SCOTLAND
The Observer
Catherine Deveney
Sunday 23 August 2015
They process slowly to the altar, Scotland’s Catholic bishops, their elaborate robes and red zucchettos symbols of their power and status. Around them, the light, honey-coloured stone arches of St Andrew’s cathedral in Glasgow soar, Italian-style embellishment spiralling up the slender columns in Madonna-blue paint and gold leaf.
On one side of me, Peter Howson’s depiction of the Scottish martyr, St John Ogilvie, seems luminous, glowing gold amid black, a study of unbowed resignation. To the other side, archbishop Philip Tartaglia is nervously welcoming publication of the McLellan report into abuse in the Scottish Catholic church, apologising to victims in a carefully worded statement. As he talks I am struck – not for the first time since the resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien two years ago – by the way opulence sits cheek by jowl with ugliness inside the Catholic church.
“The bishops of Scotland are shamed and pained for what you have suffered,” says Tartaglia. “We say sorry. We ask for forgiveness. We apologise to those who have found church reaction slow, unsympathetic or uncaring and we reach out to them as we take up the recommendations of the McLellan Commission.”
Only hours earlier, I had been on the east coast, in Edinburgh, listening as Dr Andrew McLellan, a minister and former moderator of the Church of Scotland, delivered what he referred to as, “the most important report of my life”. His words were emotional, impassioned, gathering momentum until they became a kind of hymn to justice. He talked of the “dark past” of the church, of the enormous damage it had caused victims, of the need for the church to act “from the heart”. Crucially, he had grasped not just events but a culture, a culture of cover-up in which the church said one thing and did another. McLellan had promised a report that was neither timid nor deferential. He delivered it.
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