ON the evening of 22 March 1973, the deputy chief constable of Glasgow police knocked on the door of the presbytery of Our Holy Redeemer church in Clydebank and asked to speak to Bishop Thomas Winning. In the study of the future Cardinal, the senior officer broke disturbing news: an arrest warrant had been issued for a priest in the Glasgow diocese in connection with IRA terrorist activities.
The revelation this week that a Catholic priest in Northern Ireland, Father James Chesney, got away with the murder of nine people as the architect behind the bombing in Claudy in 1972, finds an echo in the case of Father Bartholomew Burns in Scotland.
In both cases a Catholic priest dispensed with his vows to assist a terrorist organisation while the hierarchy, in the Chesney case, colluded in a cover-up, while in Glasgow they stopped just short.
Born in Sneem, County Kerry, in 1935, Burns, like many Irish priests at the time, was surplus to supply in his native land and so shortly after his ordination in 1960, became a curate, or junior priest, at St Eunan's in Clydebank, where he served for six years, before completing a second six-year stint at St Michael's in Parkhead.
He had not long moved to St Teresa's Church in Saracen Street in Possilpark, then, as now, one of the city's poorest areas when he assisted the IRA.
The story which Winning was told that spring evening was that in Burns' bedroom in the presbytery the priest had stored three cartons, each containing 210 sticks of gelignite, a total of 150lbs, 150 electrical detonators stored in an Aer Lingus bag, and various IRA documents, one headed "Notes for Unit Intelligence Officers" and another "Notes for Command Intelligence Officers", as well as Sinn Fein pamphlets.
Earlier in the day, three people, two brothers from Donegal and a 22-year-old Glasgow girl, Caroline Renehan, the daughter of Sinn Fein's Scottish secretary, had been arrested, but Burns had fled, driven away and then dropped off in the city centre by the parish priest, Fr John Martin.
Winning was stunned. But how, if they successfully arrested three others, did they miss Fr Burns? This was a source of embarrassment to the Special Branch who, during the subsequent trial of the three, admitted procedural errors had taken place.
A surveillance team had tracked Renehan in a white Morris car and brothers James and John Sweeney in a black and yellow Capri to the chapel-house at St Teresa's where they were met at the door by Fr Burns.
A few minutes after they entered, Renehan came back out, collected a case from her car boot and went back inside. Later all four re-emerged and walked to the Capri. The Sweeney brothers were each carrying a white carton, and Renehan had a dark coloured case. Burns then went back into the house while the others drove off.
The driveway was then blocked by plain-clothes police officers and all three were arrested. While Burns witnessed the arrest from the windows of the chapel-house, at no point was he questioned.
Concerned that they lacked a search warrant for the house, the Special Branch officers went back to Central Police Station, leaving two officers on a watching brief. They were told not to take action, unless something suspicious took place or anything was removed.
Unfortunately, the police officers were not briefed on Burns's appearance, and so, 30 minutes later, when Fr Martin drove off with Burns, no-one intervened.
Winning was asked by the deputy chief constable to contact them if Fr Burns should contact the archdiocese and he readily agreed. In his opinion Burns now had a public duty to face these allegations, but it was not a sentiment shared by his fellow bishops.
Bishop James Ward, the senior auxiliary bishop, with whom Winning had a difficult relationship, appeared on the verge of jubilation at Burns's successful escape. "Ward just seemed to pat me on the head and told me not to worry about it," Winning said in 2001.
The Church's attitude towards alternative authorities such as the police had always been distant in Scotland. The ghetto mentality from which the Church was beginning to emerge at the time meant it viewed both police and, particularly, the media, as sectarian and anti-Catholic; any co-operation was minimal and reluctant.
In Bishop Ward's view, Burns' escape was a blessing to the Church which had been spared the embarrassment of a trial.
Two days later, Rennie McOwan, press officer for the Catholic Church in Scotland, who was entirely unaware of the events, received a phone call from Jim McQuire, a Catholic journalist on the Scottish Daily Express. McQuire had heard rumours that a Fr Burns was wanted by the police and was seeking confirmation.
McOwan agreed to check and was disturbed when Winning confirmed the story. He was more disturbed that Winning had chosen not to inform him straight away and dismissed the bishop's reply that he had been told by CID to tell no-one, by replying: "The police give orders to CID, not the Catholic Church."
An emergency meeting was called between McOwan, Winning and Ward to discuss how to handle the resultant press inquiries.
McOwan recalled: "Bishop Ward began to run the meeting in an autocratic tone, saying: ‘Who are the media to question us? This is none of their business.' I was tired and said that I had received no help from the archdiocese at all. TJ (Thomas Joseph Winning) went white and Ward got extremely angry and said he was willing to handle the matter himself. I then threatened to resign."
It took a ruling by Archbishop Scanlan, from his sick bed (he had pneumonia) to resolve the matter. Ward went upstairs to the Archbishop's private quarters to discuss the situation and returned to explain that Scanlan agreed with McOwan that a brief statement should be issued stating that Fr Burns was suspended for having deserted his diocese and that his whereabouts were unknown.
McOwan's next concern was whether Fr Martin would be arrested and charged with aiding a suspected criminal, but Ward, once again, could see nothing wrong with his actions.
"He was living in cloud-cuckoo-land" said McOwan.During the subsequent two-day trial of the three accused at Glasgow High Court, Fr Martin said he watched the arrests, had been informed by Burns that the boxes contained gelignite and saw that his fellow priest was "confused, agitated and very, very annoyed".
Yet when Burns said he "wished to take the day off to compose himself", Martin said: "I took my car out of the garage and gave him a lift down the road to the Gallowgate, where he said he was going to see some friends. I did not want to know where he was going."
Both James Sweeney and Caroline Renehan lodged a defence blaming Fr Burns - who remained in hiding in Ireland - for the crime, though both were subsequently sentenced to seven and five years respectively. Sweeney's brother, John, was found "not proven" and upon his release he vowed to return to Ireland in search of the missing cleric. An attempt by police to extradite Burns was dismissed by a court in Dublin.
Yet the most disturbing insight into the Church's attitude towards the case occurred a couple of months later. One afternoon, quite by chance, Winning visited Archbishop Scanlan in his office and found that following a request by an Irish bishop, he was in the process of writing a letter of approval that would allow Fr Burns, still a wanted fugitive, to operate as a Catholic priest back in his native Ireland.
"Give him a job?" Winning said to Scanlan. "The guy should be in jail." Scanlan, according to Winning, was quite taken aback by the strength of his feeling and listened as he argued that it was unacceptable for Fr Burns to operate as a priest until he had returned to face the charges. Scanlan was convinced and the transfer was dropped.
Twenty-eight years later Winning said of the case: "I feel very sympathetic towards Ireland as a nation completely independent from England. I could never find a good argument for Britain to be there at all. But the end does not justify the means and you cannot justify terrorism.
A man of God and a man of peace who takes up cudgels and is accused of storing arms and giving financial help to a terrorist organisation has no place in the Church."
Fr Burns never returned to Scotland, and today the Catholic Church in Glasgow said his whereabouts are unknown.
A spokesman for the Archdiocese said: "Bartholomew Burns fled from the Archdiocese of Glasgow in 1973, abandoning both the justice system and his parishioners in Possilpark. He did not seek and was not given permission to leave. The future-Cardinal Winning, who was at that time auxiliary bishop of Glasgow, ensured the Church co-operated with the authorities to try to bring him to justice.
"It goes without saying that the Archbishop, and the Archdiocese as an institution, would utterly condemn any activities by a priest which might involve offering assistance or support to a terrorist organisation."
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