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.

FIVE

A Time to Die

‘When I was walking behind the coffin, I felt very proud that she had been my mother.’

THOMAS WINNING

When the specialist emerged from his office, having just seen Agnes Winning, and approached her son, his first few words told the whole story: ‘Excuse me, are you the next of kin?’ Winning rose from his seat in the waiting room of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where his mother had been booked for a series of tests the results of which, judging by the doctor’s expression, were not good. He had returned from Rome in July 1953 to discover his mother looking pale, weak and suffering severe lower-back pain. It had been a persistent problem since she returned from a trip to Lourdes with her daughter Margaret in May. As the local doctor had admitted to being baffled at the cause, Winning had urged her to seek further medical attention.

The cause, he was told, was a cancerous tumour growing in her rectum. Exploratory surgery was now required to determine how far the disease had spread, but the description the doctor used was ‘hopeless’. The operation was scheduled for the following day and as Agnes had no wish to spend an unnecessary night in hospital, they travelled home to Craigneuk by bus and in silence.

Winning, with the doctor’s agreement, had chosen not to reveal the diagnosis to his mother and she had not asked. Cancer was treated like a curse in the 1950s, the word was rarely uttered. The operation the following day was pitifully swift: no sooner had the surgeons opened her up, than the decision was made to close on the grounds that there was little they could do. When told by a lady in the neighbouring bed that she had been absent scarcely an hour, Agnes Winning took this as a sign that nothing had been found. Winning and his father had no intention of disavowing her of such comfort, even after Patrick Macmillan, the son of the doctor who had treated Winning as a child for pneumonia, and who was now working as a registrar at the Royal, explained that she might last no longer than three weeks. He explained that all they could do was administer a colostomy in an attempt to relieve the pain from the tumour pressing on the nerves of her legs.

Agnes Winning was to live for one more year, lulled for the first six months by the belief that the colostomy had corrected the complaint and for her final few months cushioned by the new happiness her daughter had discovered. The truth of her mother’s inoperable cancer had been hidden from Margaret by her father and brother and she was left under the delusion that Agnes would one day recover. At twenty-six, Margaret was now a qualified schoolteacher and had recently fallen in love. Edward McCarron, or Eddie to all, had been a fellow pupil with Margaret at Our Lady’s High School, he had worked as a lorry driver for the armed forces during the war and was currently working as a grocer. The couple had first met through the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS) where Eddie was a member and Margaret belonged to the Associates of the CYMS, a women’s group which organized dances and prepared any food the men might require. It is an indication of the exalted position in which Winning was placed that prior to his return home, she had been fretful about his opinion of Eddie. Since childhood, her brother had been her hero; even when the truth emerged about her mother’s condition Margaret was not angered by the deception, believing instead that her brother had been protecting her from unnecessary anguish. Her fears over Eddie were to prove groundless as both men struck up a firm friendship, with Eddie agreeing to teach his future brother-in-law how to drive. An evening excursion with Eddie at the wheel was to constitute the Winnings’ final outing as a family. On Easter Monday 1954, Agnes and Thomas senior were joined by their son and daughter on the back seat of a hired car for a short trip to Largs, a scenic little town that looked out on to the Firth of Clyde and boasted the finest Italian café in the country. Nardini’s Café was owned by a family of Italian immigrants and drew visitors from across Scotland to sample their unique blend of ice cream and revel in the culinary delight of their knickerbocker glories. Winning impressed his family by ordering in Italian and together the five scraped their glasses clean and watched the sun set.

Agnes Winning was to die hard. After the outing to Largs, she was unable to leave the house again and was confined to a bed made up in the living room. Although Ellen Donnelly, a cousin who was a night nurse, visited each morning to administer morphine injections, the pain in her legs proved interminable and the distress turned her dark hair white. Agnes knew she was dying but refused to discuss her condition or even acknowledge the colostomy; all she did was plead for the pain to cease. Winning found his mother’s slow, unsightly death to be a crucifixion. Where possible he visited every day to bring her Holy Communion and each day off or week’s holiday was spent by her side or supporting his father, for whom the experience was equally unbearable. On 22 August she slipped into a coma and one week later, on 29 August 1954, she died at the age of sixty-two while surrounded by her family. In a curious twist that sustained the family’s belief that she had at last found peace her hair, once so white, turned back to black and the lines that riddled her face faded. ‘It was weird,’ remembered Margaret. ‘But then I suppose all the pain had gone.’

While father and daughter wept openly, Winning remained stoical. ‘Thomas didn’t cry. He was devastated, but he didn’t cry. I guess he thought he had to do it for my sake,’ said Margaret. Emotions, though painfully felt, were left unexpressed as he attempted to support his father and sister in the manner of a priest as well as that of a son and a brother. It was he who organized the funeral at St Patrick’s, the church his mother had supported for so many years, and it was he who, in a remarkable feat of self-control, presided over the funeral Mass, something he described as a ‘great honour’.

I can remember the funeral well. It is a terrible experience [the death of your mother]. The gap is never filled. I felt very proud that she had brought me up because I could not point to anything other than she had done her level best. By all the social standards we were poor, but you never knew it. I never had a patch on my trousers. When I was walking behind the coffin I felt very proud that she had been my mother.

His mother’s death marked the conclusion of a difficult year in which Winning’s life both personally and professionally had seemed to conspire against him. When not fretting over her health and the terrible toll it was taking on his father, Winning was consumed by his work which over the past twelve months had been less than comforting. Monsignor Alex Hamilton, who had been parish priest at St Patrick’s while he was an altar boy, had suggested to Gerry Rogers, the Vicar General, that Winning join him at his new parish of St Mary’s in the neighbouring town of Hamilton and serve as one of his three curates. On paper, it appeared a perfect plan, one that conjured the image of an old mentor taking a young charge under his wing, and so Rogers agreed but Winning was to find the new dynamic extremely difficult. The problem was that Hamilton’s view of his former altar boy had frozen with Winning still in short trousers. While he had gone on to develop into a determined, opinionated and ambitious young priest, the monsignor continued to treat him in the dismissive manner of a child. Winning came to believe that the older priest was emotionally stunted, unable or unwilling to either give or receive affection; a characteristic he attributed to Hamilton’s loss of his mother while he was just an infant. As parish priest, Hamilton kept a similar distance from his parishioners. A shy man, he rarely made home visits and relied heavily on his curates for information. Winning said: ‘You were a functionary for him. You did not get the feeling that you had a personable relationship with him. He never gave you any great support or enthusiasm.’

Sharing the parish house and the task of home visits, daily Mass and the organization of community groups such as the CYMS were two other curates – John Murray, an older priest in his late forties who was desperate for promotion to a parish of his own, and John Boyle, a chubby pioneer, who as a member of the Irish temperance movement was sworn to abstinence for five years. Winning did not bond with Murray, but developed a great affection for Boyle, with whom he would later holiday among the vineyards of France once his ‘sentence’, as Winning described the pledge, was complete. Hamilton had little time for tittle-tattle or parish gossip so the dinner table where the four dined each evening became a forum where discussions on theology, politics and the morality of nuclear weapons were passed around with the green beans and boiled potatoes. This was one aspect of Hamilton’s cold character that Winning enjoyed and it was here that his strong lifelong opposition to nuclear weapons hardened. By 1954, the Second World War was scarcely a decade past but fears of a new nuclear holocaust were growing.

A mini-mushroom cloud had risen over the diocese in February 1954 when the announcement was made that Bishop Edward Douglas was to retire on health grounds. Douglas’s leadership of the diocese had been little short of disastrous; he was nervous, inarticulate, and wore a perpetual frown of concern. He had also developed a drinking problem in response to the pressures of office, and Gerry Rogers had increasingly been forced to deputize on occasions when Douglas was physically unable to perform his duties. Although his vicar general remained as supportive as possible, the situation was untenable and the farce collapsed when the bishop was found drunk on the kitchen floor by the Apostolic Delegate, who had agreed to pay a visit to the diocese to quietly review his continuing suitability for office. Douglas was swiftly removed from the diocese, appointed titular Bishop of Botri, an ancient Holy Land diocese, and retired to the diocese of Aberdeen, where he attempted to recover through attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, an American society that had arrived in Scotland only a few years earlier.

The true reason for his departure was hidden from the public but remained an open secret among the clergy and was another destabilizing factor in Winning’s work. He had only met Bishop Douglas once but the loss of a bishop was always preceded by an air of uncertainty and unease prior to a new appointment. And then there was the marriage tribunal: two days each week, Monday and Wednesday, Winning joined John McQuade at a detached redbrick villa in the more salubrious end of Bothwell, an attractive and leafy suburb of Hamilton. Between nine o’clock in the morning and six o’clock at night when they returned to their respective parishes, Winning and McQuade attempted to convert the theory learned in Rome into what was an often difficult practice. There are few areas of Catholicism as misunderstood as the Church’s prohibition of remarriage after divorce without a declaration of nullity, better known as an annulment. To the unaware, there exists a troubling double standard, but to the Church, the procedure remains utterly consistent with her belief in the indissolubility of a true marriage. The key is to understand that marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church is a sacrament made between two people and witnessed by God; it is a knot tied by two willing individuals who promise to accept children if so fortunate and to nurture one another until death. The indissolubility of marriage is predicated on the words of Jesus in St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Whomsoever My Father has united, let no man put asunder.’ Annulment is based upon the fact that the exchange of consent brings marriage into existence. Therefore if consent is faulty, no marriage occurs. If it can be shown, for example, that consent was obtained by force or given by someone who was incapable of doing so, or given with conditions affecting permanence, children, fidelity, or the nature of marriage itself, then it might be possible to obtain a declaration of nullity. So, while a marriage may have taken place, a ceremony held, and vows and rings exchanged, the sacrament may not necessarily have occurred and God has ‘united’ no one. If a girl was forced to marry against her wishes there could be no consent; if a man knew he was homosexual there may be no consent; if demands or conditions were placed on the marriage by either party, a common occurrence in Italy where a husband would often make his wife promise that her mother would never live with them, there could be no true consent. The same principles applied if a wife agreed to marry on the condition that the couple not have children: once again there could be no true consent. One of Winning’s jobs was to sift through a marriage that had collapsed for any evidence that would support an application for annulment.