THE snell wind blowing across Glasgow's Bellahouston Park did little to chill the throng which had gathered to greet Pope Benedict.
It was September 2010, and the size of the crowd confounded those who had predicted a pitiful attendance. In retrospect, it was to be the high point of Cardinal Keith O'Brien's career.
His origins were relatively humble. He was born in Ballycastle, County Antrim, and moved as a child with his family to Scotland when his father, who was in the Royal Navy, got a job at Faslane. He attended Edinburgh University and was ordained as a priest in the capital in 1965.
In 1985, when Gordon Joseph Gray retired, O'Brien held hopes of succeeding him as cardinal. But the palm went to Thomas Winning, despite the fact that his governance of his diocese's finances left something to be desired, while O'Brien was feted for his fiscal prudence.
Eventually he was made cardinal, in 2003, after which his views appear to have undergone a radical change. Previously deemed a liberal, he increasingly used his position to denounce homosexuality, telling MSPs that homosexuals were "captives of sexual aberration" and comparing them to the inmates at Saughton. Last year, he said same-sex marriage would shame the UK and degenerate society.
None of which would have surprised the rebellious Father John Fitzsimmons, the former Rector of the Scots College in Rome.
On his death in 2008, Fitzsimmons left the manuscript of an incomplete memoir in which he took every opportunity to lay into numerous of his colleagues in the church.
Referring specifically to Keith O'Brien, he described him as hard to define as distinguished and accused him – together with Cardinal Winning and Archbishop Mario Conti – of "shooting from the lip". If O'Brien were to live to a thousand, added Fitzsimmons, "I do not suppose he will ever understand the West of Scotland."
Of the present Pope, Fitzsimmons said: "I have never met a more disagreeable person in my life."
Fitzsimmons was equally contemptuous of several of his Scottish superiors. In his memoir, he describes how Frank Walsh, the then Bishop of Aberdeen, arrived in Rome "with his lady 'companion'," who was the wife of a Presbyterian minister.
"He [Walsh] chose to stay with her," wrote Fitzsimmons, "rather than with the other bishops. To say they were 'seething' would be an understatement."
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