This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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’.1 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.