Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Father Vincent Lockhart of St Monica’s parish, Coatbridge.
Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, good afternoon.
Today marks the 400th anniversary of the death of St John Ogilvie at Glasgow Cross: an important day in the life of the Catholic community. John Ogilvie was born near Keith in Banffshire and raised in the Calvinist tradition. At the age of 17, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith while studying in Belgium. He then entered the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—and was ordained a priest of that order in Paris in 1610.
After his repeated appeals to be sent to minister to the few remaining Catholics in his native country, Ogilvie arrived in Scotland in November 1613. However, within a year—much of it spent on the run—he was captured, imprisoned and tortured in Paisley jail. Although Ogilvie recognised the king’s temporal authority, he refused to accept his jurisdiction in spiritual matters, and for that he was tried for treason and executed on 10 March 1615. St John Ogilvie was officially proclaimed a saint of the Catholic Church by Pope Paul VI in 1976.
Some 87 years prior to Ogilvie’s disembowelling and hanging at Glasgow Cross, the Scottish Protestant reformer Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake as a heretic by the Catholic establishment outside St Salvator’s chapel in St Andrews. Some years later, two other Protestant reformers, Walter Mill and George Wishart, met the same fate.
Hanging, disembowelling and burning at the stake are no longer used against political opponents in Scotland, as far as I am aware. We have come a long way from Glasgow Cross, and North Street in St Andrews, in the past 400 years.
As a nation, we still owe much to the example of those Catholic and Protestant martyrs. They were men of principle who were not swayed by popular opinion and who valued integrity over personal comfort and safety. Rather than seeing our past crimes against one another as an obstacle, our acknowledgement of them can also make us humble and more open to tolerance and dialogue.
Last month saw the warm and cordial meeting of the Right Rev John Chalmers, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and His Holiness Pope Francis, in the Vatican. In his speech, Pope Francis said:
“We are pilgrims and we journey alongside one another”.
Let us be grateful for one another, and for the fact that we now live and journey together in peace.