On God, atheism and how a shove from a cardinal plunged me into an existential crisis

For those of us involved, 1996 will always be the year of the great roddy Wright manhunt. The venerable Bishop of Argyll and the Isles had absconded from St Columba’s Cathedral in oban with a parishioner – a divorced nurse and mother of three – leaving a scandalised flock untended, a church hierarchy in shock and newsdesks across the country bellowing the same basic instruction: ‘FIND HIM!’

As a young reporter, I was dispatched on the trail of Bishop roddy. It was an extraordinary story that only kept getting more extraordinary – another parishioner came forward to reveal that she had given birth to His Grace’s child 15 years before; there were emotional appeals on TV; I recall Princess Diana’s mum was involved, if not precisely why. Days passed and as the evidence gathered that roddy had been quite the boy, he remained stubbornly unfound.

Wild tips of public sightings flowed in. I spent a fruitless night sleeping in my car outside a suspected bolthole off Sauchiehall Street. I was helicoptered to a tiny island called oronsay, where it was said the couple had gone to ground.

As we landed in a field beside its only building, the residents came out and waved to us. I was delighted at this unexpectedly warm welcome until, upon disembarking, I saw the sign saying the field was home to extremely rare nesting birds and should not be entered. They had of course been trying to warn us off. Anyway, no dice.

Besotted

I was sent to a chapel on the south side of Glasgow where Cardinal Thomas Winning was saying Mass, and told to request an interview. This was like being asked to step into a lion’s cage, slap it across the chops and then expect a cuddle. Winning was a terrifying figure, Lanarkshire-tough, who approached his mission with the style and tactics of a capo di tutti capi. Prime ministers ran scared of him.

The Mass was ending as I arrived and Winning stood at the door, shaking hands and chatting with a besotted queue of giggling, blue-rinsed women. I joined the end.

When I reached the great man I asked for a few words about Bishop roddy. The Cardinal’s face darkened and he gripped my hand like a vice: ‘You come here, to this holy place, and you ask me this? Get out!’ He then placed an arm around my shoulders, squeezing slightly more than was necessary and walked me off the premises.

‘Tell me son, are you a Catholic?’ he asked. ‘I was, your eminence but I’m afraid I’m lost to the church these days,’ I responded. ‘No, son, the church is merely lost to you,’ he said, sending me on my way with a healthy shove in the back.

And that was that. The next day, somebody found Bishop roddy and his girlfriend, who had been in the Lake District the whole time. They ended up emigrating to New Zealand. I, meanwhile, was going through something of an existential crisis. I couldn’t get Winning’s Confucian take on my spiritual state, or his anger at my intrusion, out of my mind.

I had been raised a devout Catholic, had been an altar boy, had even wanted to be a priest for a while. At some point during my teens I had lost my faith, but that question, ‘are you a Catholic’ – I realised I didn’t really know what the answer was. The best I could do was that it wasn’t Yes, but neither was it No.

Twenty years later, I still don’t know the answer. The thing is, if I were a betting man I’d probably bet there is no God. I don’t feel any presence and I doubt I’ll ever find my way back to being a practising Christian unless as some sort of death bed insurance policy.

Nevertheless, my sympathies lie with the great organised religions. The principles for which they stand – faith, hope, charity and trust – appeal to me far more as organising principles than do the contracts and laws and grim science of the atheists and humanists.

I disagree with Catholic teaching in a number of areas – and yes, the child abuse scandals have been appalling – but I’m glad the church is there, with its unfeasible behavioural demands and unreachably high moral standards.

The welcome given to Pope Francis in the US over the past few days has been inspiring. He is a remarkable Pontiff, in many ways exactly what Catholics need. Humble, generous, thoughtful, hands-on and transparently ordinary, he is the closest the faith has come to finding accommodation with the irreversible liberalism of much of modern life. The two must, after all, find a way to co-exist.

By showing a gentler, more tolerant face to the world, the Pope creates space to be heard in areas where his voice is needed. In Philadelphia on Saturday, he dumped his prepared speech and delivered an impromptu homily on the family.

‘Families have a citizenship that is divine. The identity card that they have is given to them by God so that within the heart of the family truth, goodness and beauty can grow,’ he said.

You don’t need to be religious to agree with that sentiment. He was funny, too. ‘Some of you might say of course, Father, you speak like that because you’re not married. Families have difficulties. Families – we quarrel, sometimes plates can fly, and children bring headaches. I won’t speak about mother-in-laws. However, in families, there is always light. The family is like a factory of hope.’ Amen to that.

Contrast the warmth in this message with the witterings of the famous Professor richard Dawkins, who has set himself u up as a sort of anti-pope, a preening, pompous padre of poppycock. Atheism’s best-known cheerleader is a Pooterish figure whose Twitter account is a treasure trove of small-minded self-obsession and la lack of self-awareness.

Marvellously, a couple of years ago, he flipped after having a pot of honey confiscated at an airport, tweeting, ‘Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste.’ The Gospel according to richard ain’t exactly an inspiring read.

I’ve just finished a very funny Wodehousian comic novel of the kind you rarely see these days, called When The Professor Got Stuck in the Snow. In it, Dan rhodes tells the satirical tale of Dawkins and his manservant Smee becoming stranded by inclement weather on their way to deliver a lecture about the non-existence of God to the Women’s Institute in the village of Upper Bottom.

The pair are taken in for the night by a retired reverend and his wife, and Smee foolishly remarks on their kindness. ‘Their kindness is as hollow as an eggshell,’ responds Dawkins sniffily. ‘An empty eggshell, that is to say. They are only being kind in the hope that God sees them and gives them a pat on the back for it when they get to heaven.

Logical

‘True kindness can only ever come from humanists such as myself, we who know that there is nothing waiting for us when we die, nothing but decomposition and dissipation and that sort of thing.’

The book and its humour work beautifully because the reader senses this is an exaggerated version of the real-life Dickie Dawkins, po-faced and prissy and driven by a comical self-righteousness.

In the end, this is what pushes me back towards religion in ways I admit are probably not entirely logical or even explicable. of the priests I have known in my lifetime, most have admitted to doubts about their faith. Most have had dark nights of the soul. Some I suspect didn’t really believe any more.

But it is this lack of certainty that appeals. Dawkins and his militant ilk profess to know for sure the truth about something that is ultimately unknowable. It seems to me that the concept of consciousness and its source are so unfathomable that only a fool would claim victory, one way or the other.

This is why, despite naughty roddy Wright and scary Tom Winning, I’d still rather live in Christianity’s flawed world of hope and doubt than one built on the shaky, ghastly dogmatism of richard Dawkins.