Scottish Catholic Observer

CARDINAL Keith O’Brien has just finished a Papal visit security briefing with police at St Bennet’s, his residence in Edinburgh, prior to sitting down to talk about his own silver jubilee celebrations as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.

With Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival in Edinburgh imminent, every detail is being triple checked, including security at St Bennet’s because the Holy Father will stop for lunch there before traveling to Glasgow to celebrate an open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park.

The cardinal is greatly looking forward to the Holy Father’s arrival but good humouredly denied that the Papal visit was arranged to coincide with events to mark his own 25th year as an archbishop—‘rather the opposite’ in fact.

“The Papal visit hasn’t thrown it out of kilter but there had to be a certain amount of reorganisation of my jubilee celebrations because of the Pope’s arrival,” the cardinal said. “And I was only too delighted to do so.”

Papal visit

The cardinal spoke of the message he believes the Holy Father will bring to our country and the impression he hopes the Pontiff will leave with.

“I think in Scotland, where he arrives on the feast of St Ninian, he will remind us of our Christian roots and how we should live true to them,” the cardinal said.

He hopes that people will see how learned a man Pope Benedict is and also his great Faith in entering the Papacy later in life, and in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II—‘a hard act to follow.’

The cardinal hopes that the Holy Father will leave Scotland with a very good impression of a Catholic community ‘aware of its responsibilities.’

“We don’t always get everything right but we do our best to live our Catholic lives and to hand on our Faith,” he said.

The cardinal sees the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman as one of the highlights of the Papal itinerary.

“We are delighted that this world famous theologian, so respected by Pope Benedict XVI, is going to be Beatified during this forthcoming visit,” he said. “As well as being a convert to the Faith he was also a very beloved priest working in an ordinary parish in Birmingham for 30 years. That is basically how Newman achieved his sanctity.”

The Church changes have sometimes been difficult but ultimately for the good. The main change has been a reduction in the number of priests, vocations and students for the priesthood.

The cardinal recalled visiting Abbotsford in the Borders, a place where Cardinal Newman used to visit with Sir Walter Scott.

“In some ways I compared Newman to Blessed John Duns Scotus who came from Duns in the Borders,” he said. “Just thinking of the gently rolling countryside of the area and the wonder of God and creation that inspired Duns Scotus, I think similarly Newman must have been inspired there at Abbotsford near Melrose.”

Cardinal’s celebrations

This year marks Cardinal O’Brien’s 45th year as a priest, his 25th year as a bishop and his seventh year as a cardinal. He was nominated Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh on May 30, 1985 and was ordained to the episcopate by Cardinal Gordon Gray, then Archbishop Emeritus of St Andrews and Edinburgh, at St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh on August 5, 1985.

Yesterday (August 5, the Feast of Our Lady of the Snow) he celebrated Mass for his ‘closest collaborators’—staff at the Gillis Centre, a place that the cardinal established as the archdiocesan offices and a pastoral and retreat centre. On August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, he will celebrate a silver jubilee Mass at St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral with parishioners and finally, on September 8, the Feast of the Birthday of Our Lady, a thanksgiving Mass will be celebrated at the cathedral with bishops, priests and parishioners of the archdiocese.

On a lighthearted note, the cardinal has also agreed to sing at a concert with Edinburgh’s own Really Terrible Orchestra (RTO) on August 28 in St Mary’s as part of his jubilee celebrations and the Edinburgh Fringe arts festival, to which people of other Christian denominations and other faiths have been invited.

During the year there will be other celebrations, such as an archdiocesan Mass on the Feast of St Andrew, to which the priests of the archdiocese will be especially welcome. The cardinal also intends to visit the ten Catholic secondary schools in the archdiocese to give each of them a vestment for their own oratory from his visits to previous World Youth Days.

After his jubilee he had intended to go on a holiday pilgrimage to Sorrento and Rome in the middle week in September with a group of 45 people from the archdiocese.

“I did not want to be out of the country when the Holy Father was here and consequently my travel agent was very good at rearranging everything,” the cardinal said.

Alba Tours was able to move the group’s travel plans to mid October but a third change to the cardinal’s personal travel arrangements came after news that Blessed Mary MacKillop would be canonised in Rome in October.

“I went to Sydney with the late Cardinal Winning for her beatification and I did not want to miss out on what will be a unique event for the people of Australia, in the canonisation of this their first saint, but also a wonderful event for the people of Scotland, particularly Argyll and the Isles in Roy Bridge and Lochaber,” he said.

The cardinal also intends to join his family in December to celebrate his silver jubilee and his brother’s golden wedding anniversary.

Early years

Cardinal O’Brien was born on St Patrick’s Day in 1938 in Ballycastle, Country Antrim, in the North of Ireland, into a close knit family. His father served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and after the war ended the family moved to Glasgow before settling in Edinburgh. He attended St Patrick’s High School, Dumbarton, and finished his secondary education at Holy Cross Academy.

Early seeds of a vocation to the priesthood were hindered when he was deferred from junior, and then senior seminary because of a heart murmur. He was accepted by Cardinal Gray after studying at university and trained for the priesthood at St Andrew’s College, Drygrange. Cardinal Gray ordained him on April 3, 1965. He went on to undertake teacher training and taught in Fife for five years.

After parish ministry in Kilsyth and Bathgate, he was later appointed as spiritual director of St Andrew’s College and then rector at St Mary’s College, Blairs, before becoming Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 1985. Following the death of Cardinal Winning in 2001, he was elected as president of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland. He was first created Cardinal Priest of the title Ss Joachim and Anne ad Tusculanum in Rome on October 21, 2003 and concelebrated the Mass of the Rings with the Pope the following day.

Changes

The cardinal said that in his 25 years as bishop he has seen many changes, both in society and the ‘accelerated rate of change’ within the Church Herself.

“The Church changes have sometimes been difficult but ultimately for the good,” he said. ‘The main change has been a reduction in the number of priests, vocations and students for the priesthood.”

He spoke of the closing of junior seminaries on the east and west coasts—in particular of the closure in his own archdiocese of the seminaries at Drygrange and Gillis—of the closure of The Royal Scots College in Salamanca and of the demise of Scotland’s last seminary, Scotus College, in 2009.

“The shortage of priests is an increasing worry,” he said. “I thank God for priests who come into the diocese. I have ten priests from Poland. The positive result of this difficulty is the great role that lay people have had to take on, and are willing to take on, in the Church. They have been an inspiration and raised awareness of the lay ministry.”

He referred to the words of Pope John Paul II to the lay Faithful: “Remember you have an exalted vocation and there are many and varied forms of mission open to you.”

Outspoken

At Bishop Joseph Devine of Motherwell’s golden jubilee Mass in June this year Cardinal O’Brien admitted that by some he is seen as the ‘cardinal of controversy.’

“As Christians we must be PC, not politically correct but Proclaiming Christianity and that message, in the word of St Paul, must be preached in season and out of season, welcome or unwelcome,” he said.

Yet lobbying at Holyrood, Westminster, the European Parliament and the United Nations is not something the cardinal had anticipated he would have to do.

“Twenty five years ago I did not anticipate that I would meet with political leaders on major issues concerning our Church, life and all its aspects, the third world or moral issues here in our own country,” he said. “It is almost as if we Catholics once felt we were not supposed to say too much, and if we did that no one would listen to us. We do have a legitimate voice and a great deal to say.”

He added that: “The voice of the Church is being heard but is not always acted upon in the way we would wish on issues such as poverty, Trident and the multi millions spent on it.”

Working abroad

Cardinal O’Brien said that he had been ‘very blessed’ in his own archdiocese through the efforts of his predecessor Cardinal Gray in establishing a very firmly outward link with the missionary work of the Church in adopting Bauchi in Northern Nigeria.

“I knew of Bauchi even before I was ordained a priest so mission work has always been on my mind,” he said. “And when I was ordained a bishop some of my priests were already working in El Salvador and I wanted to strengthen those links.

“Bauchi was my first trip abroad after being appointed archbishop and I have made four visits to El Salvador too.”

From those visits the cardinal said he became increasingly aware of justice and peace work and ‘the needs of the poor spiritually and the poor materially.’ He became more involved with SCIAF because he saw it as a ‘very important part’ of his mission. And while travel has not always been easy, the compensations of reaching people in dire need, to reassure them of God’s love, have made up for it.

He believes that these trips have helped his work, when he is called upon to speak on life issues for example.

“People cannot just say ‘oh he is just on about abortion again,’ when they see that I have experience of the suffering of poor countries and seen the basic value of life,” he said.

Challenges and hopes

The cardinal has started to look ahead to his own retirement and his successor, and spoke of the challenges that lie ahead.

“We have got to increase awareness in our own Catholic community of its vocation, that Faith is not something that lay Catholics can take up and drop whenever they want,” he said. “They must be increasingly aware of the serious commitment made in their name when they were baptised.”

He sees the need for a greater commitment from the laity to Christ and the Church at parish level, especially as some priests have more than one parish to run and that the average age of priests is now older.

“That is perhaps one of the greatest challenges for us as a Church,” he said.

“While we respect other denominations and faiths I would like to think we are never, ever going to forget our Christian roots.”

When asked about the clerical abuse issue, the cardinal said: “I think that abuse has been one of the most horrible sins to have affected the Church in the lifetime of my generation. For most bishops, priests and people it is unthinkable that there could have been such abuse going on underneath our noses in so many countries worldwide.

“Thankfully in Scotland there does not seem to have been so many cases of abuse but even one case is abhorrent, be it in a parish, institution or family circle.”

The Church in Scotland has done everything possible, he said, with regards to safeguarding children and vulnerable adults and will continue to do so.

His hopes for the future include a desire for an ‘increased zeal’ amongst Scottish Catholics akin to the worshipping communities which he has seen in different parts of the world, often in very difficult circumstances.

“I would like us to be that little bit more exuberant in our liturgies and a little more appreciative of the Faith which is a gift which we have received and for which we have a responsibility,” he said.

Pic: Paul McSherry