Ten years ago one of the most outspoken, controversial – and for many downright annoying – public figures in modern Scottish life died.
Surprisingly, in these aggressively secular times, he was a churchman, and a man whose faith was at the centre of everything he said and did.
Cardinal Tom Winning moved the Catholic Church from the margins to a central place in Scottish public and political life, which was a huge achievement.
Before him, the Church of Scotland – which is after all Scotland’s national church – was the church that Scottish politicians paid attention to, occasionally deferred to, and sometimes even feared. The Kirk’s General Assembly, pre-devolution, was regarded as the nearest thing Scotland had to a parliament. The Moderator of the Assembly was regularly invited by the UK Government of the day to Westminster.
This rankled with Tom Winning. He was not a natural communicator, but he was smart and he was politically astute. Before him there a sense that senior Catholics in Scotland were expected to take, if not the back seat, then a seat that was a row or two from the front. He changed this, propelling himself and his church to the forefront. His specific political achievements were limited, but he gained for the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland a new-found public status which it retains to this day.
His Catholicism was rugged and muscular. Far from avoiding controversy, he relished it. He was fearless. Away back in 1982, the then Archbishop Winning of Glasgow became a UK figure through his attacks on the Falklands War. His attacks continued even when the Pope’s imminent visit to Britain was put in doubt because of the war. Cardinal Winning was never a natural diplomat. Later, his aggressive anti-abortion campaigning and his forthright attacks on homosexuality appalled much of liberal, secular Scotland – and also, it has to be said, quite a few in his own flock.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, he and his indefatigable media adviser Father Tom Connelly were more interested in the tabloids and the electronic media than the broadsheet press. Yet Cardinal Winning always paid close attention to this newspaper, and its content was sometimes not to his liking. More than once I took a very late-night phone call from him just after he’d perused the first edition. His language was robust, to put it mildly – he came from a mining background – and he occasionally reminded me of some of the football managers I’d encountered earlier in my career.
He also had immense warmth. He was a well kent and welcome customer in several of Glasgow’s more old-fashioned Italian restaurants, and to relax with him over some Barbera and pasta was always an enlightening and engaging experience. Deep down, he cared most for the poor, the weak and the marginalised; his concern for them went far beyond lip service.
He was Archbishop of Glasgow for a very long time. He had issues with some of his own priests, and he was not at his best dealing with financial matters, but he was there for the long haul; he knew that continuity is a great strength of the Catholic Church.
The Church of Scotland has produced over the past 30 years or so one or two outstanding leaders, but they are alas here today, gone tomorrow. The Moderator of the General Assembly is in office for just a year. When an exceptional moderator arrives and is making his or her mark, he or she is suddenly removed from the public eye. Cardinal Winning understood he would be around for a long time, and capitalised on this. He constantly stood up to politicians, including Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. He was never one for deference or scraping.
The paradox is that while he pushed his church to the centre of public life in Scotland, he remained instinctively an outsider, whose natural habitat was not a debating hall, a broadcasting studio or even a palace – but rather a street, a chapel, a tenement flat. He was a great man, if an unremittingly divisive one.
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