The first ever visit from a Pope to Scotland was an emotional occasion for the Catholic community in Scotland. Pope John Paul II spoke to adoring crowds in Edinburgh and Glasgow, who braved sunstroke and dehydration to hear him. This historic visit was followed in 1994 by the appointment of Thomas Winning, Archbishop of Glasgow, as only the third Cardinal from Scotland since the Reformation.
Under a furnace summer sun yesterday more than 250,000 people gathered at the feet of Pope John Paul to hear him deliver his sermon on a Scottish hillside. In those joyful and solemn moments, the Catholic flock of St Andrew was at last embraced by the successor of St Peter. He did it with timeless simplicity. Gently, he enfolded them with his own sense of their story: ‘It was Andrew, the heavenly patron of your beloved Scotland, who introduced Peter to Jesus … today we are bound to one another by a supernatural brotherhood stronger than that of blood.’
He allowed himself to compare it to the Sermon on the Mount. But in truth it cannot have been anything like this. He had flown to them – the largest crowd ever assembled north of the Border – in a huge Sikorsky helicopter made in America.
It came low over the trees and every move was watched on a gigantic Mitsubishi screen made in Japan. For some on the edges of the vast crowd – fully half-a-mile away – even the Japanese screen was not visible …
There was no-one, in those times, to tell them over 100 loudspeakers that ‘the Holy father is now approaching sections F21 to F28’ as they did when they drove the Pope for almost an hour through the 280 corrals in which the faithful were penned.
There were no pibrochs to welcome him in those days. Nor did they play the fiddle faster and faster as he approached until Kate Dalrymple had become a frenzy too quick to dance.
Nor did they have a thousand priests, then, each shaded with a white-and-gold umbrella to walk through the throng, slowly administering to communicants, many of them stripped to the waist on this the hottest day of the year.
Did they have first aid, then, to help the victims of heart attacks (there were six yesterday), or cases of suspected appendicitis (there were three of those yesterday), or the thousands who collapsed with sunburn and dehydration in the heat, or the lady who began to have her baby?
Did they have any of that? … They did not. But what does that matter? They had not come for such things. They had come for their Pope to tell them from his own lips about the ‘complete transformation of Catholic life that has come about in Scotland’ since the black days four centuries ago when the medieval church had been shattered and all but lost in a Scotland isolated on the outer edge of Europe.
Now, he said, Scots Catholics were ‘assuming their legitimate role in every sector of public life and some of them were invested with the most important and prestigious offices of this land.’ … He told them simply to be Christians by example – ‘the world still recognizes genuine goodness for what it is.’
Then he addressed himself ‘to that larger community of believers in Christ, who share with my Catholic brothers and sisters the privilege of being Scots sons and daughters alike of this ancient nation.’ … And then, as the children had done in Edinburgh the night before, they stopped him. Long before he had said ‘Let Scotland flourish’ they had for a little while imposed their will on him as they sang to him and called for him in the midst of his address …
It became a game between them. As the people became still and saw him on that huge screen moving to speak again, another wave of cheers and singing would detain him. He let them do it over and again – finally taking his own private joy from those ‘several moments,’ he said, ‘when the Pope became silent and you became preachers.’