Scottish Catholic Observer

‘He made his own the exhortation of St Paul to the Corinthians: ‘We are ambassadors for Christ: it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God,’” (2 Cor 5: 20).

Mgr Leo Cushley, the newly appointed Archbishop and Metropolitan of St Andrews and Edinburgh, will have good reason in the coming days to reflect on these words by Cardinal Arinze; words with which he will be all too familiar.

They come from Cardinal Arinze’s sermon at the funeral Mass for Archbishop Michael Aidan Courtney—the murdered and martyred Irish prelate—held in his home parish, St Mary of the Rosary, Nenagh, County Tipperary, on January 3, 2004. Just over three years earlier, on November 12, 2000, His Eminence had been the Principal Consecrator when Mgr Courtney received Episcopal ordination prior to embarking on his first, and sadly last, posting as an Apostolic Nuncio, to Burundi. Mgr Courtney was ambushed, shot and killed as he returned by car to the capital, Bujumbura, on December 29, 2003.

Mgr Cushley’s first substantive appointment to a nunciature after graduating from the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy was to that same troubled country, Burundi.

In 2006, when he was serving as a counsellor in the Permanent Observer’s Mission to the United Nations at New York, Mgr Cushley was given permission to cooperate with me when I wanted to write an article about his work in the service of the Holy See since leaving his home diocese of Motherwell in 1992. I had been a member of the science staff at St Aidan’s High School, Wishaw, where Mgr Cushley was the chaplain before being called to Rome in 1992.

One of the things Mgr Cushley said in 2006 resonates now as he prepares to take up an appointment he neither sought nor would have wanted.

“In this unusual path of priesthood, it’s been a great honour for me to serve the Church and both the late John Paul II and the present Holy Father,” Mgr Cushley said. “It has given me a privileged insight into the Church that I never sought or expected to have, but which has been edifying and encouraging. I have seen for myself how, through the goodness and energy of her members, the Church is alive and very active—and sometimes in the most unlikely corners of our world.”

Of course, Mgr Cushley has now served a third Pope, Pope Francis, and served him very close up and personal, acting, albeit for a very short time, as his personal secretary. This short stint included escorting him onto the stage and feeding him his speech at his audience with all the cardinals two days after his election.

How did this come about? Perhaps Pope Francis phoned the Papal nuncio in Buenos Aires and asked him if there was someone in Rome he could recommend? That nuncio is Archbishop Emil Paul Tscherrig, from Switzerland.

In 1996, Mgr Tscherrig was a newly appointed nuncio serving in his first posting to Burundi and had as his first ever assistant a newly qualified junior Vatican diplomat recently graduated from the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy: Fr, now Archbishop-elect, Leo Cushley. There can be little doubt that Archbishop Tscherrig has taken great pride in seeing his first assistant do so well in service of two Holy Fathers and so would have had little or no hesitation in recommending him to a third.

That third Pope has now appointed Mgr Cushley to take over as Metropolitan and Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh. For make no mistake about it, this appointment has been made by His Holiness personally. Under normal circumstances, Episcopal appointments are made by the Congregation for Bishops, in close consultation with the nuncio, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has found no objection. They are merely ‘rubber stamped’ by the Pope.

If, however, the appointment is to a Metropolitan Archdiocese which belongs to that group known as Red Hat Sees then the Pope will definitely have a very close look. Indeed, he may become involved long before things reach the stage of the Prefect and the Secretary for Bishops—currently Cardinal Marc Ouellet and Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri. The latter had Pope Francis’s red cardinal’s skull cap placed on his head by the newly elected Pope at the end of the conclave in March, to which he had acted as secretary, thus signifying that he would in accordance with an old tradition, not always now followed, be made a cardinal at the first consistory of the Pontificate—drawing up their recommendation.

When Pope Francis recently addressed all his nuncios when they came to Rome for a two-day retreat as part of the Year of Faith celebrations, he talked about the sort of priest they were to search out for appointment as bishop. “You know the famous expression that indicates a fundamental criterion in choosing who should govern,” Pope Francis said. “‘If holy let him pray for us, if learned teach us, if prudent govern us.’”

Vatican diplomacy’s loss is St Andrews and Edinburgh’s gain. For in Mgr Leo Cushley are to be found all three attributes in one person. And humility, too.