This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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.’