This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

TWO

Blairs Bound

‘They drained my self-esteem. I simply didn’t have any.’

THOMAS WINNING

On the afternoon of 27 August 1942, Platform Two of Buchanan Street railway station in the centre of Glasgow resembled a convention of apprentice undertakers. Three dozen boys dressed in black suits, black coats and soft trilby hats stood waiting for the one o’clock train to Aberdeen. Ahead lay their first year at Blairs, as St Mary’s seminary was commonly known, and around them hung an air of acute trepidation. Thomas Winning had perhaps more to fear than his fellow students. This was his first trip away from home and the thought of leaving behind his family had left him quite sick. His aunts and uncles had paid for his new wardrobe, the highlight of which was his first pair of football boots; but only his immediate family had come to wave him off. Before arriving at the station, Fr James Ward had taken them to Luigi’s Fish and Chip Emporium as a final treat. The farewell on the platform was short and strained. Afterwards, the priest bought Winning’s mother, father and sister tickets to see the film How Green Was My Valley, a popular weepy about a Welsh mining disaster, and told Margaret: ‘You can get your tears out in the dark.’

On the train, Winning had the same emotions, but no such opportunity for release. Instead, he took a seat beside Maurice Taylor, a quiet boy one year younger than himself, with whom he had become friendly during his previous two years at Our Lady’s High School. The carriage was filled with boys who enjoyed the easy camaraderie that accompanied a secondary education at Blairs, a clique that left Taylor and Winning with the feeling of being outsiders. As the others talked, the pair mainly stared out of the window at the countryside’s blur of browns and greens.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, the party arrived at Aberdeen’s Central Station and spilled out for what was a Blairs’ tradition – a high tea of scones and cress sandwiches at Kenaway’s, the renowned delicatessen. A fleet of taxis was then organized to carry the boys and their trunks to the college, which sat five miles west of the city centre on the south Deeside Road. Rattling in the back of the black hackney, they crossed the bridge over the river Dee and, looking back, saw the spires of Aberdeen disappear into the distance. For many boys, the brief walk from the station to Kenaway’s would be as much as they would see of the Granite City during their northern education. The temptations of Aberdeen were strictly out of bounds.

Father Stephen McGill greeted the party at the doors of the college. A small man with a clipped and careful manner and a pious spirituality many found sickly sweet, McGill had trained as a priest in France with the Order of St Sulpice, a group dedicated to the formation of aspirant priests, and would boast of having escaped the German invasion with only his typewriter and a pair of socks. He ushered them inside for a tour and what would become their traditional supper: a sweet tea, bluish in colour, and slices of bread and jam. The customary strict decorum was suspended for that first evening as the party were shown around their new home. Each student was allocated a plywood cubicle, seven feet by five feet, each with a bed and a small wooden stool. There was no door and only a curtain for privacy. The centre of the room also acted as their main recreational area and this meant that throughout the year the boys slept in the smoke-filled atmosphere. Winning sat on his bed and listened as the ‘Decano’, a senior student, shouted over the tops of all the cubicles that the following day they would be expected to dress in Roman collars and soutanes. The lights were then suddenly switched off, leaving Winning and his fellow students to unpack in the dark. He felt utterly alone. ‘The first night was hellish,’ said Winning. ‘There was a certain harsh loneliness to the place.’

Winning and his fellow students were awoken at six o’clock by the morning bell and queued in silence for the ‘jakes’, as the toilets were called. Then, dressed in their black soutanes, they headed to the oratory for morning prayers and meditation, followed by Mass. Over a breakfast of porridge, tea and toast they were introduced to the Redemptorist priest who would lead them through their first few days. The priest, from a religious congregation founded in Naples in 1732, specialized in the administration of spiritual retreats, and each new intake of students began their formation at Blairs with a three-day silent retreat. As well as the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience the Redemptorists included a fourth, perseverance, an attribute they were keen to impress on the students at a time of confusion and doubt. Winning was reluctant to listen. ‘If there had been a correspondence course I would have taken it. I found those days an ordeal.’ The problem was the silence, a void that was quickly filled with doubts, unease and uncertainty. The long periods of contemplation and prayer were separated by a series of religious talks, opportunities for confession, and walks around the ‘bounds’ – a circuitous route through the attractive parkland in which the college sat. For Winning, it was the beginning of a long period of adjustment where he had to balance his desire to be a priest with the emotional rigours of the training.

Preparation for the priesthood at Blairs was run along monastic lines. Each day would begin and end enfolded within magnum silencium: the ‘Grand Silence’. This restful time, when students were freed from the tug and pull of daily life and were thought to be more open to God’s call, started with night prayers in the oratory and ran through until the beginning of breakfast. To break the silence was considered a grave error, one indicative of a lack of self-restraint, and grounds for the guilty student’s dismissal. The college’s regimented timetable was an attempt to ingrain discipline into the very hearts of the students.

Their days ran as follows:

At the time of Winning’s formation, the priesthood retained an exalted and highly respected position both within the Catholic Church and across mainstream society. Priests were untarnished by scandal, unquestioned and reverently deferred to. As a spiritual descendant of his leader, Jesus Christ, a priest was no longer of the world; he had moved beyond it. He enjoyed a unique position, able to straddle both the ordinary and the divine. The power to transform unleavened bread into the actual body of Christ, and to administer or retain God’s forgiveness at will was bestowed on him. A priest was not only in a position of patriarchal privilege, deferred to in society and enjoying great influence, sometimes even adoration, he was viewed as physically closer to God, and capable of wielding the supernatural. As Winning had read previously in The Imitation of Christ, ‘High is the ministry and great the dignity of priests, to whom is given that which is not granted to the angels.’ But such a privilege comes at a heavy price as Thomas A Kempis later explained: ‘You have not lightened your burden; you are now bound by a stricter bond of discipline, and are obliged to a greater perfection of sanctity.’

There was little place for the individual in the role of the priest; through their training, seminarians were to be melted down and re-cast in a uniform mould. Priestly celibacy was viewed as both a practical necessity for men who were, in essence, married to God and to the Church, as well as an opportunity to radiate purity. As Fr Ronald Knox, a popular contemporary author, wrote in The Priestly Life, a priest should not have:

the insensitivity of the bachelor who finds women a nuisance, not the furtive horror which tries to forget that sex exists, but something unapproachable, blinding, on a different plane from thoughts of evil. What a waste of God’s gift, when the life that’s pledged to celibacy is not a life irradiated by purity. What brooding regrets or cheap familiarities tarnish the surface of the mirror, which ought to reflect Christ?1

In the opinion of Fr Knox, the ground on which a priest’s feet trod should be ‘a part of the soil of heaven transplanted to earth’.

Before such a feat could be performed, seminarians would undergo a five-year course, two years of philosophy, followed by theology. Philosophy, it is said, is the handmaiden of theology, and before studying the latter, student priests were given a solid grounding in the former. At Blairs, the first-year class had four lecturers in the subject, led by Fr Philip Flanagan, who had spent two years until 1940 as vice-rector of the Scots College in Rome. Although the youngest of the lecturers, he was the most senior, taking lectures in ethics and cosmology. A second escapee from Europe was Fr Stephen McGill. He was assisted by Fr Hugh Cahill, lecturer in logic and psychology, a likeable man, nicknamed ‘Domine’ Cahill after his habit of addressing students by the Latin for ‘Mr’. The faculty was completed by Fr John Sheridan, a brilliant academic whose only complaint was that his typewriter would not keep pace with his constant flow of essays and articles. He was an erudite speaker who would often spend an entire lecture on areas of cosmology and natural philosophy which were beyond even the brightest boy. For the first few months, Winning found the classes wearisome and a distraction from what he had in mind (which was the active service of others), but over time, he appreciated the clarity that the discipline brought to his life.

When his class was taught the works of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher who stated: ‘I think, therefore I am’, Winning and the other students began to counter-argue, using the rules of logic to prove that they did not exist. Discussions during meals or what little social time was available had previously been light and casual, but now they took on a competitive edge. Loose talk was scrutinized for philosophical faux pas and anyone coming to a conclusion greater than the evidence will support was accused of breaking the laws of minor logic. Winning’s teachers impressed upon him that a firm grasp of philosophy would allow him to discuss the deepest problems of human life with men and women of any (or no) religious persuasion. It also gently led to a clearer understanding of Catholic theology. Through the study of general metaphysics and ontology, Winning learned to probe below surface appearances and physical characteristics to the nature of being. He learned how to distinguish between matter and form and was able to explain the mystery of why the host, which after consecration becomes the body of Christ, doesn’t taste of flesh, but remains instead brittle bread: in the language of metaphysics the ‘accidents’, the taste, the shape and texture, remain the same while the ‘substance’ is transformed by the power of God, working through his priest.

Winning grew to enjoy his philosophy classes, but the same was not to be said of his spiritual studies under the tutelage of Fr McGill, the year’s spiritual director. ‘I didn’t particularly take to McGill as a spiritual director – he was just too sickly sweet for me. I didn’t like his manner and he seemed to have absolutely no sense of humour.’ McGill’s field was viewed as the ‘inner forum’, the cultivation of the spiritual life. Each day, for twenty minutes, he was responsible for a series of religious talks that quickly became known as the ‘starvation talks’ among the students. Prayers were often said for the bell that signalled the beginning of lunch and the end of McGill’s lecture.

Winning viewed McGill as a patron of popular psychology from their first meeting. Over later decades, the two men, as brother bishops, would become friends, in spite of their less than auspicious beginning.

Winning did not take easily to the more progressive methods of prayer. Although he experimented with both the Sulpician method which involved a rigid schedule of prayer, spiritual conferences and study, and the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, neither system truly matched his temperament. He found piety and overt holiness distasteful, almost insincere, and in many ways this was a throwback to his fear of being viewed as a ‘sissy’ or ‘Holy Joe’. Instead, the rosary, the Our Father, daily attendance at Mass and periods of quiet contemplation, became the cornerstones of his early spirituality.

After the exercise of both the mind and the soul, the body came third. Every pupil was encouraged to walk for one hour each day in the company of two other students, chosen at random to prevent the curse of ‘cronyism’. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were set aside for football, and although Winning was delighted by his football boots, they were seldom worn, as he preferred the role of spectator to that of participant. He viewed the game of billiards as the sign of a misspent youth and would instead practise the piano while others played.

In Fr Flanagan’s view, an appreciation of the arts was an important element in the education of a priest. He also believed that the charisma required to attract young people to Jesus Christ and the ability to project one’s voice from the pulpit could best be nurtured on the stage. So each year the students were required to perform a play or musical from the canons of either Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan. During Winning’s time at Blairs The Merchant of Venice was chosen and he was cast in the role of Portia, the intelligent heroine but calculating deceiver, a casting coup he attributed to his good looks. Frank Cullen, who was cast as his Antonio, said: ‘Tom wasn’t a great actor, he was like the rest of us – we managed to mug through.’

Not everyone was as successful as Winning at masking their initial unhappiness. One morning in the spring of 1943, Winning discovered at breakfast that a fellow student was to abandon his studies. The doubts that everyone developed and so often brushed away had dragged Hugh Heslin down and he announced his immediate departure by slamming a tin of syrup on to the breakfast table and declaring, ‘I’m off.’ Heslin’s departure had a shattering effect on Winning’s confidence. His decision had appeared as if from nowhere and Winning began to wonder how firm were the foundations of his own vocation. Hadn’t Hugh Heslin once thought the priesthood was his calling? Over the next few weeks, he grew increasingly concerned about the strength of his vocation.

The doubts coincided with the collapse of the water system at the college and the students returned to their homes for an unscheduled six-week break. The family house at Glasgow Road had been given up and Winning’s parents and sister had moved to a larger property in Stewart Crescent, a ten-minute walk away. The house had originally been built by the husband of Kate Canning, sister of Winning’s grandfather. While James Stewart and his wife lived in one section, the remainder had been rented out. For many years, Winning’s father had acted as handyman for the elderly couple, and upon their death, he was rewarded with joint ownership, along with his cousin Patrick Canning.

The move, though unsettling, had its benefits. Winning was given the front parlour as his own private room for the duration of his stay, which he largely spent in study and visiting his various relatives. He maintained the practice of daily attendance at Mass, but made his sister walk a few paces behind, lest gossips, unaware of their relationship, report his behaviour. He was grossly overreacting, but it was an action which illustrated his concerns and the need to tighten his grip against any possible lapse in his conduct.

The impromptu break was quickly followed by the summer holidays, and by the time of his return to Blairs at the end of August 1943, Winning had so long wrestled with his doubts that he had gained the upper hand. He returned to Blairs equipped with a new-found piety and determination, illustrated by his decision to start a diary. Throughout his life, Winning would regularly start a diary with the best of intentions only to abandon it after a few entries. A whole year would have only one or two entries, offering an odd isolated insight in a sea of empty pages.

A diary entry for 27 and 28 August 1943 contains the following: ‘The master has recalled me to another year of prayer and labour but one of sweetness, for what sweeter thing is there than the knowledge that one is carrying out the will of Jesus Christ.’2

He continues in the purplish prose of the newly inspired:

Soon autumn will arrive, if it has not already done so. The trees will be stripped of their foliage and they will stand desolate and naked against the cold winter blasts till spring invites them to don their former robes of healthy green and ripening fruit. So also must I strip myself of all my little tendencies to things of earth, the master has invited me to do so by calling me back. Then I must let grace enter my soul freely without hindrance and in the summer of my spiritual life of 1943–44 I will bear the fruits of my mortifications, my prayers and my labours which, unworthy though they be, will store up treasures for me in the land of the living …

If Winning was dwelling on God’s infinite love, the rest of the world was engulfed by man’s hate. In the evening during their hour of leisure time, the students listened to the BBC News and devoured the local Aberdeen Press and Journal for reports on the success of Montgomery in North Africa as well as the Americans’ increased involvement. German bombers regularly flew on sorties from Norway, and although their principal targets were the shipyards of Glasgow and the west coast, they would regularly dump any remaining armaments on the northeast. When Aberdeen was targeted, the boys would retire to the bomb shelter built in the basement, while each student took it in turn to act as a fire watcher, staying up all night in order to keep track of enemy planes and report on any bombing close to the college.

For the first year and a half of Winning’s stay at Blairs, the war in Europe carried the added fear that he might yet be called up to fight. Under the terms of an agreement negotiated by the Catholic Church at the beginning of the conflict, student priests were placed on the list of reserve professions. However, this was dependent on each student having clearly demonstrated his desire for a vocation prior to the outbreak of war. Technically, Winning should have been protected from the prospect of being forced to follow in his father’s footsteps, but for the public-spirited contrariness of Archbishop Donald Mackintosh of Glasgow. He believed, in defiance of every other Scottish diocese, that only those admitted to the clerical state, following tonsure, the ceremonial cutting of hair after the third year of study, should be excused.

During Winning’s first year, Mackintosh made a visit to the college, raising hopes that he might have changed his position. However, during an inspection of the Glasgow students, where he paraded past them delicately carrying a hankie, he said: ‘I wish you joy’, before asking how many had been tonsured. When only a few raised their hands, he sighed and said: ‘The rest of you know the rules.’ In other words, on their eighteenth birthday, they would be eligible for conscription and were expected to do their duty and fight for their country. Winning had no desire to exchange his soutane for combat fatigues, his meditation and studies for armed combat and the likelihood of an early death. He was proud of his father’s contribution in the previous war, but had no desire to follow his lead. Winning turned eighteen in June 1943, but did not advertise the fact, on the grounds that if called up he would serve, but he would not volunteer his services. For six uncomfortable months he held his breath, then, in December 1943, Mackintosh died. With the unyielding archbishop removed, Fr James Ward was able to persuade the Diocesan Administrator that Winning should be exempt under the government’s agreement. Ward was backed by Fr Alex Hamilton and together both men explained that Winning had wanted to train for the priesthood since he was a schoolboy in 1937, but that this had been postponed on their advice.

Maurice Taylor was not so fortunate. His parish priest was unable to vouch for his vocation prior to 1939 and so, in 1944, Taylor received his commission. However, it was with the medical corps, and the war was over by the time he was sent to India. Instead of tramping across the beaches of northern Europe with kit and gun, Winning was rolling the clay tennis courts at the college when news broke of the Allied invasion of Europe, but an endurance test of another sort lay ahead.