Tom Gallagher: Cardinal Keith O'Brien is letting Catholics down

Published on Thursday 4 November 2010 20:50

ONE week after Cardinal Keith O'Brien once again demonstrated his absorption with the fate of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, there is news of the massacre of many of his co-religionists in a Baghdad church at the hands of al-Qaeda.

I am sure the cardinal this will view this as a tragic event, but I doubt it will distract him from the Megrahi soap opera towards reflecting instead on the fate of Christian communities in the Middle East and speaking out about their plight in the face of harassment from hostile states and attacks from extremist forces.

This matters because he is the only British cardinal in the college of cardinals. Arguably what gave the biggest momentum to the Megrahi affair were mistakes carried out by luminaries of the Scottish legal profession. Yet Cardinal O'Brien and other pillars of the elite have turned the matter into a psycho-drama in which plucky little Scotland stands up against its horribly vengeful cousin across the Atlantic.

The Megrahi affair shows the immaturity of too many Scottish elite figures who are really saying sotto voce to the world, "could you imagine the likes of us in charge of our own country?"

For the Catholic Church it is worse than that: vocations for the priesthood and the Church's implantation in society are bound to suffer as a showman cardinal gets deeper into his role as a political prelate.

As a Catholic I recognise that the veteran religious commentator RD Kernohan, writing last week in Scottish Review, was not far wrong when he described the Catholic Church as a self-perpetuating hierarchy "skilfully blending monarchy and oligarchy without democracy".

By lining up with a claque of permanently furious politicians and lawyers around an issue most Scots surely now wish would go away, the cardinal is leaving his own community in the lurch and refusing to confront how best to overcome in the kind of religious fanaticism which reaped a harvest of death this week in Baghdad.

• Tom Gallagher is an academic at Bradford University's peace studies department.