Priest hanged for treason becomes Scottish saint

Press, 19 October 1976, Page 8

Priest hanged for treason becomes Scottish saint

NZPA Rome A sixteenth-century Scottish priest who was hanged for treason because of his religious beliefs has been proclaimed a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Paul VI. More than 20,000 people, including 4000 Scottish pilgrims, filed past Scottish bagpipers into St Peter’s Basilica for the canonisation of Father John Ogilvie. It was the first canonisation, of a Scottish saint since Queen Margaret of Scotland in 1250. Among the Scots attending the ceremony was Mr John Fagan, aged 63, a Glasgow man who, in 1967, lay dying witfi what his doctors said was terminal stomach cancer. Mr Fagan’s sudden recovery after his wife, Mary, and "their neighbours had prayed to Father Ogilvie was accepted as a miracle by the

Vatican; and last January, Pope Paul waived the usual requirements of a second miracle to speed the canonisation process. Father Ogilvie was bom in 1579 near Keith, in the Scottish county of Banffshire, and was brought up a Calvinist. He travelled to Louvain, France, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1596. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in Paris in 1610. After three years of begging, he returned as a missionary to Scotland, where the Roman Catholic faith was banned. He travelled in disguise and even penetrated Edinburgh Castle to comfort imprisoned Roman catholics. His missionary work was short-lived, however: he was betrayed in Glasgow in 1614, and for five months he was interrogated and tortured in an attempt to make him reject the spiritual authority of the Pope and accept that of King James I. Father Ogilvie was hanged

in public in Glasgow in 1615 for treason. On the scaffold he declared his loyalty to James as an earthly ruler, and said that he was being executed “for religion alone.” The Pope, who celebrated Mass from the Papal altar beneath the Basilica's giant bronze canopy by Bernini, said: “The new saint was nothing more than the defender of the independence of religious powqr, according to the eternal maxim of Christ the Lord: Render, therefore, to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and . t.o. God,. the things that are God’t.” As Pope Paul was.: giving his regular mid-day blessing to the crowds in St Peter’s Square outside the Basilica, Pastor Jack Glass, a Scottish follower of the Rev lan Paisley’s Fundamentalist Protestant movement in Northern Ireland, unfurled a banner, proclaiming: “Four million Scots oppose the canonisation. Ogilvie was not a i saint, but a traitor,"