This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

For Lori, my ‘Elektra’

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

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.