This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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.’3

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’.4 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.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.