wearing a light-coloured woollen dress, and Lucy, at the age of eight, stands at the back with her hair in ringlets. But the most striking presence is Winning: just four years old and dressed in a dark-coloured Russian-style top, shorts, long woollen socks and polished black boots, he carries the confident stare of a little prince.

The young Thomas’s early confidence was tested a few months after the photograph was taken, when he began to suffer symptoms similar to Margaret, whose life had been saved by a visit to the local fever hospital. Winning spent a total of three weeks in isolation at the hospital as the scarlet fever ran its course. Every few days, his mother arrived at the hospital and would wave outside his bedroom window, but this was little comfort to a five-year-old who felt himself victimized by the nursing staff. A particular nurse had taken to sticking her tongue out at him, no doubt in an effort to make the child laugh, but with the opposite result. He began to believe she genuinely disliked him, an attitude confirmed in his young mind by the fact she fed him a disgusting daily diet of castor oil mixed with orange juice.

The house to which Winning returned after his hospitalization was slightly bigger than their previous accommodation. In 1928, the family moved a few hundred yards to Glasgow Road and a tenement house at number 511. The house offered little extra comfort, but had the benefit of being only two doors away from Agnes’s brother and sister who had never married and who had remained in the family home at 515. The house was a typical working-class property. The front door opened on to Glasgow Road, while inside a short lobby ran to the front room; behind this was the kitchen, while the toilet was outside in the dry green, the concrete area where the washing was hung. The kitchen also had two recessed alcoves in which the family slept, separated by a thin white curtain. Winning slept with his father in one bed, while in another Margaret slept with her mother.

The sleeping conditions were common for an ordinary family at this time but a search for the reticence that Winning junior would attach to sex, even within the confines of marriage, should begin on the thin mattress of his sleeping arrangements. Winning never minded sleeping with his father, irritated only by his steady snoring, but the lack of room and, more crucially, privacy meant he rarely saw his parents kiss or even embrace. It was a subject Winning was always reluctant to discuss; in his family, sexual intercourse was strictly for the services of procreation. ‘There is something in that,’ Winning was to explain later. ‘They never had a holiday. I would say they were in their thirties before they were married. Two kids were as much as they could manage. If you were unemployed, two kids were as much as you could afford.’

In spite of their poverty both children were always smartly dressed, with Agnes foregoing personal clothes or pleasures for the benefit of Thomas and Margaret. The lack of physical contact between husband and wife extended to their children. In the Winning family home, emotions were rarely physically expressed and instead love was illustrated by actions. Yet while Margaret reacted to her upbringing by becoming, as she believed, overly emotional, her brother followed his mother’s example and would grow up to keep his emotions tightly suppressed. Margaret explains.

None of them went in for hugging at all. Emotions and things like that were done with their actions. You could hug anybody, but they showed you more love through their actions than by hugging. My mother kept her emotions under rein – it seems to be a failing of the Cannings. They did not show emotion. Thomas was like that. He did worry about things, but he kept them to himself.

Winning could not miss what he had not received but when his mother did show great physical affection, he adored the experience. Unfortunately this came at a time of great personal peril. At the age of seven, Winning developed a case of pneumonia after sitting on wet grass while on an outing to the local park with his father. His mother returned from a religious talk organized by the Catholic Woman’s Guild to find her son sitting next to the fire, shivering violently. Over the next two days his condition worsened as he rolled under the heavy woollen sheets, drenching them in sweat. The condition was grave, dozens of children in the village had died of diphtheria, cholera and pneumonia, and both parents feared he might succumb. His mother, who had previously measured out her emotions as carefully as a ration-book recipe, was in turmoil, weeping at his condition.

A young neighbour, Mary Cromwell, who worked as a nurse, prepared a mustard poultice, which was tightly bound round the boy’s back in an attempt to reduce the inflammation. When he did not improve, the extended family of aunts and uncles organized a collection to pay for the services of a doctor, which, prior to the creation of the National Health Service, were billed per visit. After administering treatment, the doctor could not guarantee the boy’s survival, and so the parish priest was called for.

Father Bartholomew Atkinson arrived with a vial of holy water from Lourdes, blessed the boy, and left instructions that the contents be sipped, like any strong medicine, three times a day and that Winning was to direct his evening prayers to St Bernadette. That evening, after the priest’s departure, Agnes Winning was distraught and prayed in a manner that disturbed her daughter: ‘My mother prayed that he would not die, but that she would give him back to God if he wanted him,’ remembered Margaret. ‘At one point, she shouted aloud that if God wanted him, He could have him.’ The future priest, bishop, archbishop and cardinal was unaware of his mother’s pact. Thomas drifted in and out of consciousness, but that evening a corner was turned and he began to recover.

Winning’s memory of this time was not of pain or discomfort or fear of an early death, but of the transformation that he had witnessed taking place in his mother and the softness of her touch. ‘My mother showed me a great deal of affection then. I would lie in the dark, pretending to be asleep, and she would stroke my forehead and kiss me.’

The infancy and early childhood of Winning was spent in a contented state, cocooned in a strong family, loved – though in a distant manner – and protected from a poverty he did not see or yet understand. The task of raising two young children on the few coins provided by the State was a feat of miraculous ingenuity, but a feat made easier by a generous aunt and uncle. Agnes Canning’s brother and sister had no children of their own, and would lavish their attention and shillings on their niece and nephew, paying for treats their mother and father could not afford.

In order to increase the family’s allowance, Thomas Winning began to make and sell sweets, an idea suggested by his wife’s cousin, Bob Purdy, during a routine visit. At first the former soldier laughed off the idea as ridiculous, but Bob was persistent and insisted on giving a personal demonstration. In the kitchen the men’s jackets were thrown off, their sleeves rolled up and mixing bowls and bags of sugar were commandeered for an initial experiment with candy balls. In those few moments, Thomas Winning recognized a golden opportunity. Sweet aromas began to waft through the house as he developed recipes for tablet, candy balls and an array of boiled sweets. Sales were initially to children at tuppence a bag, but soon local shops had taken an interest and Mr Winning had generated enough money to buy a small piece of machinery. The gadget resembled a mangle with a roller impregnated with hollowed shapes such as stars, fish and cars, into which the boiling candy was poured. The most popular line was marzipan walnuts – so sweet, light and irresistible to the taste that the parish priest, Fr Bartholomew Atkinson, would send his housekeeper round to fetch a dozen at a time, in spite of his diabetic condition.

The greatest indignity of Agnes Canning’s married life was the visits by the ‘Means Test Man’, the government official whose job it was to visit families on welfare with the purpose of checking whether or not they were living beyond their means, funded by illicit employment. Thomas Winning’s confectionery business had attracted their attention, even though he was scrupulous about earning only four shillings, the maximum sum permitted if he wished to retain his welfare aid. ‘My mother hated the indignity of those visits. She was house-proud and felt it was a form of invasion and yet there was nothing she could do,’ Margaret recalled. Agnes dreaded each visit and would always weep after the official had left.

The persistent unemployment of Thomas Winning had nothing to do with indolence; instead, his religious identity prevented him from walking through the factory gate. In the past, when work was plentiful, employers did not enjoy putting a Catholic on their payroll but strong backs were required. Now, in the Depression years of the 1930s, they could pick and choose. This was the era when an employer’s first question was: ‘What school did you go to?’ Those who had been educated at a Catholic school were told there was no work available. On numerous occasions, Thomas Winning would re-christen his school, but his background was always uncovered. While he accepted wave after wave of rejection with stoicism, forged in the knowledge that as a veteran of the Somme he was lucky to be alive, it ignited a burning resentment within his son. Winning was moulded in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, the consequences of which were a deep distrust and even dislike of Protestantism and an unswerving loyalty to the Catholic Church. He remembered: ‘It was a time that left its mark. My main memory was watching my father always on the look-out for work, always asking for a chance, but always being knocked back because of his religion. It ingrained something in you. It builds harshness, and so you always side with other Catholics.’

Winning’s earliest experience of hostility towards Catholics was on the small football field that lay at Shepherd’s Park, a few streets away from his home. Although his group of friends was mixed, it was not uncommon when picking sides for players to glare at him and declare: ‘I don’t want an Irishman on my side.’ He would insist he had never set foot in the country but ethnic subtleties did not matter, the equation was simple: a Catholic equalled an Irishman. On other occasions, Winning would deny he was even a Catholic when he was pounced upon by a teenage gang who often lurked along Glasgow Road and hauled up against a wall as they demanded to know if he was a ‘Fenian’.

The attitude was repeated by the Winnings’ neighbours, the Russells, who at least had the civility to restrict their behaviour to one day each year. On 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, when William of Orange vanquished his Irish enemies, protest songs would roar from the window and Mr Russell would refuse to speak to the Winnings. For the remainder of the year, the family was good natured and brought presents for the children from their annual holiday in Portobello, on the east coast. (The Winnings could not afford a holiday and when Thomas asked why, he was told that if he ate margarine instead of butter all year, they could afford a trip. Thomas said he would rather stick to butter.)

What the family experienced was common across the country as Winning’s formative years covered the most dynamic and difficult period of the twentieth century for the Catholic Church in Scotland. The Catholic population had almost doubled during the past forty years to over six hundred thousand and in 1918 the community had benefited from the Education Act that saw the government fund Catholic schools. Previously, they were funded by collections from among the parishioners. Flush with extra capital, the Church leaders embarked on an extensive building programme, yet outside the stone gables and away from the scent of incense, trouble was brewing.

The Education Act triggered a backlash as Protestants argued against what they saw as ‘Rome on the Rates’. The Church of Scotland, the country’s official Church, whose annual General Assembly was viewed as the conscience of the nation, increased the pressure when, in 1923, the Church and Nation Committee prepared a report entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality’. Their conclusion was that the immigrant Irish and their subsequent generations were stealing jobs from native Scots and dragging the country down into a gutter of crime, drunkenness and thriftlessness. The solution was the exclusive employment of Scots Protestants and the deportation of those Irish on poor relief or in prison.

The following decade saw the rise of two potent anti-Catholic groups. The Scottish Protestant League was based in Glasgow and led by Alexander Ratcliffe, a former railway clerk and son of a minister. He was an eloquent speaker who secured five seats for the League on Glasgow City Council by telling packed meetings salacious tales about renegade priests, vicious nuns and the true villainy of the Vatican. The problem had an uglier face in Edinburgh, where John Cormack, a Baptist and veteran of the First World War, formed Protestant Action in 1933, an organization that advocated the withdrawal of the vote for Catholics and their eventual expulsion from the country. Their campaign reached its height in the spring and summer of 1935, when they rallied ten thousand protestors to picket the City Chambers where a reception for the Catholic Young Men’s Society was in progress. A detachment of Gordon Highlanders was placed on standby to secure the CYMS’s safe departure. The treatment of Catholics attending a Eucharistic Congress, an assembly of devotion, in the city a few weeks later led the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Joseph McDonald, to write to Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, to complain:

Priests were savagely assaulted, elderly women attacked and kicked, bus-loads of children mercilessly stoned and inoffensive citizens abused and assailed in a manner that is almost unbelievable in any civilized community today. The disgraceful scenes have become known in every quarter of the globe, and have sullied the fair name of a city which once was justly regarded as a leader in all culture, thought and civilization.


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Across the country, parishioners were in a state of readiness, organizing around the clock watches on their churches against what was considered the worst outbreak of anti-Catholic fervour since the Reformation. The summer of 1935 was to prove the zenith of violent anti-Catholicism, but the insidious boil remained and would take decades to lance.

The red sandstone church of St Patrick’s was the beating heart of the Catholic community in Craigneuk. Built in 1891, it was here under the high arches that an oppressed people came for spiritual succour, here they brought their newborn and recently dead, here they confessed their sins, pledged their love during marriage, prayed for the strength to cope with life in this world and for a better life in the next. In an environment hostile to their faith, life revolved around the church in ways unimaginable today. The church hall was a leisure centre, open in the evening and equipped with a library, games room and a tea bar to act as an alternative to the public house. Concerts and amateur productions were performed regularly, but the highlight was the weekly dance organized to introduce the young men and women of the parish under the watchful eye of the clergy. On a Sunday morning, all three Masses were packed, the wooden pews straining to contain the villagers in their smartest clothes. The parish supported a range of organizations popular enough to operate by invitation only. Thomas Winning was a member of the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Scottish branch of a French organization founded after the French Revolution by a Catholic lawyer to aid the poor.

Each Sunday, Thomas Winning would appear at Mass, wearing a bright yellow sash embroidered with the organization’s name, and work as an usher, supervise the collection, afterwards count the takings, and then decide on its distribution among the poor and elderly. Johnny Kelly, a burly Irishman who worked at the Etna Steel Plant and devoted his spare time to charity work, led the Shieldmuir conference of St Vincent de Paul. It was a generous act for which he was cruelly rewarded. He was the father of eight children and, with his wife, watched helpless as each one contracted tuberculosis and died, a tragic event he blamed on the great bundles of old clothes, probably contaminated, that he stored in the house, prior to distribution.

The young Winning was involved in the Church from the moment of his baptism. At home each evening the family gathered to say the rosary, with his father using a set of keys instead of beads. On the morning of his fifth birthday, he began classes at St Patrick’s primary school, a mile from his house, where the four Rs were taught instead of the usual three, religion being regarded as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. The Catholic faith was taught by rote before and after lunch using the penny catechism, a dark hardback book whose questions and answers were to be memorized. The idea was to provide Catholics with ready answers for anyone who might question their beliefs.

Winning was quick to display his intelligence. He memorized large chunks of a book on biblical history, and so was asked to visit the other classrooms to demonstrate his skill. When a new headmaster was appointed, he asked to speak to the brightest boy in the school and Winning was sent forward. Unfortunately, he panicked and answered every question put to him incorrectly. ‘I have never forgotten that day,’ he was to say later. ‘I felt ashamed. I felt that I had let everybody down and I felt humiliated.’

The primary school was a natural extension of the church, and three times each year both were united with the entire Catholic community for public processions. The largest procession was the feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, in June, when the consecrated host was carried aloft by the priest around the village. In preparation, the families in tenements which looked on to the church and school playing fields dressed their windows like altars, with lighted candles and statues of Our Lady. On two occasions, Winning was given the role of carrying a basket of rose petals for a classmate, Maureen Hoban, who scattered them like a carpet of flowers over which the gathered community processed while singing hymns and saying the rosary.

At the age of seven, Winning joined his class in preparing to receive the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion. One night, Winning went home to his mother and asked if it was acceptable to inform the priest that he had disobeyed her five times. ‘Five times! Five times? Fifty times, more like,’ she replied. Winning was not a particularly naughty child, but he did enjoy teasing his younger sister to the point of tears by insisting on calling her ‘the Cat’s Auntie’ instead of by her name. Then there was the occasion when he climbed up on to the dresser to find football tickets and toppled the whole structure down. Winning made his confession, told the priest that he had disobeyed his mother fifty times, and was forgiven his sins. In the classroom, his teacher explained that the host, the little wafer of bread, would be transformed through the mystery of transubstantiation into the actual body of Jesus Christ; a concept that struck Winning as truly wondrous, but which built expectations the Catholic Church could not match. On the day of his first Holy Communion, neat in pressed trousers, white shirt and ironed tie, Winning stuck out his tongue and received the bread to a crushing disappointment: ‘I was so disillusioned by the host. I thought it would be much thicker, crunchier, and much more fleshy.’ Afterwards, he received a hot breakfast in the school and a penny from the parish priest, but even this could not make up for the earlier let-down.

While pennies were spent on gumballs, cinnamon sticks or twisted paper pokes of boiled sweets – unavailable in his father’s pantry – the week’s pocket money was spent on the cinema. Every Saturday morning, Winning would travel to Motherwell, to the Rex cinema. There, in the gloom of the cinema, he and his friends would watch Westerns and gangster films starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. The local cinema was deemed too rough for Winning, who once had his hat stolen by some boisterous lads, and watched as his younger sister fought to retrieve it. Eventually the cinema was closed and renamed. ‘All the kids thought it was called the R 10, and couldn’t work out what it meant. Eventually we learned it was called the RIO. I loved the cinema, and the way every kid felt he could be a cowboy or Indian,’ said Winning. While the cinema provided the necessary escapism, the Church was to offer him a possible career.

As a teenager, Winning never glimpsed a burning bush, heard the voice of God, or walked a road to Damascus. Instead, he was quietly drawn towards the altar by the magnetic example of the parish priests. Before becoming eligible to be an altar boy, prospective candidates had to spend a period of penance in the choir loft. The ‘Lord of the Loft’ was Fr James Cuthbert Ward, a priest from Edinburgh, who had been banished to the west coast as two older brothers were already priests in the city and the Archbishop feared a cabal. Ward was a chubby man who wore thick glasses, the size and depth of lemonade bottles, and Winning initially considered him soft on account of his frequent homilies about his mother. It was a notion the priest quickly dispelled by regularly beating altar boys and choirboys for errors and cheek. If Ward meted out punishment and strict discipline, his devotion to the high hymns and Latin chants that made up the sung Mass redressed the balance. To Ward they were a reflection of God’s beauty and a way of softening the harshness of the parishioners’ lives. Winning was no nightingale, but the effort he exerted was appreciated by Ward and the choir loft offered him a better view of the panoply below.

The elevated role priests held in the Catholic community was never emphasized more than on a Sunday when they led the parishioners in prayer. Winning would watch in quiet awe as they paraded across the altar in rich, embroidered vestments of purple, gold, green, red and white. At the age of eleven, he was finally allowed to join the priests on the altar, carrying the large brass cross, swinging the long steel thurible, the elaborate holder for the incense that perfumed the air, and holding up the priest’s cope during weekly devotions. Winning was hard-working and diligent and his duties were expanded to include the sale of religious booklets door-to-door. Often people would take one out of pity and promise to pay later, a promise seldom kept, forcing Winning to contribute his pocket money to correct the balance. He also had to maintain a steady supply of religious pamphlets for display and sale at the back of the church. This involved taking the bus to Glasgow and the Renfrew Street offices of the Catholic Truth Society. It was while browsing amongst the lives of saints and booklets on personal morality that Winning picked up a copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis, a text that was to deepen his faith to a greater degree than the shallows usually inhabited by schoolboys. The author was born in Kempen in the German Rhineland in 1380, and was responsible for the training of novices, but his posthumous work, published a century later, would became almost as widely read as the Bible. The book is constructed as a series of proverbs, designed to overcome vices, develop virtues and nurture a private prayer life, and Winning saw it as ‘a great précis on how you should live your life as a Catholic’. The enthusiasm other schoolboys reserved for football, Winning ploughed into the stern and demanding nature of the book, but kept the practice utterly private. Priests may have been admired and held up as pillars of the community, but anyone who wished to join them was a ‘Holy Joe’ fit to be pilloried by their young peers.

The only two people to whom Winning disclosed his interests were Fr James Ward and his superior, Fr Alex Hamilton, the parish priest of St Patrick’s. Alex Hamilton had arrived three years previously, in 1935, and was a quiet, reserved man whose mother had died when he was very young; the reason given for his emotional distance. When Winning first raised the idea of becoming a priest and the possibility that he might attend junior seminary at Blairs College in Aberdeen, Fr Hamilton had been surprisingly cautious. As a veteran of Blairs from the age of ten, he had no wish for Winning to suffer the poor food and intense homesickness that he himself had endured. Instead, he advised Winning to complete his secondary education and allow his true calling, if it was so, to deepen.

At no point did Winning discuss his thoughts with either his mother or father and it would be a further three years before the issue emerged into the open. In the intervening years, Winning continued his education at Our Lady’s High School, the local Catholic secondary school for boys, based two miles away in Motherwell. He had been accepted for the school after the successful completion of the Eleven-Pius, the examination designed to separate children with academic promise from those viewed as possessing a lesser ability, more suited to an early entry to the work place. The fact he passed one year earlier than most, and that many of the school friends he believed cleverer than himself should fail or be prohibited from sitting by parents anxious to secure another wage, seemed a great injustice. This feeling was later compounded by guilt when Winning did not fulfil his scholastic potential. ‘I did not feel that I fared particularly well at school,’ said Winning. ‘I have always felt it is a mistake to push kids on.’

At primary school Winning had been taken to the local swimming baths where he had stepped off the side, expecting to find steps, and sank. He spluttered to the surface, but it would be almost sixty years before he tried to swim again. After the familiar warmth and relative ease of primary school, secondary education was a shock and once again Winning felt he was drowning. The problem was understanding the art of studying; he was unfamiliar with the secret of dividing work into sections, organizing study timetables and structuring revision. His parents were supportive, offering the sitting room and dinner table for his books, and ensuring a silence suitable for study descended on the house, but, left on his own, Winning would panic. Maths was a particular chore. He missed numerous classes while serving as an altar boy at funeral services, and had a natural blind spot for numbers which was exacerbated by the maths master, John Bancewicz, whom he disliked intensely and viewed as a ‘bully’. On a number of occasions, Winning asked his father, who had taken a correspondence course in mathematics, to complete his homework, which he would then copy into his jotter and present as his own work. Trial and error in methods of revision finally paid off and the perseverance he would display during the course of his life began to take root. During those early years of secondary school, his vocation to the priesthood began to deepen, but it was not the contemplative or spiritual aspect of the job that he desired. ‘There was a glamour in the priesthood. I would imagine myself running for sick calls and looking after people in road accidents or during emergencies.’

The persecution of Catholic priests and nuns in Spain, upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and over the next three years, galvanized Winning’s ambition to be a priest. What the astute observer viewed as the beginning of a titanic struggle between Fascism and Communism was reduced to the simplest level in Winning’s mind. The machinations of Franco and his coup against an elected government were immaterial to a young Catholic boy in Lanarkshire who saw the conflict in black and white: Godless Communists against the nobility of the Catholic Church. Each Sunday, Winning would lie in front of the coal fire in the family’s living room and read the Catholic Observer and the Universe for reports on the atrocities being carried out against priests and nuns in towns across Spain. He was riveted by a picture that appeared in the Universe of the execution of a Jesuit priest who, just before he was shot by a firing squad, called out ‘Viva Christo Rey!’ – ‘Long live Christ the King!’ The Scots Catholics who supported Franco were against the tide of public opinion that sided with the Republicans, sending men, money and supplies to support the International Brigade. The sight of the co-op store collecting money for the war in Spain sickened him, and he considered smashing the window, but fear of being caught and of his parents having to pay for the damage changed his mind.

I was a staunch Francophile. I felt great resentment at the way the British government supported the Republicans. The co-op store had a milk-for-Spain campaign, it involved milk bottle tops and the money was to go towards the International Brigade. It was the way they were treating the Church that coloured my attitude. They were anti-Catholic and so I hoped they would be defeated. I discussed it with my father. We all felt the same way. To me it was simple: it was murderers versus the rest.

Winning remembers hearing about the end of the siege of Madrid on the radio and the whole family cheering Franco’s victory. ‘It was a real joy and a pleasure for us to hear that the Republicans had been defeated.’

The annual retreat organized for the boys of Our Lady’s High School and St Aloysius Boys’ School, a private school based in Glasgow city centre, was a great influence on Winning. Each year the two schools would travel to Craighead Retreat Centre in Bothwell for an overnight retreat. Winning enjoyed the walks around the expansive gardens and the clandestine game of cards after light’s out, but he would return home with a personal mantra, a prayer written by St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, which was said before each talk:

Lord, teach me to be generous, to serve you as you deserve.

To give and not to count the cost,

To fight and not to heed the wounds,

To toil and not to seek for rest,

To labour and not to ask for any reward

Save for knowing that I do God’s Holy Will.

On 3 September 1939, as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the British nation that war had been declared on Germany, Winning was tossing balls at a coconut shy at Craigneuk fair with Patrick Macmillan, the son of the local doctor. World War Two was to bring mixed fortunes to the family. Rationing meant the closure of Thomas Winning’s confectionery sideline, but after twelve years of unemployment, he was given a job on the nearby Belhaven Estate. On the farm the unemployed men were put to work planting crops, tending sheep and milking cows for a set number of hours each day for which they were paid in farm produce.

Each ‘pay day’ Thomas Winning would return to his family laden with eggs, butter and buttermilk, prized possessions when the average family were entitled to just one egg a week. Conscious of the generosity of his in-laws over the past decade, he insisted on sharing the food around. The war effort also increased Winning’s responsibilities. As the fighting drained the parish of able-bodied men, sent to serve overseas in the various armed forces, Fr Ward set up a monthly newsletter to keep them informed of parish life. Winning was conscripted to update and log all the addresses on file index cards and spend one day each month churning out copies using an early version of the Xerox machine.

In his fifth and sixth years at school, Winning remained reluctant to reveal his ambitions for the priesthood. He brushed away questions about his future plans and when once asked by a teacher what he wanted to do after leaving school, his surly response was, ‘Get a job’, an attitude that was swiftly admonished as cheek. In truth, he remained embarrassed by his ambition. Despite his doubts and poor start, he passed higher qualifications in English, German, Latin, and, incredibly, Mathematics. He followed these up by taking the prospective teacher’s exam, a qualification similar to an A-level in religious studies and which acted as a convenient cloak for his true intent.

His choice of vocation had also clouded his relations with girls. In the 1930s and the early 1940s, very few boys of fifteen or sixteen had girlfriends but the prickly hormones of puberty meant the interest was there even if the contact was not. Winning was friendly with girls in the neighbourhood, pulled pigtails and even took to the floor when Our Lady’s High met up with its sister school for girls for monitored dances, but there remained a certain careful detachment. ‘He knew what he wanted to be and knew girls didn’t come into it,’ said Margaret.

When he was sixteen, Winning finally broke the news to his parents of his plan to study for the priesthood. Their response was quiet and subdued. They had expected this day to arrive. His role as an altar boy, his interest in Latin, his weekly chores for the church, were all part of a religious mosaic. His mother said very little, while his father asked only if he was sure of his plan and when Winning replied that he was the matter was closed.

Equipped with his parents’ permission and the blessing of his parish priest, Winning’s name was sent forward to the archdiocese of Glasgow and in early June 1942, Winning was invited for an interview. His father accompanied him on the bus trip to the large Victorian town house in the Park Circus area of Glasgow. Mr Winning waited outside while his son was questioned in the drawing room. The panel of five elderly priests charged with scrutinizing candidates asked him to read a passage of Latin prose by Cicero, the great Roman orator, and though they took exception to his pronunciation, it was deemed a pass. When asked why he wanted to become a priest, Winning replied sanctimoniously but effectively: he wished to leave the world a better place. Three weeks later he received a formal letter of acceptance and notification that his training would begin at St Mary’s College, Blairs, the following autumn.

Winning was delighted and as the summer weeks crawled by his dreams and ambitions expanded to fill those empty days. One evening towards the end of the holidays, he sat on the step of his house beside his young cousin of seven, Mary Canning, turned to her, and said with (as she recalled) ‘absolute certainty’: ‘I’m going to be the first Scottish pope.’




TWO (#ulink_acc7a15d-a8db-5393-97cd-f7daff4ecead)

Blairs Bound (#ulink_acc7a15d-a8db-5393-97cd-f7daff4ecead)


‘They drained my self-esteem. I simply didn’t have any.’

THOMAS WINNING

On the afternoon of 27 August 1942, Platform Two of Buchanan Street railway station in the centre of Glasgow resembled a convention of apprentice undertakers. Three dozen boys dressed in black suits, black coats and soft trilby hats stood waiting for the one o’clock train to Aberdeen. Ahead lay their first year at Blairs, as St Mary’s seminary was commonly known, and around them hung an air of acute trepidation. Thomas Winning had perhaps more to fear than his fellow students. This was his first trip away from home and the thought of leaving behind his family had left him quite sick. His aunts and uncles had paid for his new wardrobe, the highlight of which was his first pair of football boots; but only his immediate family had come to wave him off. Before arriving at the station, Fr James Ward had taken them to Luigi’s Fish and Chip Emporium as a final treat. The farewell on the platform was short and strained. Afterwards, the priest bought Winning’s mother, father and sister tickets to see the film How Green Was My Valley, a popular weepy about a Welsh mining disaster, and told Margaret: ‘You can get your tears out in the dark.’

On the train, Winning had the same emotions, but no such opportunity for release. Instead, he took a seat beside Maurice Taylor, a quiet boy one year younger than himself, with whom he had become friendly during his previous two years at Our Lady’s High School. The carriage was filled with boys who enjoyed the easy camaraderie that accompanied a secondary education at Blairs, a clique that left Taylor and Winning with the feeling of being outsiders. As the others talked, the pair mainly stared out of the window at the countryside’s blur of browns and greens.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, the party arrived at Aberdeen’s Central Station and spilled out for what was a Blairs’ tradition – a high tea of scones and cress sandwiches at Kenaway’s, the renowned delicatessen. A fleet of taxis was then organized to carry the boys and their trunks to the college, which sat five miles west of the city centre on the south Deeside Road. Rattling in the back of the black hackney, they crossed the bridge over the river Dee and, looking back, saw the spires of Aberdeen disappear into the distance. For many boys, the brief walk from the station to Kenaway’s would be as much as they would see of the Granite City during their northern education. The temptations of Aberdeen were strictly out of bounds.

Father Stephen McGill greeted the party at the doors of the college. A small man with a clipped and careful manner and a pious spirituality many found sickly sweet, McGill had trained as a priest in France with the Order of St Sulpice, a group dedicated to the formation of aspirant priests, and would boast of having escaped the German invasion with only his typewriter and a pair of socks. He ushered them inside for a tour and what would become their traditional supper: a sweet tea, bluish in colour, and slices of bread and jam. The customary strict decorum was suspended for that first evening as the party were shown around their new home. Each student was allocated a plywood cubicle, seven feet by five feet, each with a bed and a small wooden stool. There was no door and only a curtain for privacy. The centre of the room also acted as their main recreational area and this meant that throughout the year the boys slept in the smoke-filled atmosphere. Winning sat on his bed and listened as the ‘Decano’, a senior student, shouted over the tops of all the cubicles that the following day they would be expected to dress in Roman collars and soutanes. The lights were then suddenly switched off, leaving Winning and his fellow students to unpack in the dark. He felt utterly alone. ‘The first night was hellish,’ said Winning. ‘There was a certain harsh loneliness to the place.’

Winning and his fellow students were awoken at six o’clock by the morning bell and queued in silence for the ‘jakes’, as the toilets were called. Then, dressed in their black soutanes, they headed to the oratory for morning prayers and meditation, followed by Mass. Over a breakfast of porridge, tea and toast they were introduced to the Redemptorist priest who would lead them through their first few days. The priest, from a religious congregation founded in Naples in 1732, specialized in the administration of spiritual retreats, and each new intake of students began their formation at Blairs with a three-day silent retreat. As well as the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience the Redemptorists included a fourth, perseverance, an attribute they were keen to impress on the students at a time of confusion and doubt. Winning was reluctant to listen. ‘If there had been a correspondence course I would have taken it. I found those days an ordeal.’ The problem was the silence, a void that was quickly filled with doubts, unease and uncertainty. The long periods of contemplation and prayer were separated by a series of religious talks, opportunities for confession, and walks around the ‘bounds’ – a circuitous route through the attractive parkland in which the college sat. For Winning, it was the beginning of a long period of adjustment where he had to balance his desire to be a priest with the emotional rigours of the training.

Preparation for the priesthood at Blairs was run along monastic lines. Each day would begin and end enfolded within magnum silencium: the ‘Grand Silence’. This restful time, when students were freed from the tug and pull of daily life and were thought to be more open to God’s call, started with night prayers in the oratory and ran through until the beginning of breakfast. To break the silence was considered a grave error, one indicative of a lack of self-restraint, and grounds for the guilty student’s dismissal. The college’s regimented timetable was an attempt to ingrain discipline into the very hearts of the students.

Their days ran as follows:




At the time of Winning’s formation, the priesthood retained an exalted and highly respected position both within the Catholic Church and across mainstream society. Priests were untarnished by scandal, unquestioned and reverently deferred to. As a spiritual descendant of his leader, Jesus Christ, a priest was no longer of the world; he had moved beyond it. He enjoyed a unique position, able to straddle both the ordinary and the divine. The power to transform unleavened bread into the actual body of Christ, and to administer or retain God’s forgiveness at will was bestowed on him. A priest was not only in a position of patriarchal privilege, deferred to in society and enjoying great influence, sometimes even adoration, he was viewed as physically closer to God, and capable of wielding the supernatural. As Winning had read previously in The Imitation of Christ, ‘High is the ministry and great the dignity of priests, to whom is given that which is not granted to the angels.’ But such a privilege comes at a heavy price as Thomas A Kempis later explained: ‘You have not lightened your burden; you are now bound by a stricter bond of discipline, and are obliged to a greater perfection of sanctity.’

There was little place for the individual in the role of the priest; through their training, seminarians were to be melted down and re-cast in a uniform mould. Priestly celibacy was viewed as both a practical necessity for men who were, in essence, married to God and to the Church, as well as an opportunity to radiate purity. As Fr Ronald Knox, a popular contemporary author, wrote in The Priestly Life, a priest should not have:

the insensitivity of the bachelor who finds women a nuisance, not the furtive horror which tries to forget that sex exists, but something unapproachable, blinding, on a different plane from thoughts of evil. What a waste of God’s gift, when the life that’s pledged to celibacy is not a life irradiated by purity. What brooding regrets or cheap familiarities tarnish the surface of the mirror, which ought to reflect Christ?


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In the opinion of Fr Knox, the ground on which a priest’s feet trod should be ‘a part of the soil of heaven transplanted to earth’.

Before such a feat could be performed, seminarians would undergo a five-year course, two years of philosophy, followed by theology. Philosophy, it is said, is the handmaiden of theology, and before studying the latter, student priests were given a solid grounding in the former. At Blairs, the first-year class had four lecturers in the subject, led by Fr Philip Flanagan, who had spent two years until 1940 as vice-rector of the Scots College in Rome. Although the youngest of the lecturers, he was the most senior, taking lectures in ethics and cosmology. A second escapee from Europe was Fr Stephen McGill. He was assisted by Fr Hugh Cahill, lecturer in logic and psychology, a likeable man, nicknamed ‘Domine’ Cahill after his habit of addressing students by the Latin for ‘Mr’. The faculty was completed by Fr John Sheridan, a brilliant academic whose only complaint was that his typewriter would not keep pace with his constant flow of essays and articles. He was an erudite speaker who would often spend an entire lecture on areas of cosmology and natural philosophy which were beyond even the brightest boy. For the first few months, Winning found the classes wearisome and a distraction from what he had in mind (which was the active service of others), but over time, he appreciated the clarity that the discipline brought to his life.

When his class was taught the works of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher who stated: ‘I think, therefore I am’, Winning and the other students began to counter-argue, using the rules of logic to prove that they did not exist. Discussions during meals or what little social time was available had previously been light and casual, but now they took on a competitive edge. Loose talk was scrutinized for philosophical faux pas and anyone coming to a conclusion greater than the evidence will support was accused of breaking the laws of minor logic. Winning’s teachers impressed upon him that a firm grasp of philosophy would allow him to discuss the deepest problems of human life with men and women of any (or no) religious persuasion. It also gently led to a clearer understanding of Catholic theology. Through the study of general metaphysics and ontology, Winning learned to probe below surface appearances and physical characteristics to the nature of being. He learned how to distinguish between matter and form and was able to explain the mystery of why the host, which after consecration becomes the body of Christ, doesn’t taste of flesh, but remains instead brittle bread: in the language of metaphysics the ‘accidents’, the taste, the shape and texture, remain the same while the ‘substance’ is transformed by the power of God, working through his priest.

Winning grew to enjoy his philosophy classes, but the same was not to be said of his spiritual studies under the tutelage of Fr McGill, the year’s spiritual director. ‘I didn’t particularly take to McGill as a spiritual director – he was just too sickly sweet for me. I didn’t like his manner and he seemed to have absolutely no sense of humour.’ McGill’s field was viewed as the ‘inner forum’, the cultivation of the spiritual life. Each day, for twenty minutes, he was responsible for a series of religious talks that quickly became known as the ‘starvation talks’ among the students. Prayers were often said for the bell that signalled the beginning of lunch and the end of McGill’s lecture.

Winning viewed McGill as a patron of popular psychology from their first meeting. Over later decades, the two men, as brother bishops, would become friends, in spite of their less than auspicious beginning.

Winning did not take easily to the more progressive methods of prayer. Although he experimented with both the Sulpician method which involved a rigid schedule of prayer, spiritual conferences and study, and the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, neither system truly matched his temperament. He found piety and overt holiness distasteful, almost insincere, and in many ways this was a throwback to his fear of being viewed as a ‘sissy’ or ‘Holy Joe’. Instead, the rosary, the Our Father, daily attendance at Mass and periods of quiet contemplation, became the cornerstones of his early spirituality.

After the exercise of both the mind and the soul, the body came third. Every pupil was encouraged to walk for one hour each day in the company of two other students, chosen at random to prevent the curse of ‘cronyism’. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were set aside for football, and although Winning was delighted by his football boots, they were seldom worn, as he preferred the role of spectator to that of participant. He viewed the game of billiards as the sign of a misspent youth and would instead practise the piano while others played.

In Fr Flanagan’s view, an appreciation of the arts was an important element in the education of a priest. He also believed that the charisma required to attract young people to Jesus Christ and the ability to project one’s voice from the pulpit could best be nurtured on the stage. So each year the students were required to perform a play or musical from the canons of either Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan. During Winning’s time at Blairs The Merchant of Venice was chosen and he was cast in the role of Portia, the intelligent heroine but calculating deceiver, a casting coup he attributed to his good looks. Frank Cullen, who was cast as his Antonio, said: ‘Tom wasn’t a great actor, he was like the rest of us – we managed to mug through.’

Not everyone was as successful as Winning at masking their initial unhappiness. One morning in the spring of 1943, Winning discovered at breakfast that a fellow student was to abandon his studies. The doubts that everyone developed and so often brushed away had dragged Hugh Heslin down and he announced his immediate departure by slamming a tin of syrup on to the breakfast table and declaring, ‘I’m off.’ Heslin’s departure had a shattering effect on Winning’s confidence. His decision had appeared as if from nowhere and Winning began to wonder how firm were the foundations of his own vocation. Hadn’t Hugh Heslin once thought the priesthood was his calling? Over the next few weeks, he grew increasingly concerned about the strength of his vocation.

The doubts coincided with the collapse of the water system at the college and the students returned to their homes for an unscheduled six-week break. The family house at Glasgow Road had been given up and Winning’s parents and sister had moved to a larger property in Stewart Crescent, a ten-minute walk away. The house had originally been built by the husband of Kate Canning, sister of Winning’s grandfather. While James Stewart and his wife lived in one section, the remainder had been rented out. For many years, Winning’s father had acted as handyman for the elderly couple, and upon their death, he was rewarded with joint ownership, along with his cousin Patrick Canning.

The move, though unsettling, had its benefits. Winning was given the front parlour as his own private room for the duration of his stay, which he largely spent in study and visiting his various relatives. He maintained the practice of daily attendance at Mass, but made his sister walk a few paces behind, lest gossips, unaware of their relationship, report his behaviour. He was grossly overreacting, but it was an action which illustrated his concerns and the need to tighten his grip against any possible lapse in his conduct.

The impromptu break was quickly followed by the summer holidays, and by the time of his return to Blairs at the end of August 1943, Winning had so long wrestled with his doubts that he had gained the upper hand. He returned to Blairs equipped with a new-found piety and determination, illustrated by his decision to start a diary. Throughout his life, Winning would regularly start a diary with the best of intentions only to abandon it after a few entries. A whole year would have only one or two entries, offering an odd isolated insight in a sea of empty pages.

A diary entry for 27 and 28 August 1943 contains the following: ‘The master has recalled me to another year of prayer and labour but one of sweetness, for what sweeter thing is there than the knowledge that one is carrying out the will of Jesus Christ.’




He continues in the purplish prose of the newly inspired:

Soon autumn will arrive, if it has not already done so. The trees will be stripped of their foliage and they will stand desolate and naked against the cold winter blasts till spring invites them to don their former robes of healthy green and ripening fruit. So also must I strip myself of all my little tendencies to things of earth, the master has invited me to do so by calling me back. Then I must let grace enter my soul freely without hindrance and in the summer of my spiritual life of 1943–44 I will bear the fruits of my mortifications, my prayers and my labours which, unworthy though they be, will store up treasures for me in the land of the living …

If Winning was dwelling on God’s infinite love, the rest of the world was engulfed by man’s hate. In the evening during their hour of leisure time, the students listened to the BBC News and devoured the local Aberdeen Press and Journal for reports on the success of Montgomery in North Africa as well as the Americans’ increased involvement. German bombers regularly flew on sorties from Norway, and although their principal targets were the shipyards of Glasgow and the west coast, they would regularly dump any remaining armaments on the northeast. When Aberdeen was targeted, the boys would retire to the bomb shelter built in the basement, while each student took it in turn to act as a fire watcher, staying up all night in order to keep track of enemy planes and report on any bombing close to the college.

For the first year and a half of Winning’s stay at Blairs, the war in Europe carried the added fear that he might yet be called up to fight. Under the terms of an agreement negotiated by the Catholic Church at the beginning of the conflict, student priests were placed on the list of reserve professions. However, this was dependent on each student having clearly demonstrated his desire for a vocation prior to the outbreak of war. Technically, Winning should have been protected from the prospect of being forced to follow in his father’s footsteps, but for the public-spirited contrariness of Archbishop Donald Mackintosh of Glasgow. He believed, in defiance of every other Scottish diocese, that only those admitted to the clerical state, following tonsure, the ceremonial cutting of hair after the third year of study, should be excused.

During Winning’s first year, Mackintosh made a visit to the college, raising hopes that he might have changed his position. However, during an inspection of the Glasgow students, where he paraded past them delicately carrying a hankie, he said: ‘I wish you joy’, before asking how many had been tonsured. When only a few raised their hands, he sighed and said: ‘The rest of you know the rules.’ In other words, on their eighteenth birthday, they would be eligible for conscription and were expected to do their duty and fight for their country. Winning had no desire to exchange his soutane for combat fatigues, his meditation and studies for armed combat and the likelihood of an early death. He was proud of his father’s contribution in the previous war, but had no desire to follow his lead. Winning turned eighteen in June 1943, but did not advertise the fact, on the grounds that if called up he would serve, but he would not volunteer his services. For six uncomfortable months he held his breath, then, in December 1943, Mackintosh died. With the unyielding archbishop removed, Fr James Ward was able to persuade the Diocesan Administrator that Winning should be exempt under the government’s agreement. Ward was backed by Fr Alex Hamilton and together both men explained that Winning had wanted to train for the priesthood since he was a schoolboy in 1937, but that this had been postponed on their advice.

Maurice Taylor was not so fortunate. His parish priest was unable to vouch for his vocation prior to 1939 and so, in 1944, Taylor received his commission. However, it was with the medical corps, and the war was over by the time he was sent to India. Instead of tramping across the beaches of northern Europe with kit and gun, Winning was rolling the clay tennis courts at the college when news broke of the Allied invasion of Europe, but an endurance test of another sort lay ahead.

In the autumn of 1944, Winning and his class switched the relative comfort of Blairs for the harsher, more ramshackle facilities at St Peter’s College in Bearsden, five miles to the north-east of Glasgow. After completing their two-year philosophy course, they were to begin their studies in theology. They had reached the Holy Land. Unfortunately, there was nothing virtuous about St Peter’s College, as Winning quickly discovered. The building was decrepit and the staff critical to the point of abuse. It was to be a miserable year, the repercussions of which unfurled far into the future.

After the striking architecture of Blairs, St Peter’s appeared rather bland by comparison. The college was approached off a main road, through a lodge gate, where it stood at the end of a long, curved drive. The atmosphere was set by the hill behind the college, branded the ‘Hungry Hill’ on account of its poor soil. The college was packed and rooms were scarce. The strict rule of seniority meant that older students enjoyed the luxury of rooms, while Winning and his friends studied in a disused cupboard. The actual sleeping quarters, or ‘slum clearance’ as they were known, had shaky walls, inadequate lighting and, along with the rest of the college, a feeling of decay. Dry rot was discovered in the refectory and so all meals were taken in the common room.

Tuberculosis had also begun to take grip. The stuffy atmosphere produced by the blackout conditions created a breeding ground for the bacillus, and a number of students fell seriously ill. In an attempt to combat the condition, the college gardener kept a goat and the sickest students were fed its milk. Frank Cullen secured his own room after the previous occupant died of the disease. As fresh air was the remedy recommended by staff, the students spent long hours out of doors working in the gardens or hiking along the ‘Khyber Pass’, the circuitous thirteen-mile walk along the foot of the Campsie Hills and back via the town of Milngavie.

Winning spent the time reflecting on his rapidly diminishing self-esteem. As a schoolboy on his front step, it had seemed impregnable, but any thought of achieving the papacy was replaced by the idea that at best he would be an inadequate priest. The cause of the crisis of confidence was that his education now took on a dismissive and caustic edge. At Blairs, the regime was rigorous and disciplined, but the lecturers remained friendly and encouraging. At Bearsden, there was a total separation of staff and students, they no longer joined each other at dinner, on the football field, or for a smoke over a game of billiards. The attitude of the staff was encapsulated by an incident later that winter when Winning returned from a walk in the snow and slipped in the corridor from ice on his heel just as he was passing a member of staff. Sprawled on the ground, he looked up just as the priest looked down, sneered, and walked away. ‘You were a worm. They were distant, unsympathetic, and they failed to offer any encouragement,’ said Winning.

Condemnation became standard teaching practice. The priest whom Winning found most ill-tempered and contemptuous was Fr John Conroy, a lecturer in moral theology, who viewed the world in terms of black and white. Frank Cullen described him as possessing a ‘sneering and supercilious manner’ and although he was tough on himself, the students believed he reserved his true bile for them. In classes, he dismissed them as lazy and ignorant. If the priesthood was already held in an exalted regard, Conroy cranked it a few notches higher. He inspired fear and conjured up a spectre of trouble. Winning felt that at any moment he could be branded an unsuitable candidate and sent home. Instead, he and the entire college were sent to London.

By the summer of 1945, the college in Bearsden was in such a state of disrepair that the hierarchy decided to close it down and allow the myriad faults to be tackled simultaneously. With space at a premium across Scotland, the students and teachers were forced to relocate to St Joseph’s Missionary College, close to Hendon aerodrome in the Mill Hill area of London, twelve miles from the city centre. The disconsolate air of Bearsden was unfortunately also packed up and shipped south.

The college was the principal centre of education for the Mill Hill Fathers, a religious order founded a hundred years earlier by Bishop (later Cardinal) Vaughan, and the Scots were blamed for the current overcrowding. The students were unpopular with their hosts. Talk during breakfast was banned and instead they were forced to listen in silence as a senior priest read out chunks of The Imitation of Christ in French, followed by an English translation, which was scarcely an aid to digestion.

Father Conroy, meanwhile, grew increasingly dictatorial; he launched a series of talks each Sunday evening, which Winning believed served no greater purpose than to censure the clergy. Each student was also expected to spend thirty minutes every day in manual labour. When given a choice, Winning opted for tailoring in the belief that he would be stitching ‘loin clothes for wee black kids’. Instead, he had to darn holes in trousers belonging to members of staff. Even visits to central London were prohibited, along with any visits to private homes. On one occasion, Winning broke the rule. Their daily constitutionals took Winning and his two colleagues to Edgware, close to the home of his mother’s cousin, William Canning. The three boys paid a visit, but Winning was unable to enjoy the reunion for fear that the visit would be discovered. On this occasion he was lucky. But three other friends who decided to sneak a visit to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks were less fortunate. Riding on the tube home, the trio were spotted by the vice-rector and promptly expelled.

On 13 May 1946, a workman, tackling repairs to the roof of St Peter’s College, accidentally set it alight. The fire quickly spread, gutting the main building but providing a spark of good fortune for the brighter students. In order to combat overcrowding, the decision was taken to reopen, as quickly as possible, the foreign colleges in Spain, France and Rome. Two weeks after the fire, Fr James Ward wrote to Winning with the promise of escape:

My Dear Tom,

By now you will have heard the sad news of the destruction of Bearsden College – to us here it was like the death of a dear friend. Fortunately no lives were lost, the chapel is saved – it is a strange affair, but God’s will [and] that is exactly how His Grace has accepted it. Now, let me whisper something in your ear (not for anybody else) – I’m glad you want to go to Rome because you are definitely going, along with seven others – you see, my undercover man has really been busy, eh? You do know that I would not joke about this, don’t you? I am thrilled that you have been chosen to go to Rome and am really proud of your success – thank the Good God for his kindness to you, thank him to keep you humble as you have always been – that virtue is the secret of your success. I am sure that Jack will be delighted when I tell him and will be able to give you some knowledge of the life there … Congratulations on your good fortune – don’t forget your dear pal! Best love and prayers, Jim

Winning was delighted. He was bound for the centre of the Catholic universe. Rome carried not only a reputation as the training ground for the brightest of students, but held out the promise of a wonderful cultural experience. The basilica of St Peter’s, the frescos of Michelangelo, the presence of the Pope – what he had previously only read about in the inky pages of the Catholic Observer he was about to witness for real. The question he continued to nurture in his mind, however, was: could he cope?




THREE (#ulink_39e36735-e618-5b4f-a119-bb3f9d516775)

To the City by the Tiber (#ulink_39e36735-e618-5b4f-a119-bb3f9d516775)


‘Perhaps the most intimate quality of Roman formation is the personal love and loyalty it nurtures for the Vicar of Christ and the Holy See.’


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THOMAS WINNING

When Pope Clement VIII founded the Scots College in Rome in the year 1600, his goal was more than just the provision of education for the sons of Catholic noblemen condemned to a strictly Protestant schooling since the Reformation forty years before. A leading pope of the Counter-Reformation, Clement VIII now wished for a foundry for casting Catholic agents whose ambition was to overthrow the might of Protestantism in Scotland and return the nation to the faith of their fathers and their fathers before them.

At first the Scots College, which opened in 1602 with eleven students on its roll, was principally an educational establishment where the sons of noblemen were taught good morals, piety, sound doctrine and Christian values without having to make any promise to join the priesthood. Yet when control came into the hands of the Jesuits a decade later, it took little over a year to convert the college into a seminary. The catalyst was the first anniversary in 1615 of the execution of John Ogilvie, a Jesuit hanged at Glasgow’s Tollcross for refusing to swear allegiance to the Crown.

At the time, the students were asked to sign an oath promising to receive holy orders and return to Scotland as missionaries. The popular story is that the anniversary was enough to galvanize all fifteen students to sign up, but in truth only five oaths were ever discovered. Over the past three centuries, many students have taken advantage of the college’s excellent education, but failed to emerge with a clerical collar.

By the eighteenth century, the college became a hotbed of Jacobitism as hopes of a restoration of a Catholic monarchy ignited. They rested on Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was born and educated in Rome. A legitimate heir to the throne, he was prevented from ever succeeding by the Act of Settlement, put in place in 1701 to ensure the Protestant Hanoverian succession passed over the Stuarts, though his ill-fated campaign in 1745 carried the hopes of the college students. When he returned to the city in 1766, following the death of his father, Prince Charles, he received a welcome befitting a monarch from the college rector, later summarily dismissed by the Pope, who, on grounds of Realpolitik, refused to recognize the Young Pretender.

From almost its earliest days, the Scots College has enjoyed a desirable address, sitting close to the Quattro Fontane, the road of the Four Fountains, high on the Quirinal, one of the seven hills that make up the Eternal City. The original property was knocked down and in 1869 a new college was built a few hundred yards away on a street with the gradient of a toboggan run. As the Quattro Fontane was the principal route to the papal palace, for over three centuries Scots students would watch as kings, queens and the royalty of Europe arrived to pay their respects.

In the early twentieth century, the palace was home to Italy’s King and, just before the Second World War, students watched as Hitler and Goebbels drove towards a meeting with Mussolini. One contemporary diarist at the college commented how easily he could have lobbed a bomb. It was a thought shared by the Italian partisans, who, in March 1944, planted a bomb in a bin at the college’s back door on the Via Rasella. The device detonated and killed thirty-two passing members of the Waffen SS. Upon hearing the news, Hitler demanded that the entire quarter be razed, but Field Marshal Kesselring, the country’s commander-in-chief, insisted on a more emotive act of retribution. He had 320 men rounded up from the surrounding streets, marched to the Ardeatine caves outside the city, and shot – ten men for every dead German. At the time, the college’s caretaker, Lorenzo Martinelli, narrowly escaped with his life after hiding among the Italian orphans, now based within the college.

The lynching of Mussolini, Germany’s defeat and the triumph of the Allies in 1945 left the college’s rector, Mgr William Clapperton, anxious to return to Rome from his exile in Scotland. Appointed in 1922, Clapperton was almost sixty and could be cantankerous and brisk with underlings but he was proud of his achievements at the college. The son of a Justice of the Peace from a Catholic enclave in Banffshire, he earned a First in Classics at Durham University before studying in Rome, a city he would never truly leave. At the Scots College, he bounded up the career ladder from head boy to vice-rector, then rector at the age of thirty-six.

The death of Archbishop Mackintosh of Glasgow in 1943 had robbed him of his great supporter and left the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, James McDonald, the senior cleric in the country. A man with little respect for the college, McDonald preferred instead to send promising students to Cambridge. His intention was to maintain the college as a distant outpost populated by a few egg-headed postgraduates, but Clapperton’s resistance and a strongly worded letter from Cardinal Pizzardo at the Vatican’s Congregaton of Seminaries produced the desired effect. In May 1946, it was finally agreed to reopen the college and in July, Clapperton was flown by the British Government’s Transport Command to Rome to make the necessary arrangements.

The essence of the Scots College is contained in the lyrics of the college song, written in 1900 as part of the institution’s tercentenary celebrations. The author was John Gray, a published poet, novelist and Englishman. Gray had been a former lover of Oscar Wilde, who named his most celebrated character, Dorian Gray, after him in order to capture his affections. Accepted by the college as a mature student, Gray put away what he viewed as the errors of his youth and rose to be a canon and secretary of the Scots College society. The song runs:

From the land of purple heather, from the dear and distant north,

Scotland casts our lot together, Bonnie Scotland sends us forth, To the city by the Tiber, to the height of St Peter’s Dome, To bear the bright tradition back of everlasting Rome.

Here’s a hand and faith behind it, here’s my love till death shall part;

Give yours and I will bind it, with the dearest of my heart.

So land and kin forsaking, for Scotland’s faith grown cold

For her valiant spirit aching, with the wound they wrought of old: In faith and heart united all in happy exile one, That Scotland’s wrong be righted, so that Scotland’s work be done.

We foot the fervent traces of those that went before,

Adorned with gifts and graces from our Alma Mater store: So sing the Careful Mother for a tribute to her worth, For to find so good another we might journey all the earth.

For aye the gaps supplying she draughts her study bands,

To keep her colours flying in the best of bonnie lands: The men she taught to cherish all she knows or ever knew; The hope that cannot perish Romans all and Scotsmen true.

To the accompaniment of these words, Winning and thirty other students arrived, under the supervision of Fr Philip Flanagan, at Rome’s Stazione Termini on the afternoon of 18 October 1946. The college’s vice-rector had taught them the words as an antidote to the tedium of their three-day journey – by rail from Glasgow to London, by boat from Dover to Calais, and by train once again via Paris to Rome. The devastation of central Europe, following six years of war, was visible from the carriage windows and the volume of ruined bridges and rail lines buckled by bombs reduced their progress to a crawl. Winning was to spend the first leg of the journey attempting to cheer up a fellow student, who would become one of his dearest friends. Charles ‘Donny’ Renfrew had been raised by two aunts, following the death of his mother, and the day before departure one of them had been killed by a passing tram. With the date of departure fixed and the journey viewed as impossible for a solitary seventeen-year-old, Renfrew was prohibited from attending the funeral. When not attempting to raise Renfrew’s spirits, Winning was at work on his own. A painful stomachache, written off as a bad case of nerves by his parents, developed during the course of the journey into a series of stabbing pains that left him pale and withdrawn. The train’s arrival in northern Italy was accompanied by a splitting headache, one that powdered Asket mixed with Vichy water was unable to tame. The party then stopped in the city of Turin to visit the tomb of St John Bosco, founder of the pious Society of St Francis de Sales (the Salesians). John Bosco was the patron saint of youths and author of many of the pamphlets Winning had previously sold door to door. It was while in Turin that Winning first encountered Italian food. What was in fact to develop into a lifelong love affair did not begin well: he was unable to twirl the spaghetti, the veal Milanese was mistaken for fish in breadcrumbs, and the spicy tomato sauce exacerbated his tender stomach.

The party’s final approach to Rome was heralded by one student’s cry that he had spotted the Colosseum, which later turned out to be a gasometer.

On the platform to greet them stood Mgr Clapperton and Fr Gerry Rogers, a tall, handsome priest from Glasgow who had arrived in Rome for further study in the field of canon law at the Roman Rota. Together as a happy band they made the short trip to the college by bus, along the Via Volturno, where British troops in khaki uniforms and bolt-action rifles patrolled the streets. At the Scots College, Lorenzo Martinelli had dusted down the cassocks he had hidden for the duration of the war. Winning was now to experience his own taste of Italian style, a uniform that consisted of a purple soutane, red sash, and black university-style gown called a soprana, an ensemble that was then topped by a black broad-brimmed hat, nicknamed the soup bowl.

Once dressed, the boys were given a tour of their new home. The kitchen and refectory were on the ground floor, the first floor housed both the library and the offices of the rector, while the second floor contained red damask-covered chairs and the valuable paintings of the drawing room. The student rooms were tucked away on the third floor. Winning’s room was small, basic and tiled in black and white. Its only accoutrements were a bed, a wardrobe, desk and chair, and an enamel basin, jug and pail. There was a solitary light in the ceiling and a cube of sunlight would sneak in through the window high in the wall. A shower room sat at the end of the hall, where each day he would collect water to wash.

Over the next few days, Winning began to familiarize himself with his new surroundings. A trip was organized by Fr Rogers to the catacombs of San Callisto and Winning, along with a few other students, wandered through the ancient passageways where the first Christians and early popes were buried. As impressive as the frescos and stucco work of San Callisto were the contents of the bakers’ windows to students starved of cakes and éclairs and subsisting on meagre food with little charm. Rationing was in force and the rector was struggling to secure adequate provisions; a situation that led to the Vatican sending over supplies of bread and pasta. Yet still the students would retire to bed hungry.

The cold was another persistent problem. The students arrived in the middle of October, when the days should have remained sunny and warm, but the worst winter that century had arrived for a long stay. The long cassocks worn by the students were valuable insulation against the cold, as were the silk stockings into which their trousers were tucked (as the college rules insisted). Until his death, Winning still possessed the silk stockings bought at great expense by his mother. He said: ‘It was so cold that first year and the building was so old that the cold seeped into your bones. I remember wrapping anything I could find round my legs to keep me warm.’

In 1946, Pope Pius XII, christened Eugenio Pacelli, had resided on the throne of St Peter for seven years, since the very eve of war. A skilled diplomat, he had previously worked as papal secretary of state and negotiated concordats with both Austria and National Socialist Germany, agreements which lent Hitler international prestige at a crucial time, but which the dictator would later break. Throughout the war, Pius XII had repeatedly argued for peace, but refused to condemn the specific genocide of the Jews, preferring to protect the Vatican from possible destruction by the use of the broadest of strokes. Yet for all the condemnation that would accrue after his death, Pope Pius XII attracted universal devotion during his long life. He would become Winning’s favourite pope, a relationship triggered by the student’s first glimpse of the ethereal pontiff, who more than any previous incumbent offered a glimpse of the divine.

The first time Winning saw Pius XII was on the Sunday after his arrival in October 1946. The students had been informed that a beatification ceremony was to take place that evening at St Peter’s, and those who chose to could attend. Winning made his way to St Peter’s Square accompanied by three other students, where they were recognized as Scots through the purple of their tunics by an elderly priest. ‘Wonderful! You are back in Rome,’ he commented, before introducing himself as a retired bishop of Malta and insisting they all accompany him as his ‘secretaries’ to the front of St Peter’s Basilica. As they walked along the vast, marble-encrusted interior, crammed with chapels, altars and precious works of art, Winning was visibly taken aback, an emotion that would only deepen with the appearance of the Pope.

They waited almost an hour in the pews, where the bishop interspersed his prayers with a brief history of the building. Both students and host fell silent when hundreds of crystal chandeliers throughout the church unexpectedly sparked into life, to be followed a few seconds later by sonorous peals from silver trumpets. The Pope’s arrival was further heralded by the choir singing ‘Tu es Petrus’ (You are Peter), while musicians played the pontifical march written by Vittorino Hallmayr, an Austrian regimental band director. The crowds then cheered. The first thing Winning saw was the plumed steel helmets of the Swiss Guard, advancing with raised halberds, the striking combination of spear and axe, and a chamberlain in traditional ruff. Then, high above their heads, seated on the Sedia Gestatoria, the great portable chair carried on the shoulders of robed men, was Pius XII. He had a rake-like appearance and the ghostly pallor of one who eats frugally. His fixed stare, shuttered behind round wire-rimmed glasses, was that of a man who could see past his audience, beyond this world and into the next. For the duration of his carriage, he was fanned by ostrich feathers and he in turn continually blessed those present by making a rigid sign of the cross. ‘He had an almost mystical image. I felt overawed by the experience,’ said Winning. He remembered the evening and the many future audiences he would attend, when he wrote in 1964:

Perhaps the most intimate quality of Roman formation is the personal love and loyalty it nurtures for the Vicar of Christ and the Holy See. In Rome the student lives under the shadow of Peter, close to Christ’s visible head. Every student has his favourite Pope; it is usually the one he first saw and knew on coming to Rome. Instead of being simply a man or a catechism answer, the Holy Father is a living person.

Two years later, in 1948, Winning and a group of Scots students attended a private audience with Pius XII. They were not permitted to speak but instead they each knelt before him and kissed his ring as a sign of loyalty and devotion; in return, they received an individual blessing and a group photograph. Fifty-one years later, Winning fulfilled his vow when John Cornwell, the Cambridge scholar and author, published Hitler’s Pope, a critical biography of Pius XII that viewed him as an anti-Semite who did little to protect the Jews. In a robust defence in the opinion pages of the Daily Telegraph, Winning argued that Pius XII had been fearful of further antagonizing the Nazis who would then turn the screws tighter on the Jews. ‘Would history have judged Pius differently if he had hurled anathemas at Hitler’s regime, and wallowed martyr-like in the blood of his own people and the Jewish people?’


(#litres_trial_promo) He went even further and contacted the priest in charge of furthering Pius XII’s beatification and offered every assistance in the defence of his hero’s crumbling reputation. This was to become a typical response from Winning who would mentally edit evidence, dismissing or reducing Pius XII’s obvious anti-semitism and embracing the line that best supported the Church: a position that painted him as an ultra-loyalist, prepared to swallow the party line and regurgitate it when so called upon.

Winning and his colleagues departed the ceremony at around five o’clock and spotted seminarians in the scarlet cassock of the German College. Winning took the lead in approaching them in a gesture of peace, but his noble effort was unnecessary; each student was from Hungary, though based at the German-Hungarian college. As Latin was the only common tongue they began to quiz each other as they walked home. Josef Bistyo, one of the Hungarian students, explained how he had deserted from the army and walked for weeks until he reached Rome. Unable to speak the language he would rub his stomach when hungry. Winning and Bistyo became friends and for the duration of their university years they spent each morning break talking in Latin, so that they would become fluent in the language of the classroom and their textbooks.

If Winning’s devotion to the papacy was fuelled by his first sight of Pius XII, his template for the priesthood was formed by the lecturers at the Gregorian University, the West Point of the Catholic Church. If Oxford University in England had a propensity to produce prime ministers, the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana produced popes; ten during the previous four hundred years, including Pius XII. Originally founded as the Collegio Romano by Ignatius of Loyola, it was upgraded to a university by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and became an incubator for the Church’s elite. The original building, constructed from a handsome honeyed stone, and situated in the old town, was confiscated during the Reunification of Italy in the 1880s. Mussolini granted permission for a new building to be built in 1929, a feat completed with Fascist punctuality in 1931. So it was to the Piazza della Pilota, a ten-minute walk from the Scots College along the Via Rasella, that Winning arrived in November 1946. The Scots College was comparable to a contemporary hall of residence, with Winning’s actual education taking place at the university under the tutelage of the Jesuits.

The first day brought a problem. After examining the Scots students’ previous course of study, the authorities decided that it was necessary for Winning to repeat a year of theology. It was a decision which meant the misery of Mill Hill was compounded by being regarded by Rome as a waste of time. He was initially disappointed, but grew to be grateful for the extra time, relishing the dynamism within the university. Each day, 2,500 students drawn from over 200 colleges and religious orders or communities gathered at the ‘Greg’ to learn from 110 professors. The lecture theatres had raised banks of seats, each with a hinged desktop, and on the ground floor stood the professors who led them through dogmatic theology, fundamental theology and moral theology. A German student who sat in front of Winning in a number of classes was so enamoured with particular lecturers that he would sneak a camera from his leather satchel and take their picture. Winning said: ‘He never bothered with the boring ones. Rome and the Greg were so full of great people he did not need to.’

Their teachers were contemporary stars such as Heinrich Lennerts, a German who taught dogmatic theology and explained to Winning the nature of the Trinity, the power of grace and the workings of the Holy Spirit, while also writing speeches for Pius XII. Maurizio Flick was an Italian Jesuit who taught moral theology and focused on the theology of the cross, a subject on which he would later write a celebrated book. Winning’s personal favourite was Sebastian Tromp, a Dutch Jesuit who was the principal author of Pius XII’s encyclical, ‘Mystici Corporis’, issued in June 1943. During classes Tromp would joke, ‘As we said in our encyclical … excuse me, as the Holy Father said in his encyclical.’ Winning was inspired by their quiet and usually humble nature, unexpected from men of such intelligence and achievement. On one occasion, he bumped into Charles Voyers, the French Jesuit who was an acclaimed humanist and pioneer of the ecumenical movement. Winning was able to give him a spare ticket for a papal event. ‘He thanked me profusely and I would think these are the kinds of guys I want to be. He was a world-famous theologian, but very humble.’

Winning’s attempts to become such a ‘guy’ were aided by his tremendous stamina for work, combined with a comprehensive style of study. He would never use three textbooks, where a fourth might offer a more illuminating passage. At the college he would consistently study past midnight, despite the threat of a five o’clock rise. Eugene Matthews, a postgraduate student of canon law, said: ‘I thought he was very unwise and pushed himself much too hard.’ Since Rome was regularly bedevilled by power-cuts, this meant most of Winning’s studies were conducted by candlelight. Commenting on his study methods, Charles Renfrew said: ‘He read a lot in bed at night. The rest of us would have one or two books … Tom would have fourteen books and they’d all have markers sticking in them. I used to say: “Can I take away thirteen of those and let you finish one?”’


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For all the breadth of his study and the depth of influence brought to bear by the current pope and the teachings at the university, Winning was still able to carry his own personal experiences into the classroom. One unmarked exam paper was to have a growing consequence for his concept of social justice, which became more radical as he aged. During Winning’s second term, a lecturer asked the question, was it right to steal if you were starving? Winning drew on the poverty of his childhood and viewed the answer as simple: clearly it was better to save your life than die in obedience to the law. Outside of the class, he discussed his answer with other students and discovered that he was the only one to answer yes. Yet as the papers were never corrected his position was never challenged. ‘I asked the older fellows and they would shake their heads; but I felt they damn well needed to experience it.’

The experience of a Roman education was one of the gifts for which Winning would most often thank God. After the demoralizing drudgery of his British education, his experience in the Italian capital was one of levity and an unexpected liberalism. True, there were strict rules regarding many of the quintessential Italian experiences: the smoky bars of Trastevere, the chic restaurants of the Borgo Pio, the Opera House and theatre were all proscribed under threat of expulsion. But the museums, the churches, the Colosseum and the millennia of culture remained on permanent display and through the mandatory daily walk, designed to ensure the body remained as fit as the mind, Winning witnessed them all.

The Scots College, under the firm reign of Mgr William Clapperton, was reasonably contented. The rector preferred one rule for all, rather than having exceptions, and Winning found the college the most relaxed of all the establishments he had been in. ‘If you were caught smoking in Bearsden, you would be fired. But if you were caught smoking in Rome, the rector would just say: “Don’t put the cigarettes down the washbasin sink.”’

Clapperton could be boorish at times with his own staff, but he was remembered fondly by students for the balance he brought to their education. For instance, students were encouraged to drink wine with their meals; a pleasure denied to Winning who was now nursing the beginnings of a stomach ulcer that would trouble him for the next twenty years. Should a student become ‘puggled’ through drink, it would pass once without comment but a lesson was considered learned. However, as the wine was consistently watered down, such an occasion occurred only rarely.

Winning was called before Clapperton a number of times and reprimanded for his untidy dress and tardy arrival at morning prayer, but he held him in some affection. The rector was at his most unpopular during the monthly film nights, organized by Eugene Matthews with the assistance of Warner Brothers and MGM, who had offices in Rome. As a result of Clapperton’s poor hearing, he would ask for a running commentary. Rome was the type of city that attracted Hollywood stars and on one occasion, shortly after watching a Tyrone Power picture, Winning spotted the actor with Linda Christian, a leading actress of the day, posing for pictures by the Trevi fountain.

Clapperton reserved his most spectacular outbursts for the college football team. Before the war the Scots never lost their annual match against the English college; after the war they never won. Winning was an ineffectual player and rarely strayed on to the pitch; instead he preferred to remain on the sidelines and revelled in the Celtic match reports sent from home. He once took the opportunity to canonize Celtic’s entire first team. Each day at 12.45 p.m., the students filed into the college chapel to perform the Litany of Saints, a prayer in which they petitioned the help of the Church’s saints and martyrs. As Winning was leading the chant, and in the absence of either rector or vice-rector, he substituted the names of the saints for players such as George Hazlett, Konrad Kapler and William Gallacher.

Winning was frequently late. His tardiness provoked the ire of Clapperton, and caused his fellow students to moan with frustration. The amateur dramatics common at Blairs had been revived in Rome. Rehearsals were scheduled between eight o’clock and nine-thirty each evening, and Winning was perpetually late, reluctant to don a frock once again.

During his three years in Rome he would go on to perform as Calpurnia and Lady Macbeth, but he was allowed to retain his own sex in the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘We all assembled at the right time, but he was always late. He would get impatient and he’d say, “Why the hell do we have to say this?”’ said Charles Renfrew. Roddy Macdonald, another contemporary, said, ‘He wasn’t Laurence Olivier, but he worked hard, he made an effort.’ The productions were performed each Christmas when, for a few nights, the English-speaking colleges in Rome became a cabaret circuit with the students performing one evening, spectating the next. The life of a ‘poor player’ had its downside, when on more than one occasion Winning had to visit a chemist, dressed in his soutane, to request nail-polish remover.

In July 1947, in a tradition dating back over three hundred years, the college closed down and everyone, staff, students and servants, travelled the twelve miles from the baking heat of the city centre to the relative cool and shade of the mountains. A stone house had been purchased in 1654 in an idyllic spot outside the hill town of Marino, which offered wonderful views out across the Sabine Hills on one side, and the blue of the Mediterranean on the other. The original Villa Scozzese had long since crumbled and had been replaced in 1925 with a modern two-storey structure, complete with an elegant courtyard and a bell tower which commanded views across the parched plains to Rome and up to the summit of Monte Cavo. The leisure facilities were those of an upmarket country hotel and included a swimming pool, tennis court and acres of vineyards, where, as Winning remembered, ‘you could pick bunches of grapes as big as a bucket’.

Upon arrival, the students’ and staff’s first priority was to inspect for any war damage, as the villa had been rented by the Italian Air Force before being converted into a German command post for the local area. It was in this capacity that Field Marshal Kesselring, commander-in-chief of Italy, had visited. Monsignor Clapperton discovered that what the Germans had lent with their right hand, they had stolen back with their left: new pumps had been fitted to ensure a steady water supply, the roads had been kept in good repair, and a mechanical wine press had been installed in the cantina. Upon their retreat, however, they had taken all the beds and mattresses, and ripped out the stoves they had fitted, leaving, as Clapperton recalled, ‘only the holes in the walls to greet us’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The compensation the college eventually received failed to cover the cost but, as Clapperton felt, ‘It was summer, we were back at the villa, and it felt good to be alive.’

In previous centuries, summer visits to the Villa Scozzese had been restricted to just six weeks, but now with exams over, the university closed until October, and visits to Scotland restricted to just one every three years, the house was to be home for almost three months. The students settled into a long summer of hiking, swimming, tennis and only the lightest of studies. The rector ran a morning class, studying Dante’s Inferno in the original Italian and there was the rosary and Benediction each evening. Yet Winning was to tolerate his visits to the villa as opposed to truly enjoy them. A lifetime’s fear of indolence was born during the two summers he spent at Marino. On future holidays for the rest of his life, he would plan and pack each day with excursions or visits, unable to simply slouch. ‘I felt it made you soft,’ said Winning, of his drowsy Italian summers. He was also stricken with pangs of homesickness and would climb the bell tower to watch the planes he imagined were bound for Scotland. To keep himself busy, Winning began teaching a daily German class for any students who could muster the enthusiasm to attend.

Some days, however, were easier to endure than others. The rector enjoyed the sea and regular trips were organized to Netuno on the coastline. A lorry was hired and the students would climb into the back for the short trip. The villa’s servants would also travel down to prepare a large lunch at a beachside restaurant that they would take over for the day.

One incident Winning remembered with bemusement was the arrest of Constantino, the villa’s chef. He had already embarrassed himself by making a drunken speech in honour of dead Fascists. This took place when the students had attempted to pray before a memorial to the Gordon Highlanders who fell at the Anzio beachhead. A few days later, a second incident occurred on the occasion of Marino’s annual festival, when the townsfolk travelled the neighbouring vineyards collecting grapes so that the town’s fountain would spout wine. After the ceremony, Constantino returned to the villa to prepare supper, but instead of simply serving the meat dishes and departing, he insisted on blowing a kazoo repeatedly in the rector’s face. He was arrested the next day with two stories circulating (both of which may or may not be true), one that he had killed a man while serving Mussolini during the war, another involving the theft of a cow.

In the summer of 1947, the students were joined for a few weeks by the Scots bishops, who had arrived in Rome for the Ad Limina, the report they deliver every five years to the Pope and the various Vatican departments. Their arrival had an effect on Winning’s future as he learned that the archdiocese of Glasgow would be split to create two smaller dioceses, centred around the towns of Paisley in the west and Motherwell in the east. Although Winning remained a student for the diocese of Glasgow, he now knew he would not serve there as a priest, as his address lay within the new diocese of Motherwell. The students returned to the college in October, narrowly missing the collapse of the top-floor ceilings.

In the autumn of 1947 and spring of 1948, Winning was an interested spectator in an unprecedented campaign by the Catholic Church in the national politics of Italy. The cause was in opposition to the growing strength of the Communist Party under the remarkable leadership of Palmiro Togliatti, a native Italian who had spent the war years sheltering in Moscow. Togliatti was a natural politician, aware that Italians had no desire to swap Mussolini for Stalin, and so he developed a distinctly Italian form of Communism, one capable of drawing ten thousand spectators to hear him speak. He had already been expelled from the coalition government during the spring, at the behest of Washington, and now with a general election planned for May 1948, he stood as a potential Prime Minister.

While the American government publicly threatened to withdraw the benefits of the Marshall Plan from Italy, in the event of a Communist victory, privately they pumped in $5 million through the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency to the Christian Democrats and anti-Communist trade unions to prevent any such victory occurring. Hundreds of thousands of posters began appearing for the Christian Democrats, showing a skeleton in a Soviet uniform with the shoutline: ‘Vote – or he’ll be your boss.’ A pastiche of such posters appeared on walls of the Scots College, during the election of the new debating chairman. Yet it was the power of the Pope which arguably swung the election. On 8 February 1948, Pius XII met with Professor Luigi Gedda, leader of Catholic Action, a Vatican-backed lay movement, which operated in a number of European countries to educate men (and a few women) about Catholic social teaching with the idea that they would influence society for the better, and charged him with the task of preventing a Communist takeover.

Pius XII denounced the Communists whom he detested for their atheism, and threatened any Catholic who sided with the party with excommunication, and Gedda set up a Civic Committee in 1,800 parishes across the country. These distributed propaganda posters and screened films depicting the Communists as godless and evil. From the balcony of his papal apartment, Pope Pius asked the gathered crowds, which included Winning, ‘Do you want to live under the atheism of Russia? Do you want to be disciples of Christ?’ A week prior to the election, while Winning was on a short break in Siena with Charles Renfrew and Eugene Matthews, Italian seminarians across the country removed their cassocks, dressed as laity, and actively campaigned for the Christian Democrats. On 18 April 1948, the Church’s pressure bore fruit: the Christian Democrats proved victorious. The Church’s achievement would resonate with Winning, who would never forget the potential for influence which existed within the Catholic Church, though at the time he questioned the effects on democracy. His conclusion, however, was that a Communist victory would have had even greater, more serious consequences.

The date of Winning’s ordination as a priest was set for 18 December 1948. As he was still only twenty-three years old, one year below the permitted age, a special dispensation was sought and granted. Prior to the ceremony, he embarked, as was customary, on a one-week retreat to reflect on the honour and burden about to be bestowed on him. Winning and Hugh McEwan, a fellow Scot whose ordination was set for the same date, spent their retreat at the Jesuit headquarters a few hundred yards from St Peter’s Square. There they met their former scripture professor, Fr Josef Mochsi, a Hungarian Jesuit, who was composing a report for the Vatican on Communist Hungary. The priest wished them both well, but asked that they pray for him as he would be returning to Budapest shortly and arrest was inevitable. Winning promised to offer his first Mass for the priest, who one month later was imprisoned by the Communist authorities.

Maurice Taylor had reconvened his priestly training in Rome on the completion of his military service, and it was he who visited the Jesuits’ headquarters and told Winning the location of the ordination. Unfortunately, the Church of the Twelve Apostles was an ordinary, unflattering site – entirely undesirable in the opinion of Winning – for hosting such a service. He insisted Taylor change the mind of the bureaucrat at the Vatican office who had made the decision. Winning wanted the ceremony to take place at the Basilica of St John Lateran, the grandest church in Rome after St Peter’s, and the site where he had previously received his minor orders. The self-regard of such a statement is one that verges almost on arrogance and illustrates that behind Winning’s doubts and occasional crises in confidence, there actually lay a strong bedrock of self-confidence. It is hard to imagine any Scots seminarian before or since who would deem a particular venue as unsuitable for his own ordination. Incredibly, Taylor was successful and Winning’s presumptuous wish was granted. On the appointed day, he arrived before dawn for a ceremony that began at half past six and would last over six hours.

Among the packed congregation was an extended delegation from Winning’s family. Thomas Winning senior had decided to sell his sweet-making machines in order to raise the necessary funds for himself, his wife and daughter to attend. Eight other relatives, including aunts, uncles and cousins, decided to make what was in 1948 a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not only to witness Winning’s ordination, but also to see the sights of Rome. The church, with its stunning marble statues and fourteenth-century frescos, did not disappoint. In total, thirty-nine priests and a whole host of minor orders were ordained that morning by Archbishop Luigi Traglia.

Winning attempted to focus all his attention on what was to come. God, working through the Holy Spirit, was only moments from descending upon him. At the altar, the elderly archbishop laid both his hands on his head and began to utter the prayers of ordination which stretch back two thousands years to Christianity’s earliest days. After praying that the Holy Spirit would touch Winning with his gifts, Traglia anointed his hands with the oil of Christ, the sacred oil of olives once used in the coronation of kings and a symbol of the Holy Spirit. It was these hands which would now be able to administer the sacraments of the Church, turn wine into blood, and unleavened bread into the body of Christ.

In the most dramatic part of the ceremony, Winning lay flat on the floor of the sanctuary, his face pressed into the marble and his arms folded under his head – a form of surrender to God and a symbol of his rebirth. ‘He is waiting there like a dead thing, for the Holy Spirit to come and quicken him into a new form of life,’


(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Ronald Knox of the ordination ceremony. After a moment of silent contemplation, Winning rose as a priest and accepted the chalice and paten, the cup and plate used during the Mass for the bread and wine.

Outside after the service he embraced his mother and sister and shook hands with his father. It was the first time they had seen each other in over two years and the delight was evident. Although students were prohibited from missing classes to witness their friends’ ordination, Charles Renfrew had attended and gave his warm congratulations. Again, according to tradition, the rector was absent and so Winning returned to the college to give Clapperton his first blessing as a new priest. After this he retired to a local restaurant for a family lunch, which he followed with a visit to Vatican Radio in order to broadcast his blessings and good wishes to Scotland.

A highlight, not only of his ordination but also of his life, followed two days later when he and his family enjoyed a brief audience with Pope Pius XII. In contrast to Winning’s previous encounters with the Pope, this time he was able to speak with him, even though very briefly. He exchanged a pledge of loyalty for the Pope’s blessing and promise of his thoughts and prayers. It signified the closure of a remarkable two years. Though his final exams at the Gregorian would not take place until June and his fine grades, a cum laude, were not yet known, that meeting on 20 December 1948 contained the essential ingredients of his future life and career: a fierce loyalty to the Pope, a deep love of the family, and an unflinching devotion to his duty as a priest.




FOUR (#ulink_8bfc3361-3394-5397-b3d8-ebb3c4089314)

A Curate’s Tale (#ulink_8bfc3361-3394-5397-b3d8-ebb3c4089314)


‘Gerry Rogers was a father figure to me.’

THOMAS WINNING

Ecclesiastical politics and their secular cousin are very similar. In both, any change in leadership frequently corresponds to a change in personnel. In 1947, Fr Gerry Rogers, once the indispensable troubleshooter of the previous Archbishop of Glasgow, Donald Mackintosh, discovered that his successor, Donald Campbell, was a far brisker, ruder character. Where Rogers had once sat at Mackintosh’s right hand, advising on a range of issues from Church law to liturgical matters and changes of personnel, he now found himself distanced from and no longer welcome within the confines of the inner circle.

Donald Campbell did not care much for Gerry Rogers. He disliked his popularity among his fellow priests and was jealous of his easy manner and his reputation as a ‘man’s man’, as comfortable on the eighteenth hole as he was uttering Latin prayers or cradling a child beside a baptismal font. As president of the Glasgow Archdiocese’s Marriage Tribunal, Rogers spent office hours sifting through the detritus of buckled marriages and would never have become Thomas Winning’s close friend and valued mentor were it not for Campbell’s irrational desire to rid his archdiocese of a brilliant mind whose face he felt no longer fitted. Campbell’s solution was cunning; in 1947, Rogers was appointed chaplain to a congregation of nuns in the town of Bothwell. In 1948, the archdiocese of Glasgow was broken up to create two new dioceses, and as Bothwell fell within the boundary of the new Motherwell Diocese, Rogers was excluded from the diocese of his birth.

The reason for the formation of the new dioceses was not simply to facilitate Rogers’ departure. It was the culmination of five centuries of antagonism and jealousy between the country’s rival cities – Glasgow on the west coast and Edinburgh on the east – over where the Church’s power lay and who best had the ear of Rome. Glasgow had enjoyed an early lead in the Dark Ages when in 1175 the diocese was granted the title specialis filia Romanae ecclesiae, Special Daughter of the Roman Church, by Pope Alexander III; this was a cloak of protection which defended the diocese from the long crook of the Archbishops of York and Canterbury who wished to see it pulled within their empire.

Seventeen years later, the title was stretched to cover the whole of Scotland, and Glasgow lost her exclusive status. Her fortunes tumbled further when, in 1472, the Vatican chose to elevate St Andrews to a metropolitan archbishopric, an arrangement which placed every other diocese, including Glasgow, in a subordinate role to the east of Scotland and incensed both bishops and King alike. James III initially refused to allow the new Archbishop Patrick Graham access to the town of St Andrews. So deep was his fit of pique at not having been consulted over the appointment that it took Graham’s promise of extra taxation for the Crown before the King agreed to lift his blockade. In Glasgow, Bishop Robert Blacader sank into a petulant sulk over his inferior position and refused to recognize the east’s new status; he went on to petition the Scots parliament who, in 1489, passed a law stating that: ‘the honour and welfare of the realm demanded the erection of Glasgow into an archdiocese’. Two years later, the bishop travelled to Rome and successfully pleaded his position before Pope Innocent VIII. Glasgow’s honour was restored on 9 January 1492 when a papal bull announced the area’s elevation to an archdiocese with its own suffragen sees of Dunkeld, Dunblane, Galloway and Argyll. Yet hostilities continued between Blacader, now Archbishop, and William Scheves, the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh. Scheves was attempting to seek redress at the Apostolic Signatura, the Church’s highest court, for what he considered Blacader’s repeated violations of his metropolitan authority. After a further year and a half, King James IV had cause to bang their mitres together in an attempt to seek a solution to a problem that was draining the country of money as rents and dues were now being sent to Rome to fund the lawsuit. The squabble was never resolved and decades later the Archbishop of Glasgow and the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh were still fighting over supremacy. On one occasion during the 1540s, the cross bearers of Cardinal David Beaton of St Andrews and Edinburgh and James Dunbar, the Archbishop of Glasgow, were reduced to fighting each other outside Glasgow Cathedral to ensure their respective Archbishop entered the cathedral first.

The situation in reality was comparable with tussling over a deck chair on the Titanic. The Catholic Church was viewed as corrupt and heretical by the new reformers led by John Knox. The religious houses were perceived to be swollen with the contents of the people’s purses, parish priests were often absent, having abandoned the work to low-paid, poorly trained and ill-educated curates, and, as a result, parishes fell into neglect. A distinct lack of discipline rippled across the Church, leading to accusations of sexual immorality. While the Church leaders were rarely as promiscuous as presented in the accounts of Protestant historians, any sexual relations at all were hypocritical among men sworn to celibacy. In their defence, they believed the Church was on the cusp of recognizing a married clergy, and characters such as Cardinal Beaton, who had eight children by the same woman, Marian Ogilvie, with whom he lived for twenty years, considered themselves to be pre-empting progress. Progress, however, lay in the hands of Protestantism. The reforming theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, with their emphasis on scripture and condemnation of the way in which the Catholic Church conducted itself, had arrived in Scotland in the 1520s and begun to exert their influence. The burning of reformers such as George Wishart in 1545 and Walter Myln on 28 April 1558 did nothing to cauterize calls for change; instead, the first death led directly to the revenge slaying of Cardinal Beaton in his own room at St Andrews in 1546, while the execution of Myln triggered rioting in Edinburgh.

In reaction to increasing hostilities, the Church held a number of provincial councils between 1547 and 1559 to introduce reforms but, by the close of the final council, Catholicism was already doomed. A coalition of Lords and Lairds, hostile to Scotland’s French Queen, Mary of Guise, now christened themselves the Lords of the Congregation and vowed to rid the country of both Queen and Catholicism. In 1557, a bond was issued vowing to ‘renounce the congregation of Satan’ and to ‘establish the most blessed work of God and his congregation’. John Knox was invited back from Geneva and within two years the group had raised an army, with the patronage of Elizabeth I, the new Queen of Protestant England, and defeated the forces of Mary of Guise.

At the Reformation Parliament which took place in Edinburgh in 1560, the Confession of Faith, a document written by John Knox, was produced to state Scotland’s new intent: the country was to be Protestant, and Catholicism was now illegal. The Mass was forbidden, priests were arrested and locked in the stocks, children born following a Catholic marriage ceremony were classified as illegitimate and the Church sank underground. Tufts of Catholicism remained in the north of the country and in the more remote islands where the Reformation failed to penetrate but the organized Church as it was known withered and died. Priests were pensioned off and married, parishioners converted, and attendance at the Kirk was mandatory.

Glasgow lost out once again in 1878 when the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was finally restored to Scotland. For 275 years the country had been without dioceses or bishops; instead, it was branded as a mission country and carved into three districts, northern, eastern and western, which were overseen by vicars apostolic. An argument was made that Glasgow, then the second city of the empire, the chief centre of commerce, manufacture and industry and crucially home to three times as many Catholics, priests and churches as Edinburgh, should be made the new metropolitan archdiocese.

Unfortunately, sense gave way to sentimentality. John Strain, the Vicar Apostolic of the eastern Crichton-Stuart district, supported by powerful lay patrons including John Patrick, the third Marquess of Bute, then one of the richest men in the world, argued that the Church should favour continuity and over time reanimate the dead dioceses. St Andrews may once have been the ecclesiastical centre of medieval Scotland, but in 1878, the town housed only two Catholic families and had no Catholic place of worship. Despite the drawbacks, John Strain won his way and was crowned Metropolitan Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh with a bejewelled mitre purchased by the Marquess of Bute, a generous gesture he extended to each new bishop.

The restoration of the hierarchy had triggered violent religious tensions in England when it took place in 1850, but Scotland was for once more fortunate. The Glasgow Herald was surprisingly supportive and argued that it would give the Pope pleasure and do Scotland no harm. The Free Church of Scotland was more aggressive, but overemphasized the strength of Scots law when one member sent a telegram to the Vatican threatening legal action in the Court of Session should the Pope have the temerity to persist, while the Episcopal Church, recognizing a credible threat to the size of its congregations, many of whom would subsequently drift to the Catholic Church, described it as ‘a violation of the law of unity and a rendering of the Body of Christ’. Neither opinion, however, led to bloodshed on the streets.

In recognition of Glasgow’s size and history, the city and the surrounding towns and countryside were made an archdiocese, responsible directly to Rome and operating without ties to Edinburgh, but also without the prestige of any suffragan sees. The Vatican had always planned to rectify this, but delay was followed by delay and once the archdiocese of Glasgow had embarked on a huge building programme it was thought imprudent to launch any new diocese until the books were balanced. This was achieved by the work of Archbishop Mackintosh, working closely with William Daley and Gerry Rogers.

During the course of his career as Archbishop and Cardinal, Winning would swivel both the media’s spotlight and the balance of power away from the metropolitan archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh to a permanent anchor within the confines of the archdiocese of Glasgow. In the space of one lifetime he would succeed where a dozen bishops and archbishops spread across eight hundred years had failed, by making Glasgow the undisputed capital of Catholic Scotland. Yet such achievements lay in a distant future; Winning, twenty-three years old, newly ordained and back living at home with his parents, said Mass daily at St Patrick’s where he had previously served as an altar boy, and waited for an appointment to a parish.

A new diocese requires a new bishop and in late December 1948, one was appointed. He was a poor choice. In later years, parishioners would joke that the Holy Spirit was on holiday when Fr Edward Douglas was appointed as their spiritual shepherd, others that the appointment was less the result of a rigorous search of the viable candidates than the activities of a blindfolded altar boy, armed with a list of names and a hat pin. The responsibility lay with Archbishop William Godfrey, the papal delegate to Britain, who developed a reputation for his controversial appointments. The new Bishop of Motherwell was certainly that. Edward Douglas was a small man, with a long crooked nose and a stoop, and if some heads are made for the mitre, others are crushed by the weight, and during the next six years, he was slowly flattened. For the past eighteen years, Douglas, who was forty-six, had been a diligent teacher at Blairs, where he was better equipped to deal with books, lessons and students than he was to deal with the administration, priests and stress that now lay ahead. In spite of his own deep reservations, he accepted that Rome – or at least the London branch office – had spoken, and on 21 April 1948, Douglas was ordained a bishop at Our Lady of Good Aid in Motherwell, a large Gothic church which would now serve as the diocese’s new cathedral.

What Douglas lacked in qualities of leadership was compensated for by his eye for talent developed during twenty years in the classroom. Among his first decisions was the appointment of Gerry Rogers as his Vicar General, a choice that irritated Archbishop Campbell who had no wish to see the adversary he had thought he had rid himself of return. In a traditional diocese the ‘VG’, as he is commonly known, acts as the Bishop’s deputy or chief of staff, assisting with appointments, liaising with priests and attending functions in his absence, but in the case of Motherwell, an infant diocese with a nervous, inexperienced leader, Rogers’ influence and power were magnified. It was a testament to his character that he never exploited his position, and instead did his best to support his wilting boss.

The new diocese’s office was a detached bungalow in Bothwell from where Rogers began to organize staff. His position meant he was unable to oversee the marriage tribunal which each diocese required, so a new recruit was needed to be trained in canon law. As Rogers was a graduate of the Gregorian University and believed this was where the brightest students would reside, he contacted the rector of the Scots College asking him to recommend a suitable candidate. Clapperton suggested Winning, who had recently graduated with high honours, as someone possessing the necessary intelligence to complete the postgraduate course in canon law. A few weeks after returning from Rome, Winning was called into Rogers’ office and informed that he would be heading back the following year. The news was initially unwelcome. Rogers explained that knowledge of canon law was an invaluable aid in climbing the Church’s career ladder, that it would open up new opportunities, but Winning could only see a return to the familiar pattern of study, one he was glad to have left behind. Before recommencing his studies, he needed to complete a year as a curate. This was to be his first opportunity to practise as a priest and he was sent to the tiny village of Chapelhall in Lanarkshire.

In August 1949, Fr Thomas Winning stood in his vestments at the altar of St Aloysius, smiling as Fr Peter Murie, the parish priest, introduced him as the church’s new curate. ‘He’ll only be here a year,’ explained Murie from the pulpit, ‘so don’t you be muttering that I can’t keep a curate.’ Duly warned about his short shelf life, the parishioners still embraced the new priest as one of their own. As his first parish, St Aloysius was an exhilarating introduction to Winning’s chosen career. First, there was the church itself which enjoyed an enviable position on top of a hill, overlooking the rows of tenements that housed the village’s two thousand residents, and backed on to a blanket of green fields. On a Sunday, Winning would stand outside the church door, ring a hand bell and watch as children aged from four to fourteen ran from their houses and up the hill for a weekly bible lesson. Father Murie was an erudite man and talented pianist who, although he suffered persistent ill health, remained a fine conversationalist and was only too happy to entertain his young charge with show-tunes after supper. Finally there was the work, which Winning found as rewarding as it was at first frightening. One week after his arrival, Murie took three weeks holiday leaving Winning in charge.

For almost a year, Winning revelled in his new role. He worked hard to set up a variety of groups such as the Union of Catholic Mothers and a Catholic Young Men’s Society. The children’s Sunday school was a source of great humour; he dubbed one boy the ‘heathen’ as his enthusiasm for putting up his hand was never matched with the correct answer. He organized a football team for the older boys of the parish, who proved as poor in the penalty area as their younger siblings were at Sunday school. Winning remembered the team in an interview for the book Faith, Hope and Chastity, a compilation of interviews with priests around Britain. ‘We were beaten 10–1 the first time we played. During the game one of the team got a bad gash in his knee – one minute I was studying it and cleaning it up, the next minute I was having a cup of tea in somebody’s house. I was twenty-four, and I’d fainted at the sight of his blood.’ A remarkable aversion for a man with the ability to transform red wine into the blood of Christ.

In the evenings, he conducted home visits and discovered that the dozen demanded by Fr John Conroy at Mill Hill was both impractical and ineffective. Instead, Winning settled on three or four visits per night and applied the tips suggested in the works of Fr Ronald Knox: speak with the father about work, the mother about her children, and always listen more than you talk. Although the area was poor, a visit from a priest remained an occasion for the best china and the provision of the comfiest seat. The only disappointment came within the confessional box. After seven years in the study of philosophy and theology, Winning was eager to flex his new knowledge, to wrestle with great moral issues, counsel the confused and guide those in doubt. Instead, his long hours behind the metal gauze and thick velvet curtain which separated the priest from the penitent were a tedious litany of adults continuing to confess the ‘sins’ of a child. When one old man confessed that he had been ‘disobedient’ to his sister, Winning asked him if he was not ‘a wee bit old for that’. The man, taken aback by what he perceived as the priest’s impudence, replied by asking Winning if he was not ‘a wee bit too young for this’, then walked out, and from then on went to Fr Murie for confession. Winning felt it was crucial to dissuade parishioners from repeating in rote form what they had said, once a month, for decades. Confession, he insisted, was about liberation from sin – not simply turgid repetition. This was to be the only blip in an enjoyable year that drew to a close too soon.

Winning returned once again to Rome in the autumn of 1950, exchanging his previous freedom for the rigid discipline of a student, for although ordained with experience in a parish he was still expected to follow the same strict timetable as the youngest student. The rector found it easiest to apply a universal set of rules and so Winning slipped back into a routine of a five-thirty rise, followed by prayers, Mass, breakfast and university. It was as if Scotland and St Aloysius were now little more than a blurred, half-remembered dream. ‘In the library, I saw the same bookcase with the same panel of broken glass, and it felt like I had never been away,’ he explained.

As soon as Winning arrived, he was given over to doubts which tore away at his confidence and ability. It was hardly surprising, for the task that lay before him was daunting. To achieve a doctorate in canon law was considered a stiff challenge to those familiar with the subject. John McQuade, an Irish priest who accompanied Winning and was also destined for Motherwell diocese, had studied the subject for three years, while another student on the same course had taught it for twelve years at an Irish seminary. In comparison, Winning’s experience to date with canon law was restricted to a couple of lectures at the Gregorian University three years previously. Winning likened the situation to being sent to complete a PhD in chemistry at Cambridge University when ‘you hadn’t made it past cleaning out the test tubes at school’. Privately, he was terrified of failing, and in order to avoid such humiliation, examined his strengths and plotted what he recognized was the only route to success: a working routine of Stakhanovite proportions. His fluency in Latin was a tremendous aid, one which allowed him to understand the lectures with a precision which other students lacked, but closing the huge gulf required a daily programme of study which continued until one o’clock in the morning and permitted little more than four hours sleep each night, having serious consequences for his health.

In November 1950, a new Catholic dogma on the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was announced.

A joke is perhaps the simplest way to illustrate the depth of devotion many Catholics have towards the mother of Jesus Christ: while Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he looked down to see a peasant woman, kneeling in silent prayer. Bored with his work, he decided to brighten his morning by playing a trick at the old woman’s expense, and so as she bent her head in prayer, unaware of the artist’s presence, Michelangelo began to speak in a deep, resonant voice: ‘I am Jesus Christ, speak and your prayers will be answered.’ Slowly the woman’s head tilted up towards the heavens and she began to answer. ‘Hush! Can’t you see I’m talking to your mother?’

The Blessed Virgin Mary or Mary, the Mother of God, has for almost fifteen hundred years inhabited a deep place in the hearts of Catholics across the world. The reason for her popularity and the piety directed towards her is that she was entirely human, but one who, through her acceptance of God’s will and the virgin birth of her son, became blessed with the divine. For centuries, Mary has been viewed as an intermediary, a postmistress who ensures the petitions and prayers of the faithful reach the correct destination, namely God.

The concept of Mary as a mediator between God and his sinners on earth developed in Western medieval piety around the eighth century, with the translation of the legend of Theophilus. The story is a predecessor of that of Dr Faustus and tells of a man who exchanged his soul for well-paid employment; when he was near to death, he begged Mary to save him from eternal damnation, which she achieved after pleading with the Devil. As the story spread out across Europe, so developed the idea of Marian devotion and the theological concept that God’s grace could flow through Mary to earth. The belief was comforting to those who felt unworthy to pray directly to Jesus, the son of God, for they believed Mary’s maternal nature would intercede with her son on their behalf. By the eleventh century, pilgrimages had sprung up in her name, her image appeared on icons, and miracles were attributed to her hand, while the prayer the Hail Mary and the prayer cycle known as the rosary were becoming increasingly common. So powerful was the concept of Mary to become that in 1854, the Church proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the assertion that she had been born without original sin. Less than a century later, in 1950, just two months after Winning’s return to Rome, a second dogma was to be defined. Pope Pius XII announced the doctrine of the Assumption, in which it was stated that at the end of Mary’s natural life she was raised body and soul into heaven.

In truth, Winning had never had much time for Mary. He said the rosary, appreciated that May was a month devoted to her memory, but that was as far as it went. In Winning’s mind, Mary was not a principal player and so was relegated to the role of extra. In the autumn of 1950, the theologians at the Gregorian University were deep in debate on the merits of Mary’s new status. A series of Saturday morning debates had been organized to articulate the arguments for and against the Pope’s plans. The ecumenists were concerned that it would further distance the Catholic Church from the Protestants for whom Mary was no more than a vehicle for Christ’s birth. Since the Reformation they had been critical of any devotion to Mary on the grounds that it demonstrated a lack of trust that salvation would come through Christ alone. The Eastern Orthodox Church was in disagreement of the doctrine, for they felt the move distanced Mary from the human race, while the Mariologists were convinced of the hope such a dogma would provide to the world, namely that one day all the faithful would be similarly raised up.

Winning had attended the talks, but remained indifferent; it was his passion for Pius XII and his desire never to miss a public appearance that brought him to St Peter’s Square on 1 November 1950 where the Pope was preparing to address a crowd of almost one million people. The square was packed so tightly that Winning could scarcely move his arms, and had to strain his neck up in an attempt to peer over the shoulders of his fellow pilgrims. The setting was most uncomfortable for what Winning marked as a profound spiritual experience: looking across the sky above Rome, he noticed that although it was now early morning, the moon was still visible and was carved in a deep crescent – the same shape common to many illustrations of Mary as Queen of Heaven in which she stood perched on a crescent moon, smiling down on her charges below. The image startled Winning, and the crowds appeared to melt away. It was as if he had found a point where the membrane that separates the world from God was particularly thin and he was able to push through. In his heart he now knew Mary was real. ‘Previous to that moment, she had been a statue or a figure or a face flat on a wall. I don’t know what it was, but it came to me that she was real. It has remained in my memory as a very powerful image.’

Pius XII had his own reasons for announcing the doctrine of the Assumption. While Winning had been moved by the moon, the Pope had been struck by the sun, for while walking in the Vatican gardens, he had witnessed the phenomenon of the spinning sun, a sight associated with the visions of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. He also wished to make a statement about the preciousness of life. In his text Munificentissimus Deus (God the Most Generous), he reaffirmed the importance of the body as a sacred vehicle of God, following a decade in which over fifty million lives had been lost during the Second World War. When the Pope finally appeared on the balcony and began to speak, Winning borrowed pen and paper from a neighbour and began to transcribe his comments, so anxious was he to capture the moment. Over the next few weeks, he was to re-examine the text and arguments concerning the Church’s new teaching, and it was to strengthen his understanding of eschatology – the theology of death and mankind’s final destiny. Later, Winning was to develop a dreadful fear of death, one he felt was unbecoming for so senior a religious figure, and this moment was one he would frequently return to for solace during private moments of prayer.

In the Catholic Church, it is said that the politicians study canon law, while the spiritual are drawn to study the liturgy. As lawyers proliferate in the secular world of politics, so are they found in the upper reaches of the Catholic Church. Though Winning had no choice in the matter, there is little doubt that his intellect and aggressive personality were better suited to grappling with the practical application of rules and regulations than the esoteric flights of fancy required for pioneering work in theology. He was interested in the law, and if the field had been easily accessible to him in Scotland (it was for the most part a Protestant clique) he might have considered it as a career. In later life, he talked about alternatives to the priesthood he might have pursued as being those of ‘a doctor or lawyer, something with a bit of bite’.

The law of the Catholic Church – or canon law, drawn from the Greek word for ‘rule’ – had been passed on through the centuries from AD 95, when the first ‘Church orders’ were written down in order to clarify the organization of the early Church and the manner in which the sacraments were to be celebrated. The writings of Church Fathers such as St Augustine and St Ireneus had produced further ideas that required legislation, while the growth of the Church led to a proliferation of rules governing everything from doctrinal issues and public worship to the disciplinary proceedings for priests and religious. Canon law became divided into universal laws, applying to Catholics throughout the world, and particular laws which held force within a given territory such as a diocese. Winning was to learn that the laws themselves were derived from three areas: Church law, which covered such matters as disciplinary measures or the length of the fast prior to communion; natural law, which concerned itself with issues such as the insistence of monogamy and correct heterosexual behaviour, as they were discovered in the natural order and were considered irreversible; and a third area, known as divine positive law, found in the revelation or the self-disclosure of God, and which included the indissolubility of marriage and the sacrament of confession. In 1140, Gratian, a noted canonist, produced a common text of the Church’s rules and regulations, a collection of five volumes which was swollen over the centuries with new additions, but not until 1917 were all the volumes comprehensively codified. The man largely responsible for codification in 1917 was Fr Pietro Gasparri, but among his closest assistants was Padre Cappello, a diminutive Jesuit whose lectures Winning grew to love. In many ways, Cappello was a character the young priest could have found disagreeable; he had almost no sense of humour and refused to engage the class outside of the parameters of the discussion. Gifted with a prodigious memory, Cappello used neither textbook nor notes while speaking and could quote entire pages of canon law with ease. Laws and rules, he was keen to impress on his students, were for the safety and benefit of mankind, they were the boundaries on a straight road to heaven. Outside of the university, Cappello had a reputation as a wise and considerate confessor, a latter-day Solomon who sat for hours each day hearing confessions at the Church of St Ignatius. ‘When he died, his body lay in the chapel of the Greg and thousands came to see him, later they introduced his cause for canonization. He couldn’t help but be a living role model of who you were trying to be,’ said Winning.

Although Winning had just three lectures daily, each lasting fifty minutes, the period between the autumn of 1950 and the summer of 1951 was the hardest period of his academic life. John McQuade offered assistance where possible, but had his own concerns as he struggled to develop a working knowledge of Latin. Month after month, Winning worked seven days a week, from dawn until after midnight; his only breaks were morning and evening prayers and the daily queue to say Mass in one of the college’s small oratories. By the time of his summer exam, the punishing regime had shattered his health; so exhausted was he by his labours that he had to take a taxi to the university as he was unable to walk. After focusing for the length of the oral exam he took a taxi back to the college and spent the next ten days in bed. When a doctor was called he was diagnosed as suffering from rheumatism and although he had planned a trip to Lourdes, en route home for the summer, he was forbidden to take a dip in the waters in case it exacerbated his condition. After treatment at a Glasgow clinic for nodules in his joints, Winning returned to Rome in September 1951 for an academic year that was only slightly easier.

Among the friends Winning made that year was Paul Marcinkus, a huge American who had the build of the football player he once had been. Marcinkus was a postgraduate student at the US college who drove a Cadillac and spoke, as Winning observed, ‘from the side of his mouth, like a gangster’. Winning’s friend would rise to become the most senior American in the Vatican and the centre of one of the Church’s biggest contemporary scandals. In 1982, ‘the chink’ as Marcinkus was dubbed by Winning, was head of the Institute for the Works of Religious (IoR), otherwise known as the Vatican Bank, when it became tangled in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, a large Italian bank. Marcinkus was friendly with Roberto Calvi, the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, and in order to assist him as he attempted to sort out the bank’s finances he provided Calvi with letters of patronage which stated that the IoR backed his activities. However, in order to protect the Vatican, Marcinkus insisted Calvi provide him with a letter indemnifying the IoR from any financial responsibility, a fact hidden from Calvi’s creditors, who would later consider this to be fraud. When the bank collapsed owing $1.2 billion, Calvi apparently hanged himself from Blackfriars Bridge in London, a scene that inspired Francis Ford Coppola who a decade later incorporated the death into The Godfather Part III. Many still believe he was murdered. The Italian authorities later convicted thirty-three people over the bank’s collapse, while Marcinkus spent two years trapped within the Vatican City after the police threatened him with arrest in spite of his diplomatic immunity. The matter was finally resolved in 1984 when the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli and the Pope agreed to pay $244 million compensation to Banco Ambrosiano’s creditors against Marcinkus’s opposition. At the time, Winning stood by his old college friend and believed Marcinkus’s defence that he himself had been misled and was innocent of any wrongdoing. This position was, frankly, ridiculous, extending as it did a greater degree of leeway and understanding to Marcinkus than either the Pope or Cardinal Casaroli could muster, but it still fitted Winning’s pattern of deliberately choosing to believe the best about Church personnel, in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.

In order to graduate, Winning was required to complete a body of original research that would further the study of canon law and so in the summer of 1952, he began to search for a suitable subject for his thesis. There were two reasons why he settled upon ‘Tithes in Pre-Reformation Scotland’ as the completed manuscript was titled; the first was proximity – he was to spend the summer at home and it made sense to focus on an aspect of Scottish Church history when libraries and research facilities were so easily to hand; the second reason was more basic and primal – a desire for revenge. In the past so much research had been carried out by Protestant historians who Winning believed had twisted and distorted the facts in order to better justify the Reformation. This would be his opportunity to redress the balance, and so he set to work with the words of the college song whispering in his ear: ‘that Scotland’s wrong be righted, so that Scotland’s work be done’.

He was aided in his research by the discovery just four years before of a manuscript copy of lectures delivered in the sixteenth century by William Hay, the Scottish theologian and canonist at King’s College in Aberdeen. Although it had not yet been edited, Winning found inside its worn and faded pages a wealth of original information which he fashioned into crucial ammunition in his battle against what he perceived as the errant forces of Protestantism. Over the summer, he buried himself in the libraries of Scotland, working through a variety of sources including diocesan registers, the chartularies of monastic houses, and as many ecclesiastical documents as had survived the destruction of reformers. Where previous historians had found a corrupt system of arbitrary taxation of the poor by the Catholic Church, Winning uncovered a carefully regulated and organized system that funded hospitals and poor houses. In the preface to his work, he set forth his agenda to treat the subject from a Catholic point of view for the first time and to correct erroneous perceptions made by Protestant historians who, he wrote, ‘manifest an appalling lack of understanding of the canon law which regulated the payment of tithes to the clergy’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Winning wrote with a clear, simple style topped with the occasional literary flourish and over the course of 236 pages, he traced the origin, development and decline of the tithe system, crossing swords whereever possible in defence of the faith and within only a few pages skewering opposing views: ‘Scotland has never recovered from the calamity of the Reformation and over three hundred years were to pass before she could boast once more of a properly constituted hierarchy. The great hatred of the priesthood engendered by Knox and his unruly mobs has been kept alive by generations of bigoted historians who have slandered the pre-Reformation Church without respite and continue to do so today.’

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.




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