Focus: Confessions of Father Flash A Catholic priest makes a cousin pregnant and no one turns a hair. Just 10 years ago it would have rocked the Church. A new era of tolerance or indifference? By Kenny Farquharson and Gayle Ritchie
At ceilidhs on the island of Barra the star turn was always Father Roddy MacNeil, the local Catholic priest. Strumming softly on his guitar he would sing in Spanish or his native Gaelic as his audience listened and smiled indulgently. Mostly he played songs of love.
Hilda Robertson, the priest’s first cousin, would often be looking on. Their mothers were sisters, and as youngsters Roddy and Hilda had played together in the Hebridean summers. Early in 2005 she had moved to Barra from the mainland. Anybody could tell they were close.
Just how close would soon become all too clear. The 1,300 inhabitants of this tiny island, immortalised by Sir Compton Mackenzie in Whisky Galore! and famed for its white cockleshell beaches, were about to lose their priest to a sex scandal.
Fr Roddy was something of a local celebrity as a close personal friend of Frances Shand Kydd, mother of Diana, Princess of Wales. They had holidayed together in Italy at Lake Garda in the five-star Villa Cortine Palace hotel. Fr Roddy helped conduct Shand Kydd’s funeral service in June 2004, saying the final prayers over her grave.
The 46-year-old priest was also a significant national figure in the Catholic church as a director of MISSIO Scotland, the Scottish branch of the Pontifical Missionary Society of the Catholic Church. The post often attracted high- flyers among the clergy.
Locals on Barra had christened their priest Father Flash. The name was used mischievously, but with affection. While other priests might choose to drive a modest runaround, his car was a 4X4 Shogun. He also kept a pleasure boat on South Uist, where he was born.
MacNeil liked to do things differently. One visitor to the island recalls: “We took communion from him and were surprised that it was not wine we sipped but whisky! Somebody else reassured us it was still the blood of Christ.”
The women of the parish especially adored him. “He was the life and soul of the party,” said one last week. “He is shortish and a bit dumpy, not much of a looker, but he has a real twinkle in his eye and is really charming.”
That twinkle was to land him in trouble. Just before Christmas, parishioners at the Our Lady Star of the Sea in Castlebay came to mass to be confronted by an unfamiliar priest. MacNeil, they were told, was taking time “to reflect on the future of his priestly vocation”.
Last week, a tabloid newspaper explained exactly why. Hilda, 41, was pregnant and expecting a child in June. The father, the paper said, was none other than Fr Flash.
This week MacNeil faces a showdown meeting with his bishop, the Rt Rev Ian Murray, when his future in the priesthood will be decided. Whatever the outcome, his story and the reaction to it tell their own tale about the moral climate of Scotland in the 21st century.
The last time Scotland saw a priestly sex scandal of this kind was in 1996 and it involved another Roddy. Roddy Wright, bishop of Argyll and the Isles — ran off with housekeeper Kathleen MacPhee, a divorced mother-of-three, and later married her in the Caribbean. Wright, who died of liver cancer in New Zealand last year, also admitted an affair 20 years earlier with another woman, which led to the birth of a son.
At the time, Wright’s defrocking was a national scandal that rocked the Catholic church and provoked shock and outrage across Scotland. This time, with the islanders of Barra almost wholly supportive and forgiving of their pastor, it seems the only people exercised are tabloid headline writers.
So what led this popular and respected priest to father a child with his cousin? What does the lack of a censorious reaction tell us about the moral mood of the nation? And can a Catholic priest be a father to his flock and a father to his child?
A STATUE of Our Lady stands on a hillside overlooking the village of Castlebay on Barra. At times, given the shenanigans among the 1,300 inhabitants below, she might be advised to avert her gaze.
Barra has something of a racy reputation in the Western Isles. The island’s dentist, Robert McIntosh, was so distraught at his wife’s fling with a local nature warden that he fled 5,000 miles to St Helena, in the South Atlantic. The enraged wife of the nature warden burnt their marital bed in the street.
Then Ray Robertson, one of the island’s policemen, had to write an apology in Barra’s local paper, Guth Bharraigh, after an affair of the heart with a woman who lived next to the police station.
MacNeil became parish priest in Castlebay after stints in Dunoon and Uist. On the Catholic islands on the southern tip of the Western isles the priest plays a powerful community role. MacNeil performed his duties with enthusiasm and diligence.
He had long been an important figure to Frances Shank Kydd, as both a friend and a spiritual guide. She lived on Seil island, near Oban, and had converted to Catholicism just before Diana’s death on August 31, 1997.