The vendetta in pursuit of my father A system of lies that is prepared to ignore truth

I write, of course, of last week's decision by the Assembly Commission of the Free Church of Scotland to resume pursuit of my father, Professor Donald Macleod, and denying him any liability for a decade-long vendetta that almost landed him in prison.

And I write, I hope, only to put before you a few facts. My feelings I will try to keep to myself.

It was widely thought that the commission would adopt the proposed deliverance of the church's Finance, Law and Advisory Committee.

Its contents were well known before the commission met.

There was a token stab at my father - his writings subsequent to his sheriff court acquittal had ``grieved many'' - but, critically, it removed from office the three most discredited Church officials.

These were the Clerk of the Training of the Ministry Committee, the Rev John MacLeod of Tarbat; the Rev Angus Smith, of Cross, a member of that committee; and Professor Hugh Cartwright, Assistant Clerk to the General Assembly.

Only one FLA member - the Rev William MacLeod of Portree - recorded his dissent from that decision.

But, when the commission finally met last week, the resolution was never moved.

The FLA, on Wednesday night, disintegrated in a succession of canon law outrages.

The Rev William MacLeod moved in defence of the named ministers and in sustained attack on my father.

Against him were the Rev Alex MacDonald of Edinburgh and the Rev David Robertson of Dundee, the Church's most prominent ``revisionists'', pushing in the opposite direction.

And there were bit-players, like the pathetic Rev Malcolm MacLean of Lewis, closely linked to Angus Smith, and father of one of the women in the case (``I really felt she was lying about the whole thing,'' concluded Sheriff John Horsburgh in his judgment): MacLean was allowed to attend, speak and vote.

The catastrophic resolution at length adopted by the Assembly Commission was put by a third party, Donald Matheson, an elder from Aberdeen, official of the FLA, a senior businessman and sometime officer in the Army.

Mr Matheson is an able man who once did me much kindness. How did his wits desert him so completely?

He did not, in fact, write the ``composite'' motion himself, it was drafted by the Rev Alex Murdo MacLeod in Lewis, Moderator of the 1994 Assembly, and of whom much might be said.

This MacLeod's grasp of canon law does not inspire confidence.

At the 1995 Assembly he seconded the motion the Assembly adopted, finding ``no evidence of censurable conduct'' against my father, and declaring that any who raised the matter in Free Church would be liable to censure for slander.

But, in October 1995, my father was charged by the police.

MacLeod, incredibly, then felt free to second a successful motion by the Rev Angus Smith in the Lewis Presbytery, calling for an emergency commission with a view to my father's immediate removal, on forced leave of absence, from the Free Church College.

And, as if he had not made sufficient a fool of himself, the Rev Alex Murdo MacLeod then, in another capacity, granted the crave of his own motion, and called that commission.

For he (following the death of the 1995 Moderator) was Moderator pro tem of the Free Church of Scotland.

More than anything else, MacLeod's malignant blundering in this affair shows the calamitous gun-law administration of the Free Church.

At any rate, the commission last Thursday morning adopted the Matheson-MacLeod resolution, and the Church plunged into black farce.

For the six paragraphs of the commission finding are an incoherent, inconsistent, inanely evil mess.

Paragraph One thanks Almighty God for my father's acquittal in the sheriff court and declares that this is a vindication of the 1995 Assembly.

This is completely untrue. The 1995 Assembly recorded a grudging not proven verdict, pointedly failing to assert the professor's innocence.

Once my father was charged, the Church failed even to stand by that.

An outrageous commission was held, last December, as demanded by the Lewis and other presbyteries, and asked him to stand down from the college.

The Free Church, at its most official - the very FLA - refused to hand over documents vital for his defence in the sheriff court, and my father had to apply for a court order, a move that cost him #3000.

The Church paid no heed to that vital principle, presumption of innocence; and its orgy of self-justification since the trial should not hide its utter failure, at any official level, to support or sustain my father through it.

Paragraph Two notes the commission's concern that Revs John MacLeod, Angus Smith and Hugh Cartwright ``may have lost the confidence of many within the Church''.

They therefore appoint a special investigative committee, with prescriptive powers and access to all relevant papers, to report to the next diet of Commission in March 1997.

So, though the Free Church is falling apart, the commission wish to prolong the affair at least another five months (and, de facto, to the next General Assembly).

In the meantime these individuals remain on the Training of the Ministry Committee with their powers intact.

I understand that the special committee appointed to probe them includes the Rev Gordon Mair of Fort William.

Convener of the Training of the Ministry Committee in October 1994, it was Mair who, on the evidence given in Edinburgh Sheriff Court by Dr Eric MacKay, ``rubbed his hands in glee'', as further women made accusations against my father ``like rabbits popping out of a hat''.

The same Mair, according to Dr MacKay in court, declared: ``I think we've got him now!''

Paragraph Three notes the commission's concern ``about statements and comments made by Professor Donald Macleod in the media which appear to be at variance with the Free Church's confessional standards''.

The Training of the Ministry Committee is directed to investigate, and to take appropriate action, reporting no later than next March to the scheduled commission meeting.

This is the libel of heresy. The errors, of course, are not identified.

But my father is now to be tried again - putting him, and us as a family, through another winter of this.

And he is to be tried by the utterly discredited Training of the Ministry Committee, still including the Rev John MacLeod and the Rev Angus Smith, whose opposition to my father is notorious, and whose dealings against him were fully documented - and proved - in Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

Paragraph Four makes various pious remarks about all the ``deep wounds caused by this episode in the Church's history'' and urges all to work together for repentance, renewal and revival.

Paragraph Five notes that ``throughout the Church there have been widespread rumours that ministers and others have been involved in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice''.

The commission repudiates the idea of such a conspiracy. It commands all Free Church adherents to refrain from questioning the innocence of any alleged conspirators.

This paragraph was accepted by Matheson at last week's Commission diet as an addendum to his own motion.

It was proposed on the floor by the Rev Ronald Christie of Glasgow. Mr Christie was, until May, editor of the Free Church's Monthly Record.

And it was on Record stationery, according to evidence given in Edinburgh Sheriff Court, that Mr Christie wrote to one John Heenan of Oban last winter with a donation to the infamous Dorcas Fund, established to pay the expenses of a prosecution witness.

Sheriff Horsburgh described Mr Heenan as a ``slippery character'' and the Dorcas Fund as an ``interference with the course of justice''.

It is indeed much in Mr Christie's interest that the Free Church denies any conspiracy against my father.

Paragraph Five makes nonsense of almost everything else in the commission finding.

As the Church, in this section, has now officially declared there was no campaign, the special committee appointed in Paragraph Two to investigate MacLeod, Smith and Cartwright is left without purpose or mission.

So why appoint such a special committee in the first place?

Paragraph Six calls on Free Church adherents to respect the verdict at Edinburgh Sheriff Court regarding the innocence of Professor Donald Macleod and to refrain from anything that would ``tend to call in question Professor Macleod's innocence before the law in regard to the charges brought against him''.

Well, now. Is the Professor innocent, or is he not, and was there a conspiracy, or was there not, and if there was not why has a special investigative committee been established?

The grudging language here should be noted.

It hints darkly that the professor might be innocent before the law of the land, but not before the law of the Church.

And that he might be innocent of the criminal accusations sometime levelled at him, but not innocent of something else.

It was only in the cold light of Thursday that the scale of Matheson's misjudgment became apparent.

And, far from fostering unity, last week's decision has brought the Free Church to the brink of schism.

I will confine myself to three personal comments. I cannot speak for my father and he may disagree with them.

First: It should be manifest to any fair-minded reader, having waded this far, that the Free Church of Scotland is run by idiots.

Second: it should be plain that, as a body, the Free Church of Scotland is possessed by evil.

It is malignant. It is prepared to destroy lives, to hurt individuals, for its own self-sustaining ends.

It is a system of lies, prepared to deny any reality, to ignore any truth, rather than to purge its stables, confront its internal sickness, or to admit that it has, as a body, been in any way at fault.

Third: My father's enemies, vile as they are, must excite a certain admiration.

They are organised, they are determined, they are focused.

What of his friends? You may be fine, loving people. But you have, I feel, too often failed him.

You are forever outmanoeuvred, you seem to lack either leadership, energy or guile.

You still pretend to yourselves that you are dealing with nice, reasonable people.

I grasped long ago that, in this case, my father was dealing with animals.

I am tired of secret meetings, tired of hand-wringing, tired of every tranche of Thinking Of You cards that hits our house whenever something wicked happens because you did not have the guts to take a stand.

You now have to face reality. If you wish to save the church of your nativity, you must turn and fight.

There can be no more compromise. There is no modus vivendi with those people.

If they are suffered to remain in the Church, they will grow as a party: they will always go on and they will never give up.

Once they have destroyed my father, they will turn and come looking for you. And they will drive you into the sea.