This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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.2

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.