This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

THREE

To the City by the Tiber

‘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.’1

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?’2 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.