This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

DEDICATION

For Lori, my ‘Elektra’

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

PART ONE THE PRIESTLY YEARS

1 In the Beginning …

2 Blairs Bound

3 To the City by the Tiber

4 A Curate’s Tale

5 A Time to Die

6 No One is Far Away

7 A Better World

8 A Battered Mitre

PART TWO THE ARCHBISHOP YEARS

9 The New Archbishop

10 Glasgow’s Miracle

11 Tough Talking

12 When Peter Met Andrew

13 The City of God

14 The Collection Plate

PART THREE THE CARDINAL YEARS

15 The Red Hat

16 The Affair of the Errant Bishop

17 The Thorn on Labour’s Rose

18 A Right to Life

19 The Spin Doctor Who Came Unspun

20 The Opinion that Dare Not Speak its Name

21 A Twilight Moment

22 A Good Fight Fought

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Notes

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

If ever an incident encapsulated the character of Cardinal Thomas Joseph Winning, it was a meeting with Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor. The Archbishop of Glasgow had travelled to London in 1999 to meet Britain’s most powerful lawmaker, in order to raise concerns over the issue of bioethics. After a long wait in the outer chambers of the Lord Chancellor’s office at the House of Lords, the Cardinal spotted Irvine striding towards him, woollen wig flowing, ruffled shirt tucked in place, breeches and silk stockings meeting neatly at the knee, and patent leather shoes buffed to a brilliant shine, offset by silver buckles. As Irvine breezed past, offering the Cardinal the briefest of nods, Winning nudged Ronnie Convery, his current affairs adviser, and said: ‘If that’s the Lord Chancellor, can you imagine what God looks like?’

So much of this anecdote gives a flavour of the man: he was a humorist who pricked pomposity with wit, he was an outsider, suspicious of the corridors of power, and he was a critic of the government, whether it came wrapped in the blue ribbon of the Conservative Party or wore the red rose of New Labour. As a Prince of the Church, Winning possessed a wardrobe of scarlet robes and red birettas capable of matching the Lord Chancellor stitch for embroidered stitch, but instead he preferred the anonymity of a dark suit and white collar, the garb of a common priest. Derry Irvine famously proclaimed himself in the mould of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, whose power and pomp in the early sixteenth century was legendary. Winning, in comparison, was closer to St Thomas à Becket – ‘this turbulent priest’, as Henry II christened his Archbishop of Canterbury, so painful had he become to the government of the day.

Yet Cardinal Winning was no saint. He could be arrogant, a bully and a sexist. He disliked homosexuals, distrusted many politicians, and considered Donald Dewar, then First Minister of Scotland and ‘Father of the nation’, a ‘bigot’ – a charge to which he himself lay open. In financial matters, he was at best woefully uninterested, and at worst incompetent, and his tenure as Archbishop of Glasgow coincided with the creation of a £10 million debt that almost bankrupted the diocese. On the flip side of the coin, he was warm and personable. He cared deeply for his priests and his people and, throughout his career, he fought both poverty and social injustice. In a secular age, he managed to make the Church relevant. He battled against Prime Minister Tony Blair over the issue of abortion and startled the country by offering money to women in crisis pregnancies. This is the story of a miner’s son, raised in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, who went on to become arguably the most powerful religious leader of his day in Britain.

I was a six-week-old infant cradled in my mother’s arms when I first met Thomas Joseph Winning. He was then an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Glasgow who had been sent, against his will, to the parish of Our Holy Redeemer in my hometown of Clydebank, the shipyard town that bequeathed the world the Singer sewing machine and the QE2. A reluctant parish priest, he appeared to spread the misery around by decreeing that all baptisms be carried out before nine o’clock Mass on a Sunday morning. I was born in the January of a bitter winter and my mother feared I would catch pneumonia if brought out at such an early hour. Winning never actually baptised me – he was too busy fighting a turf war with his fellow auxiliary bishop – but he did peer into my swaddling clothes and I repaid his interest by praying for him every Sunday until the day he died.

It was customary during the Eucharistic prayer of the Mass for Catholics in Glasgow to pray ‘for our bishop Thomas’, but I was unaware of him as public figure, looming larger than his five feet six inches. Later, as an altar boy, I served at Masses at which he concelebrated. My interest in him deepened once I had exchanged the soutane of an altar boy for a journalist’s mackintosh. I literally bumped into him on the Glasgow-Edinburgh train shortly after he had received the red hat of a cardinal, and I was surprised that he was travelling alone, without a bag carrier or assistant. We chatted for an hour and I marvelled at his approachability.

It was not until I returned to Scotland after eighteen months working for the Sunday Times in London that I began to consider him as a subject for a biography. The idea flowed from a profile of the cardinal I wrote for the Scottish edition of the paper in May 1998. I flew to Rome to speak with Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. The previous year, Winning had launched his pro-life initiative and became a cause célèbre, and I expected steady praise from the leader of the Vatican department on which he served. Instead I received nothing. In a strange, almost jealous turn the Colombian cardinal refused to discuss Winning at all, in spite of my varied attempts to lever him into the conversation. After a particularly blunt segue he simply stood up, offered me a chocolate from a box on his desk, kissed both my cheeks and showed me to the door. ‘Winning is one man,’ he said and shrugged.

True, Winning was one man, but a man rapidly growing in stature and influence. If Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, was for the Establishment the soft, pious face of Catholicism, then Winning was the hard man, a poster boy for the traditionalists who welcomed his fight back against a secular society. The Sunday Times profile left me nursing more questions than answers. Why did he provoke such extremes of emotions? What drove him on? Had he ever fallen in love? What did he think about when alone in the dark? I began to see his role less as a spiritual leader than as a minister in a world government, pushing through policy, dealing with egos and jealousies, juggling crises, attempting to keep the faith in an uninterested world. To touch his soul is too melodramatic a phrase; instead I wished to prise open the armour Thomas Winning had constructed around himself during a half a century as a priest.

When I first approached the late Mgr Tom Connelly, then press spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, with the idea of a biography, he was enthusiastic. ‘It’s got to be warts and all,’ he explained over lunch at his favourite Italian restaurant. He viewed previous books on Scottish Church figures as anaemic hagiographies, well intentioned but principally the efforts of fans with typewriters. I planned a more robust and in-depth project and the idea was discussed with Ronnie Convery, Winning’s adviser, before being pushed up the line to ‘the Boss’. After both men prepared the way, I was invited to lunch in the Cardinal’s private dining room in the diocesan offices in Glasgow, overlooking the River Clyde. Winning sat at the head of the table, ladled out the spaghetti, and listened to my pitch. After five minutes he agreed: ‘I’d have no problem with that, Stephen,’ he told me, and once lunch was over, we walked to his office to inspect his diary and plan the first of over forty interview sessions which would spread out over the next two years.

The going was tough, the terrain unfamiliar. The Catholic Church in Scotland has for so long been ignored or reported simply at face value. Winning was a natural raconteur, an experienced interviewee, but the key was to strip away the tired and worn answers and somehow reach a deeper truth. It was not easy. Painful memories were shuttered behind ‘I can’t remember’, personal feelings required careful teasing out – and even then were swiftly converted into the third person and immediately generalized, so that ‘you would feel’ took the place of ‘I would feel’. Friends, family, politicians and old foes provided an alternative record and a process of checks and balances distilled the facts from fondly remembered fiction. I was the first journalist to enjoy access to Winning’s sister Margaret, who explained their childhood. His niece and nephew described the various visits, dinners and football matches that comprised their uncle’s only relaxation.

My interviews were regularly one hour long. I would arrive at The Oaks, the wonderful Arts and Crafts-style villa in the leafy suburb of Newlands on Glasgow’s south side, promptly at 9.25 in the morning. I discovered that arrival any earlier disturbed his daily recitation of the divine office, the prayers of a priest which he performed each morning in the small oratory just off the hall. Our discussions took place in the living room, he on the sofa, myself in an armchair, and the glass table that lay between us became the net over which questions and answers were batted. At ten-thirty, Mrs Mclnnes, Winning’s housekeeper of thirty years, would arrive with tea and biscuits and a further fifteen minutes would be idled away on current events or personal pleasantries.

We wrestled with the years from his birth in 1925 to the present day, arguing, me prodding and he resisting. For the majority of our sessions we were alone; only when we crossed into his years as a cardinal (1994–2001) was he joined by Ronnie Convery. Far from blocking or fielding questions, Convery sat, listened, and even assisted as we discussed Winning’s duels with the government, the launch of the pro-life initiative and the Roddy Wright affair, when the errant Bishop of Argyll and the Isles abandoned his post for a divorcee.

The rules for the book were clear from my first approach. I wished to enjoy the access of an ‘authorized’ biography but none of the controls or manipulations often inherent with ‘official’ status. I happily agreed that I would allow Winning to read the finished book before publication to allow the correction of factual errors. Any views, opinions and matters of interpretation were to be mine alone. I knew this would be difficult. Winning was a man unschooled in the acceptance of constructive criticism. He shared an attitude with Margaret Thatcher, his bête noire, during the 1980s for bracketing people either as ‘one of us’ or ‘one of them’. Those who were not for him, he felt, were against him. At one point our relationship skittered over an icy patch when I arrived for an appointed interview and was presented with a formal letter that insisted he receive a written document and be given the opportunity to read the work completed so far; the continuation of any further interviews hinged upon my acceptance. A compromise was reached when I wrote a letter, putting our previous oral agreement on paper. Winning was a clever manipulator. ‘Stephen,’ he said, smiling his crinkled Robert de Niro smile, ‘I want you to be as welcome in this house once the book is published as you are today.’ I knew this would be unlikely and steeled myself for the inevitable battle which would take place once the book was completed.

It was a battle never fought. Winning’s death on Sunday, 17 June 2001 closed our collaboration, but not our relationship. When the news editor of the Scotsman called me at home, alerting me to the announcement by the Press Association, I felt physically sick. The Cardinal had suffered a heart attack eight days previously but had returned home and was described as ‘recovering well’. A ‘get well’ card and a wrapped present rested on my kitchen table. That afternoon I sat in the Scotsman’s offices and wrote a lengthy appreciation with time spent in the toilet in tears. I was troubled by the turbulence of my emotions, and it took a few days to trace the source to the obvious: an obsessional analysis of a life now lost. As any man in a public and powerful position, Winning had a number of sides, one witnessed by family, another by friends; priests saw a third, brother bishops a fourth, and so on. For two years, I had attempted to meld these separate sides, like frames on a negative, into a single, moving picture. The early summer of 2001 was to be a curious time. His death had occurred during my sabbatical when I was finishing a first draft of the book. A strange sensation occurs when you witness a man in his coffin, then return to your study to re-animate him on the page.

When I first embarked on the writing of this biography, I was aware that a previous book by Vivienne Belton, a Glasgow school teacher, had been completed, but had as yet been unable to find a publisher. When in March 2000 the Daily Record first revealed that Winning’s life was to be the subject of a ‘controversial’ biography by myself, it had the fortunate effect of galvanizing Ms Belton into asking for Winning’s assistance in finding a publisher for her manuscript. Cardinal Thomas Winning: An Authorised Biography by Vivienne Belton was published by Columba Press in the autumn of 2000. The Cardinal: An Official Tribute, published by the Glasgow archdiocese and the Scottish Catholic Observer, joined it on the shelves a few months after Winning’s death, together with Always Winning, a book of tributes and photographs published by Mainstream. I have read all three books, yet the principal source for my account remains the hundred hours of interviews with Winning, his friends, family, colleagues, contemporaries, priests and politicians: all buttressed by newspaper reports, both secular and religious.

In the jargon of Hollywood, every story has an arc and progresses through ‘action beats’, dilemmas and troubles the hero overcomes which fuel him through the next phase of his development. Thomas Winning never overcame all of his troubles. He remained a poor judge of character and was let down by a number of close associates; his director of social work ran up large debts in highly ambitious but slackly managed projects, his spin doctor was unspun by a love affair, a court case and a bawdy limerick, while his beloved Pastoral Plan was at one point in the hands of a priest later revealed to be a drunk who hired a former topless model as a housekeeper and paid the inevitable price. The popular view propagated first by the Scottish media and latterly by the British media, was of Winning as the man of the people. This was a convenient pigeonhole, grounded in truth and weary with repetition, but one which ignored Winning’s inevitable loneliness. He was a man severed by the weight of position and responsibility from the people. As a young teenager, he had undergone a harsh transformation to become a priest when there was little room for the personal. What constituted Winning the priest and Winning the man was to be a dilemma with which he wrestled for the rest of his life. The garb of a priest was a suit of armour in which he clanked uncomfortably. He found the expression of love beyond the strict confines of his family to be difficult, afraid that the emotion might veer from the platonic.

If the suit of armour retarded his emotions, it lent him protection during his long campaign to drag Catholicism in Scotland out from under the parapet and into the mainstream. This was not to be achieved by ducking issues or diluting dogma. In his twenty-nine years as a bishop, Winning branded Britain a nation of ‘spiritual dwarfs’, accused Prince Charles of ‘woolly theology’, wrestled with the Conservative Party over nuclear weapons, condemned the Gulf War, and spent the last six years of his life staring over a ‘no man’s land’ littered with issues such as abortion, student fees and bioethics, at Tony Blair, the Labour leader and pseudo-Catholic who had the potential on paper to be his greatest ally.

The life of Thomas Joseph Winning, a journey from poverty to a position as a prince of the Church, is an inspirational tale of one man’s struggle with himself and his surroundings to achieve what he genuinely believed was God’s will, in an age when self-will has increasingly become the only currency which counts. At the height of his popularity Winning was to be touted as one of the papabile – a candidate for Pope. Although it was a ridiculous suggestion – he lacked both the intellect and standing in Rome – and he was already too old, he was flattered by the suggestion. On one occasion, when I accompanied him to Rome, we walked across St Peter’s Square late in the evening after dining in the Via Condotti. Winning was dressed in an anorak from C&A, while the Roman clergy were elegant in their long black frock coats. As we both looked up at the light burning from the papal apartment, I asked if he was not proud to have climbed up to be a candidate.

‘Sure,’ he said, before triggering another vintage moment. ‘I wouldn’t want to score the goal, but I’m glad I’ve made it to the penalty area.’

ONE

In the Beginning …

‘The papists [are like a] rattlesnake, harmless when kept under proper restraints, but dangerous like it, when at full liberty; and ready to diffuse a baleful poison around.’1

JOHN ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY,

GLASGOW UNIVERSITY, 1770

It is not known exactly when Patrick Win arrived on the boat from Belfast at the docks of Glasgow in search of a better life and a fuller belly. Born in 1834 among the hills of Fermanagh in the counties of Ulster, he survived the terrible potato famine of the following decade that killed one million of his countrymen and emerged, like his father John, a hardy survivor and itinerant labourer. Ireland at the time was a ravaged country, where food was scarce and what little work there was offered scant prospect of betterment. Tired of farm work and the quiet desperation of his fellow workers, Patrick decided to strike out for a brighter future ‘across the water’. A lack of formal schooling had left him illiterate, a barrier which forced him to live on his wits and by the sweat of his brow.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland was a country in the grip of the Industrial Revolution. Railways, quarries, ironworks, mines, canals, docks and factories were consuming working men, women and children like so much coal in a furnace. The centres of heavy industry such as Glasgow and Dundee were drawing immigrant workers from Ireland at a tremendous rate. By 1851, Patrick Win was just one of over two hundred thousand first-generation Irish immigrants who had arrived in Scotland over the past fifty years, the majority bedding down along the west coast of the country. While most were Catholic, a proportion of the Irish visitors were Protestants from Ulster, whose ancestors had gone to Ireland to colonize the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many had been tempted back by the notices placed in Belfast newspapers looking for skilled workers to replace those Scottish employees drawn away to Canada, America or Australia. The owners of steelworks, ironworks and coal mines offered them sweeteners such as comfortable accommodation and education for their children. The Irish Catholics could expect no such welcome.

Those who arrived in Scotland were quickly saddled with several unshakeable problems, namely poverty and Catholicism; Scotland may have been expanding its industries, but wages were low and the city of Glasgow offered an example of both boom and bust. Shipbuilding on the Clyde was the cornerstone of its prosperity and accounted for a third of all the world’s merchant fleet before 1912. The flourishing tobacco and cotton trades only added to its success. Yet the city had a tradition of high death rates eclipsed by even higher birth rates. The population explosion had been fuelled by the influx of immigrants and refugees fleeing the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands. In 1850, over 50 per cent of the population of 400,000 were born outside the city, resulting in severe overcrowding over a long period in pitiful accommodation which, on average, did not extend beyond one room. Outside the houses open sewers flowed freely and so disease was rampant.

The distress caused by low wages and poor, unhygienic living conditions was compounded by the attitude of locals to Catholicism. In Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Catholic faith was abhorrent to the Protestant population. For over two hundred years, since the Reformation of 1560, Catholicism had been illegal. Priests were prosecuted and celebration of the Mass was forbidden; the remaining small outcrops of believers who refused to convert were despised. A relaxation in the law came with the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, once again allowing freedom of worship, and the Emancipation Act which followed thirty years later loosened the bonds further still, but the attitude of the public remained fixed.

Catholics were viewed as a problem to be contained, an attitude encapsulated by John Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1770. While debating with a colleague the merits of repealing laws against Roman Catholics, he compared them to a rattlesnake: ‘harmless when kept under proper restraints, but dangerous like it, when at full liberty; and ready to diffuse a baleful poison around’.

The population of Glasgow had always kept a watchful eye on their Catholic neighbours. It was claimed that during the 1790s the city housed forty-three anti-Catholic organizations at a time when the total Catholic population was just thirty-nine. By 1850, the Catholic population in the city had risen to over seventy thousand. In response, anti-Catholic organizations such as the Scottish Protestant Association formed and printed journals such as the Bulwark and the Scottish Protestant. Members and readers were of a view that Scotland was under attack by an ‘inferior race’ threatening disease, crime and degradation.

In a short, hard life, Patrick Win witnessed them all. After arriving in the city he moved to the south side of the river Clyde and settled in the village of Pollokshaws. The construction of the Glasgow, Paisley and Johnstone Canal in 1808 had brought a large number of Irish Catholic labourers, or navvies as they were known, into the area and Win was just another to add to their number. Instead of finding work with the large cotton mills, the principal employers in the area, he succeeded in obtaining a job as a railway surfaceman. In such a hostile atmosphere the Catholics invariably spent time with their own countrymen and women at the Irish clubs whose music and dancing offered an opportunity to forget for a few hours the misery of their lives. Win was to meet a young woman by the name of Ann Maguire, a bleacher by profession and a fellow exile from Fermanagh, and on 19 October 1855, the couple wed.