Scottish Catholic Observer

THE Herald magazine ran a story about me recently, mainly focusing on the new setting of the Mass I have written for the Papal visit and my liturgical activities with the Dominicans at St Columba’s, Maryhill, Glasgow.

Mostly I thought the article was OK, considering that at one time, not so long ago, I couldn’t even speak to The Herald due to their attempted character assassination after my Edinburgh Festival speech on sectarianism in 1999.

Anyway, things have got a lot better and I was perhaps a little off-guard with their journalist when we had lunch. Nevertheless, one off-hand comment about a couple of individuals became blown up out of all proportion when the sub-editor decided to feature it in the introduction and pullquote of the article. Here was I claiming that some priests were “arrogant, ignorant little sods”.

I totally regret this, not just for the prominence it was given (as it overshadowed so much more important things), but because it gives a very wrong impression of my own attitudes. I don’t know a more priest-friendly person than myself. I have always felt good in the company of clergy—some have been truly saintly men and have been the main spiritual and intellectual inspirations in my life. Some people are at ease in the company of priests, some are not. I am very much at home with them. As a teenager and young man I contemplated the priesthood for myself. There was only one problem, though. Her name was Lynne.

One of the first people I met in my fresher’s week at Edinburgh University in 1977 was Fr Aidan Nicholls OP, who was then the Catholic chaplain of the university. Within hours of that meeting he had invited me to form a schola in the Catholic Chaplaincy and Dominican Priory. This began, not just my life-long love affair with Catholic liturgy, but a deep engagement with Catholic theology and teaching. Aidan Nicholls turned out to be one of the greatest Catholic thinkers in the English speaking world. His first book, of many, The Art of God Incarnate, is dedicated to me, amico dilecto in Christo.

Fr Aidan was talking about Joseph Ratzinger long before anyone else in this country. He was among the first English speakers to explore the writings and ideas of the future Pontiff. Fr Aidan was responsible for some of Cardinal Ratzinger’s most important and effectively influential visits to this country in the 1980s and 90s, when British Catholics began to discover the fresh exciting new breath of orthodoxy in the air. The rest, as they say, is history.

I have been friends of Dominicans ever since, right to the present day. My wife and I are members of the Glasgow Lay Dominicans, and were married by Fr Aidan in 1983. My little granddaughter Sara Maria has just been baptised by Fr Robert Pollock, an old family friend, in the Church where the Dominicans moved in 2005 at the invitation of Archbishop Mario Conti.

But I am quite ecumenical—I like Jesuits too! My children were all baptised by Fr Peter Gallacher SJ when he was based at St Aloysius in Garnethill. On my musical trips to Australia, the Jesuits host me in Melbourne and Sydney. One of them is a fellow composer—Fr Christopher Willcock. I am amazed at the amount of clergy who are involved in the arts and culture in profoundly serious ways. The American premiere of my music-theatre piece Busqueda, based on the poems of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, was staged in the Church of St Joseph in Buffalo, by the university chaplain, who was trained in stagecraft and musical theatre. The Oratorians in Brooklyn have become some of my greatest supporters in the US.

The priests of the Faith Movement and Opus Dei, with whom I have come into contact recently have reopened a vigour and energy in my heart for the beauties of the Faith, not just in its cultural and intellectual traditions, but in the excitement of encountering the Faith and Morals of our Church afresh. I couldn’t be anti-clerical even if I tried.

For all of this I am profoundly sorry for the way The Herald’s sub-editor spun things recently. In all my dealings with hostile, anti-Catholic media I should have been alert to how things can go, and in this instance I only have myself to blame.  I’ve only had problems with less than a handful of Catholic priests in my entire life. They should not have featured in a conversation with a stranger for an article which was to cover the complex issues facing our Church today. We need our holy priests now more than ever, and in the future. I will always