Learning from John Ogilvie something of what is Scotland, what should be our Catholic Church in Scotland and, so, how to evangelise our land.
 
In this talk I think I want to open up a discussion rather than drawing too many conclusions.  My question is how we are supposed to be the Catholic Church in Scotland in these times.  To do this I suppose we need to understand our times in Scotland today.  And my own opinion is that Saint John Ogilvie is still the best guide, measure and inspiration for us. 
 
In my talk I am going to rely on Pope Paul VI’s homily at Saint John’s canonisation, Father John Hardon’s lecture on Ogilvie, the address of Pope Francis to our Scots College in Rome last year on the four hundredth anniversary of its transformation from a hostel for Scottish students into the seminary it is today.  Finally I am relying heavily on Saint John Paul’s reflections on the meaning of nationhood set out in his work Memory and Identity. 
 
I hope my suggestions can lead to a good discussion about how we can understand what Scotland is today in its profound roots so that we can love our country passionately and serve it appropriately, by which I mean from the perspective of the Catholic insight that alone, I think, can bring Scotland to its fullest realisation or destiny in the light of the Gospel.
 
Let me give you some summary conclusions that I hope to develop as we go along.  The first is that in order to evangelise Scotland and bring it back to Christ we have to love our country with single hearted devotion, and be proved to love our country more than anyone else.  Secondly, in Saint John Ogilvie we can find the essence of what it means to be Scottish.  Thirdly, in Ogilvie we find how, to be the true champions of our nation that Scotland needs, we sometimes have to stand up against the Scottish authorities of any given time.  And finally, Ogilvie shows us how love of our Heavenly homeland in our Catholic faith does not make us less patriotic than our countrymen but should make us decidedly more so. 
 
In passing there are other useful lessons we can learn from John Ogilvie, but how to be Scottish Catholics is my main concern. 
 
In his homily for John Ogilvie’s canonisation Pope Paul VI noted how we can only understand the Scottish martyr from understanding Scotland in the times in which he lived.  He described those times in these broad terms.  Scotland was then a place of turbulent spiritual upheaval brought about by great political and religious crises.  He went on to observe how, in the Catholic Church, it was also, not unlike our own period today, a post-conciliar time in which the Church was struggling to find its way towards much needed renewal of Catholic life but which was, in the meantime, tormented by wars all around and undermined by decadent customs within.  Traditional Catholicism was breaking up and falling apart and it was not clear what was being put in its place. 
 
Amid these times John Ogilvie emerged, raised up by the providence of God for those very times, as a prophet with an exceptionally clear and concise understanding of what Scotland needed.  ‘ I came to Scotland’, he said, ‘ to save souls'.  That was objectively what he came to do.  But lots of countries in Ogilvie’s days needed their souls saved, many in Europe where John was already based. John chose Scotland personally, you could say, because of a burning passion within him both for his Catholic faith and for his beloved homeland of Scotland. 
 
John Hardon sets out the circumstances of Ogilvie’s mission in Scotland.  Hardon says John knew his country's history only too well, and how hard, rough and bleak its spiritual terrain had now become.  According to Hardon’s account, soon after his ordination John met up with two Jesuits who had managed to escape from Scotland after failing to convert anybody.  They told him, 'Scotland is a lost country'.  But galvanised rather than dispirited by their report he was ambitious to go back, even though they protested that they had been imprisoned and tortured and insisted, 'Look, we're telling you, forget it.’  So he started writing to the Jesuit general, "I want to go back to Scotland."  The General refused, basing himself on the evidence of the Jesuits returned to France whose experience and calculated opinion were that it was impossible to convert anybody in Scotland and whose strategy was to go labour in more promising fields.  Undaunted and even more determined than ever John wrote relentlessly to his local superiors for the next two and a half years, and his dogged boldness wore them down till they eventually gave in and petitioned the General to let him go.  He arrived in Scotland disguised as the horse trader John Watson. 
 
My main point of discussion in this talk is how we should come to know and love our Scottish homeland with the kind of caritas Christi that the great missionary Saint Paul knew well and that urges us on to its conversion. 
 
Having said that, there are other little bits and pieces we can gather up about John Ogilvie along the way that may be useful hints.  One such interesting aside is John’s pastoral method of going first and foremost to the Scottish nobility with his missionary message.  He set off straight to family friends whom he knew were only masquerading as Presbyterians in order to avoid trouble.  Since John was trouble, however, he discovered they did not want to know him.  Finding thin pickings among the movers and shakers of the Scottish establishment he headed to London and to the very top where he got in touch with King James I.  Ultimately he was unsuccessful in these approaches to society’s high and mighty and in the end the only ones who received him among those still Catholic were the poor, the nobodies who had nothing to lose. 
 
Still it is interesting to reflect upon his approach, gleaned, perhaps from the approach of our ancient Scottish and Celtic national saints, like Ninian and Columba, who brought a whole nation to faith simply by converting its leaders.  John Ogilvie calls us to reflect upon what kind of apostolate we have to the leaders of Scotland today and what efforts we make to preach the simple Kerygma to them.
 
Another interesting aside is John’s independence of spirit.  He tended to work free-lance, trusting in his own assessment of the situation, in his own lights and initiatives, rather than waiting for others to produce some strategy; hence his mission to King James in London.  Here he had a markedly different approach from his contemporary English Jesuits, one that maybe even points to a difference in our national psyches to this day.  John’s free-lancing and direct approach upset his Jesuit colleagues in England, who preferred more discrete methods, so much so that they had to get him out of the road and sent him back to France. 
 
Back in France his superiors rebuked him for pig-headedness in going to Scotland in the first place and, when he reminded them he had permission, they rebuked him for his decision to return to France without authorisation, even though he had been requested to do so by his peers down south.  Even though John showed admirable spirit of obedience, his contemporaries and superiors could not all have been wrong in identifying some free, driven and independent streak in John, so passionate that it proved hard to control.  But who is to say, looking back, that he was not just being Scottish and who is to say he was wrong in his Scottish method?  In any event they ordered him back to Scotland. 
 
Reflecting on what we might call John’s maverick tendencies one wonders what our mission in Scotland today needs most in our own times.  While the Gospel always calls priests to willing obedience does this need to mean the surrender of their red blood, free spirit and evangelical initiative?  Does it mean always waiting for someone higher up the chain to come up with a master plan, or would the Scottish mission in our times be better served by a spirit of personal decisiveness and enterprise at grassroots.  When Joshua counselled Moses on a cautious approach of leadership exclusive to the centre and the restraint of grassroots’ initiative Moses asked, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD'S people were prophets, that the LORD would put His Spirit upon all of them!’ (Num 11:19)
 
Maybe this is what Pope Francis meant when he charged the young people at WYD Rio to ‘Go make a mess’.  Perhaps bishops want to encourage this entrepreneurial spirit in our presbyterate, and encourage priests with a fresh boldness and daring, prepared to take a chance, like Ogilvie did, in their own time and place.
 
Yet another aside raised by John’s life is the question of what constitutes success in our Scottish mission.  On first impressions Ogilvie’s mission was a failure.  Whatever else he did it seems he actually made very few converts.  Not only that, but John Hardon hints that it may have been a personality flaw that led to Ogilvie being arrested too quickly, after only a year.  It seems he may have been too foolhardy, too naïve in trusting that the former archbishop really was interested in hearing him, and that it was a lack of caution that accounted for his failure to take stock of the possibility of a trap.  Hardon suggests John could be criticised in general for being somewhat precocious and overly bold.  A more prudent and calculating approach may have allowed him to take precautions that would have seen him hang around longer in Scotland and save some more Scottish souls.  How might we calculate the impact of such personality traits especially if, in his case, they proved literally fatal?   Let’s hold that question for a moment because the story is not yet over.
 
We need to bring in Pope Francis to complete the story with his address to the Scots College last year.  The Pope pointed out an historical fact that the direct impact of the news of John’s courageous martyrdom reaching Rome on 10 March 1616 was that the sixteen laymen who were studying at the Scottish hostel there at the time all immediately resolved to take up studies for the priesthood in the Scottish mission, so inspired were they by the account of Ogilvie’s bravery that they immediately desired to follow in his footsteps.  Thus his death is the immediate origin of the Scots College in Rome as we know it today.  As Pope Francis put it,  ‘If the martyrdom of Saint John Ogilvie was meant to silence the Catholic faith, instead it was an impetus for its promotion and for defending the Church’s freedom to remain in communion with the See of Peter.  The decision of the sixteen, as the Pope said, ‘was born of John’s martyr blood’.  He went on, ‘The “yes” proclaimed by the sixteen men to  John’s witness led (to many priests being ordained for the Scottish mission) to face the hardships that awaited them, even if it meant becoming martyrs themselves, in lives which sought the joys and peace that Christ alone could offer’.  If John’s precociousness of approach seemed to produce but a few converts at the time his boldness of faith inspired thousands of priests down the centuries to go preach the Catholic Faith on our Scottish shores.  
 
Only now can we begin to answer the question of John’s personality that led to his untimely martyrdom ahead of his other Jesuit peers.  One man’s precociousness is another’s missionary daring and I would propose this thing can be evaluated only in the light of the Gospel.  Perhaps are too cautious and  we worry too much about careful strategies or coming up with flawless arguments that prevent us from engaging civic society until we have every ‘i’  dotted and every ‘t’ crossed, just in case we make a fool of ourselves or offend someone  or give the impression our message is half baked or not properly thought out. You can plan a lifetime for that killer sound-bite.  But would our country, especially our youth, really be so unforgiving of our imperfect strategies or are they not crying out, rather, for the passion of real leaders, maybe warts and all, but leaders who care passionately for them, for all that, and for their souls and who are totally given over to their salvation?  Fortune, as they say, favours the brave not the cautious. Or, maybe better, the words of Saint John Paul in his first homily as Pope. ‘Help the Pope with Christ's power to serve mankind. Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows "what is in man"’.
 
Courage. For this, of course, we need courage, one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, a gift much to the fore in the Scriptures of our Easter Liturgy as we read the Acts of the Apostles and find there what will always be the essential Church.  John Hardon assessed Ogilvie's courage to be of a high calibre, but he saw something distinctively Scottish about the Jesuit’s courage, unlike anything he had quite seen before, even in the likes of the North America Martyrs.  It is not that Ogilvie’s courage was better, just different; more Scottish, he dared to suggest.
 
Hardon identified it as specifically intellectual courage.  Ogilvie, he says, was dealing with a first generation of apostasy and so was keenly aware of the urgency of evangelisation.  Since it was the leading classes, the establishment as we have said, who had led the country and population astray, John saw the need to go to them first and waste no time trying to convince them that they were intellectually wrong about Christianity and that the Catholic faith was the true one, in hope and prayer for their conversion so as to bring the true faith back to the nation  Hardon claimed to have read the dossier prepared for Ogilvie’s cause of canonisation and suggests the witness of intellectual courage was a significant factor in his case going forward. 
 
The irony of our own times is how the Church’s opponents reject the Christian claim by professing to be intellectual and rationalist while their positions tend to lack even the most basic academic rigour when push comes to shove.  Nonetheless our Church today would be well served by leaders blessed with a share of the intellectual courage Ogilvie displayed, and with his readiness to take on all comers in proclaiming the true faith. 
 
But now I want to move a bit closer to the nub of the question I am most interested about in this paper.   It is about what makes our county; what makes Scotland Scotland, the land in which God’s providence placed us to love with the patriotic piety of true sons and, equally, with the kind of evangelical charity that can bring our country back to Christ.
 
John was put to death on the charge of treason, essentially an accusation that he was being unpatriotic because he would not submit in all matters to the laws and offices of the state.  And part of the answer to true service of our country in these changing times lies,  not first of all in thinking about the type of political settlement that best suits our future, but, more importantly, I would suggest, in knowing how to distinguish the nation from the state itself.
 
Accused of treason of the state Ogilvie responded like the similarly charged Saint Thomas More by declaring, ‘The king does not have a more obedient subject in his realms but, in matters of the spirit, King James has no jurisdiction.’  John Hardon argues that, just as Jesus 'suffered under Pontius Pilate’ that is, under the civic authority of the time, John Ogilvie typifies the perennial struggle of the Church with the state.  He goes on to argue that the state gave the Church her first three hundred years of martyrs and, over the centuries, became the arm of the enemies of God, routinely placing heavy burdens on those who wished to remain faithful to Christ.  Hardon identified this conflict of Church and state as the ultimate feature of John Ogilvie's martyrdom.  As Pope Paul VI put it, ‘They condemned him as a traitor of the loyalty owed to the civic Power of his homeland while he was being nothing other than a promoter of the autonomy of religious power according to the words of Jesus, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mt 22.21).  The Pope concluded, ‘In this he has the merit of making an heroic contribution to vindicating in civic society the right to religious freedom’.  
 
From this perspective we can ask who was the real champion of the Scots in those times?  Was it those officers of state who were attempting to create a new Scotland from some kind  of cultural  ‘Year Zero’, or was it John Ogilvie who was personifying the best of Scottish national identity in his defence of Scotland’s historical identity in religion and perennial spirit of freedom?  John  Ogilvie reminds us that true Scottish champions will be found, from  time to time, among those who stand  up against the civic zeitgeist of their times and to whom Scotland will owe a big Scottish debt of gratitude in times to come.  We can hope that Scotland will always find in us true patriots, even if it means vindicating authentic Scottishness over and against any unwarranted use of civic or contemporary power.
 
This distinction, that puts selfless patriotism at the root of authentic citizenship, allows us to move more closely to the heart of the matter of working out what Scotland really is and how we come to identify most surely what is genuine Scottishness. 
 
At his canonisation Pope Paul VI said quite simply of John Ogilvie: ‘He was Scottish!’  He went on to describe him as a son of a land founded and built upon a history of other saints beloved of the Church, like Saint Columba and Saint Margaret’.
 
Significantly, he went on to say he how he found Scotland and Scottishness itself in the personality of John Ogilvie. ‘In Saint John Ogilvie, this glorious champion of the Scots’, he said, ‘(we discover) an ideal exemplar of Scottish history, as well as a magnificent inspiration for Scotland’s happy future’.  That is, he was ready to attribute to Scotland itself the national qualities of sympathy and heroism that he found in the personality of the martyr and, thereby, to conclude that Scotland somehow must be a naturally religious, strong and generous land on the basis that these were characteristic of this man so exemplary of Scotland itself.  Looking at the Scottish champion, John Ogilvie, the Pope declared Scots generally will be found to be ‘citizens of the world, commissioned to bring to the world the light of harmony, progress and peace, through faith in Christ, and by remaining true heroes of freedom and of faith.’  In the same canonisation homily the Pope went on to say that John’s unique sense of the value, the duty, the certainty, the necessity, the truth of faith, and his testimony of Jesus, is what makes his sacrifice so nationally significant for our Scottish sense of identity.
 
In recognising how national characteristics were traceable back to a source in the life of Ogilvie, one of Scotland’s most significant personalities, Paul VI was moving towards a personalist view of history that was later developed by Saint John Paul.  Put simply it means that national identity flows out of its historically most significant sons and daughters who are members of the clan, or extended family, and is moulded out of the influence of these most memorable of family personalities, or clan members, or out of its most important events, like our family history, if you will.  Any authentic nationality needs these strong cultural markers to act as a loadstone for our sense of national identity.  This helps us to find in John Ogilvie, a fellow clansman, an important part of the answer as to what makes Scotland Scotland, a point of reference for what makes a Scot typically Scottish at his best; an answer which, for us, brings together our sense both of faith and of patriotism. 
 
In his book Memory and Identity the Pope reflects on how patriotism comes from a sense of family membership, from the word patria, or father ( pater) so that to be patriotic is really to be a loyal son of an extended family.  From the Fourth Commandment’s injunction to honour your father and mother we find a Biblical perspective on patriotism as honour due to everything belonging to our native clan and land: from its history, traditions, language and geography, to admiration for our national champions and pride in their genius and achievement, but on the basis of a sense of family loyalty and pride.  Motherland also refers to the spiritual patrimony that makes up our identity.  So patria is not just about land but refers more to a legacy of family - or clan - values, culture and spirit. 
 
In passing John Paul noted how important it was that his native Poland experienced a quite exceptional flourishing of its Polish culture in the nineteenth century, a spiritual awakening based upon the Romantic renaissance that brought back to life, as it were, its national heroes of early history.  It proved vital to Poland finding the right kind of strength –cultural rather than political or military - in its struggle for independence a century later.  National identity was so deeply rooted in the resourcement and aggiornamento of the Polish culture and spirit of the previous century that not even the insane storm of hate unleashed by East and West on it between 1939 and 1945 could destroy it.  John Paul concluded that national identity presupposed and depended upon the memory of national champions who forged for the nation a sound bond between the spiritual and the material, between culture and territory.  In his address to UNESCO (1980) the Pope concluded that ‘Poland kept its identity, not by relying on the resources of economic or political power, but solely by relying on its culture (and that) this culture turned out, in the circumstances, to be more powerful than all other forces’. 
 
In that sense Scotland’s future is not made secure simply in terms of how deep run our oil reserves in the North Sea but by how deeply run our cultural reserves and the memory of our heroes in the spirits and veins, hearts and souls of our people.
 
Pope John Paul found this philosophy of national identity we are discussing to be rooted in Revelation.  In the Old Testament the formation of the clan or nation of Israel out of one father in faith, Abraham, suggests a personal and familial basis for nationhood.  From Abraham’s spiritual genealogy or patrimony a nation was formed.  Thereafter Israel’s identity came from its Abrahamic faith in One God, and was built up on other national heroes like Moses, with his Exodus and Ten Commandments, and later champions like its Prophets with their proclamation of some messianic mission for its people.
 
From the instance of the nation Israel, John Paul finds a law that can be applied to every nation in its search for identity.  The history of every nation is also called to become its own history of salvation .  This offers a profound understanding of nations as places where God reveals something unique about Himself.  In trying to discover something of the authentic character of Scotland in the personality of John Ogilvie we are also looking to discern our particular mission and the manifestation of the Person of Jesus Christ Himself and His light for the fulfilment of our nation.
 
In the Gospel Jesus deepens our idea.  He claims to have come from the Father, that is, to have come from the patria of Heaven, and He invites us to be patriots also of another Heavenly Homeland with Him, by emulating His witness of loyalty to His patria. 
 
Jesus’ vison calls on Christians to see Heaven as our truest homeland but, crucially, in a way that does not diminish but rather extols our earthly patriotism while, at the same time, saving it from descending into nasty nationalism. 
 
Simply put, we can love our homeland, for the time being, as a kind of sacrament or icon of our love of our Heavenly homeland, while the awareness that we await an ultimate homeland precludes us from deforming our love of our earthly homeland into an idol or nationalistic worship.  ‘Christ’s words, “ I am leaving the world and going to my Father” (Jn 16:28) open our patriotism for our native land up to an eternal dimension.
 
This, I think, is what was captured in Cecil Spring’s patriotic poem, set to Gustav Holt’s stirring tune, which allowed the poet to ‘ vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love in a loyalty so passionate that it could be expressed in ‘ The love that asks no question as well as in , The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.  And yet it saves this Christian patriot from the temptation to make his beloved county into a god, or his patriotism from falling into the false religion of nationalism because he never forgets how, ‘ there's another country, I've heard of long ago, Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know .  It is this Christian patriotism, this kind of harmony of sincere national loyalty with a higher religious sense alone, that matures into the noble attitude, ‘My country, right or wrong’, explained in the addendum later added by the same Stephen Decatur (or Carl Shulz), ‘if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”
 
It was this love of Scotland, a love deeper than any other Scot, deeper because he loved Scotland from an eternal perspective, that compelled John Ogilvie to return to Scotland to serve it and, in the end, ,to give his life for it and it should be the motive force of our own desire for a new evangelisation of our land.
 
Conclusion
 
Paul VI noted how John Ogilvie was a young member of the Jesuit Society in the original fresh phase of its ardent and fruitful apostolic mission’.  In Evangelii Gaudium Pope Francis wrote of how ‘Jesus knows how to break through this current period of darkness and ecclesial weakness of ours -with its dull categories that enclose Him- to break through with an amazing creativity’ (11).  He went on to say how ‘this always happens when we return to our source and rediscover the original freshness of the Gospel then new avenues open up’ because ‘every form of authentic evangelisation is always new (12).  The primacy is always God's who calls us to cooperate with him and the real newness is that which God Himself mysteriously brings about in a thousand ways.  God asks everything of us but he also offers everything to us (13).  Significantly he concluded how ‘(evangelisation) always includes remembering like the apostles who never forgot the moment Jesus touched their hearts and how, after them, (new evangelisation always involves) the next generation remembering their leaders’ (14).
 
John Ogilvie’s spirituality centres on his loyalty to the Pope and it was for this that, finally, he was condemned.  When the civic authorities pressed him on why he had come to Scotland he replied, ‘I came to un-teach heresy and to save souls'.  It was also for his devotion to the Sacrifice of the Mass, which brought on his betrayal and condemnation.  In his spiritual journal he identified the unity through obedience to the Pope, and the Mass as a continuation of Calvary, as what attracted him to the Catholic Church. As Paul VI put it, ‘The sanctity of our hero is in his witness of devotion to the Magisterium of the Church and faith in the Holy Mass.  
 
In conclusion Pope Francis reminded our Scots seminarians how ‘we too are living … in the midst of a culture so often hostile to the Gospel’ and he urged us to have that same selfless spirit as our predecessors (like John Ogilvie), (namely) to ‘love Jesus above all things!  Again, Pope Francis, ‘Let your (priestly) “yes” be marked by a firm resolve to give yourselves generously to your priestly formation so that (you) prepare (for service in) Scotland and offer (there) your lives completely. If you have this same passion.., that same love for the Church and for Scotland, you will honour the history and sacrifices (of John Ogilvie and the many who followed in his footsteps) we recall today (and) become in this moment a sign to the Scottish people.