Putting faith, justice and peace in the picture

“I FEEL a bit, a bit like Mary, the mother of Jesus standing at the foot of the Cross and watching what's happening and you just wish it would stop. We can't stop it, so there’s that kind of feeling of helplessness and because there's nothing that Mary could do to stop what's happened to Jesus and what can we do to stop what's happening in Gaza?

“Then there’s what's happening in the West Bank with the settler incursions too. In Taybeh, a Christian village, settlers have been coming and chasing people off their land. It's a great injustice and it’s been allowed to happen by the Israeli Government who are not being active in stopping this settler violence. It's clearing the land of the Christians.”

These are the words of Archbishop William Nolan of Glasgow who has long had a love of and concern for the Holy Land. The significance of his visits there have no doubt increased since becoming a Bishop, and now Archbishop, with the onus on flagging up such injustice, discrimination and suffering and encouraging Catholics in Scotland to do likewise. Setting a good example is something that he has been keen to do since following his vocation, because faith inspirations have played a key part in that journey.

Inspirations and strength

“I first got the notion to become a priest when I was about 7 years old,” Archbishop Nolan said. “But you know what the catalyst for it was, I couldn't really say. However, I was impressed by the priests I knew. I held them in high regard and I suppose they were an inspiration.

“I've been inspired at different times by different people. I’ve read about the lives of so many saints, for example, be it St Francis of Assisi with his complete commitment to his faith and his vow of poverty, or St Ignatius of Loyola and his more kind of intellectual faith.  

“I’ve also been to Auschwitz and I went to the cell where St Maximillian Kolbe was imprisoned and eventually put to death. People like him can inspire you when you are going through tough times because you can see just how much other people have endured at times. We also have St John Ogilvie who we celebrate in Glasgow. He is someone who committed his life to come and spread the faith in Scotland, which is what myself and all the other priests in the archdiocese are trying to do. So, you take inspiration from saints like them.”

With many years of service to the Church now under his belt, Archbishop Nolan not only has a good handle on what the term vocation means, but also the qualities needed to become a priest and how a vocation can be strengthened in the earliest days of priesthood.  

“Vocation is a call,” he explained. It’s from the Latin word vocare (to call). It's not just a notion for something, it’s a kind of inner call and asking what God wants you to do. We should all reflect on what God wants us to do in our lives and what purpose our lives have.”

“When you become a priest, you become very caught up in the lives of your parishioners and you have to be there for them,” he continued. “There will be happy moments and sad moments in the midst of that. So to deal with all that you need to have great faith, a good prayer life, intellectual ability and good formation. Human formation is actually very important. You want somebody who is a human being that can empathise with others and is open to others. So, as well as having a desire to give yourself to the service of God and to serve other people in the Church, you have to have empathy for people.

“And you can draw strength from those relationships. Strength comes from other people and that's a great encouragement. When I was a parish priest in East Kilbride for 20 years, you would go out and visit the sick and the housebound. I always found that very uplifting, because you would be visiting people who were suffering more than I was suffering and you’d think what have I got to complain about? There are so many people that I found inspiring in the parish and it's the same here in the archdiocese as well.”

Answering the call

When the call to become the new Bishop of Galloway came, it wasn’t something Archbishop Nolan was originally keen on, enjoying, as he mentioned, the life of a parish priest. He candidly spoke about some of the challenges that you face when you are elevated to being a Bishop, but also emphasised the many positive aspects of it too.

“Being a Bishop can seem such a vast task,” Archbishop Nolan said. “It’s unlike if you're a parish priest in a parish and you want to do something, then, more or less, you just can go ahead and do it. If you're a Bishop, you're that step removed from getting it done. So, you have to try and inspire others to do it, you have to try and inspire your priest to do it. So that can be a bit difficult.

“Perhaps the main positive is that you get to meet some very good people. That's really encouraging. You also get the opportunity to travel a bit further. For instance, I was invited to go to China and visit the Christians there and that was quite inspiring. You go to a country which is atheistic and people have been brought up in atheism and yet you found young people there who discovered God, you know, and they were so enthusiastic about it. The Church is not allowed to proselytise, but people still come to the faith and it was quite inspiring to meet those Christians.”

Reflection and contemplation

While Archbishop Nolan mentioned that he drew strength from people as both a parish priest and bishop, the latter has also seen him take on a more contemplative approach when facing the challenges that the greater responsibility brings with it. Not only that, it is a main feature of his chosen motto as Bishop.

“When you become a bishop you get a coat of arms and a motto and my motto comes from a passage from the Old Testament,” he said. “The prophet Elijah has been chased for his life by the Queen Jezebel. She wants to kill him and so he goes down to Mount Sinai and he goes into a cave and then there's a mighty wind, but we're told that God is not in the wind. And then there's an earthquake and we are told that God is not in the earthquake. And then there's a fire, and we are told that God is not in the fire. And then there is what's sometimes translated in some Bibles as the sign of a gentle breeze, but the translation I like is ‘the sound of sheer silence.’ And that's what my motto is. It’s in the silence that you come face to face with God. And it’s in the silence that Elijah then steps out the cave and then speaks to God. He then encounters God, not in these very impressive events that are happening, but in the silence. And so that's a scripture passage I find very inspiring. You’ve got to have stillness in your life in order to encounter God. You get to encounter God in the silence.”

A mission insight

That focus on reflection has continued in his role as Archbishop of Glasgow and, just as he mentioned about being a bishop, he has been afforded the opportunity to travel and visit those living and working on the missions. A visit to Peru to visit a Glasgow priest who lives and works there allowed him to gain an even greater insight into the universal Church, which he first tasted as a young seminarian at the Pontifical Scots College in Rome.

“I went to visit him and the churches that he was looking after,” Archbishop Nolan said. “The people there were absolutely lovely and they were so good and so welcoming and so enthusiastic. I looked around and I realised how difficult the living conditions were. We originally started off in Lima, but once we went further out from the city, I could understand why Pope Francis kept talking about the peripheries, because the further you got from the centre the more difficult things got. So, there we were out in these hills, they were brown, all dried up and all there was, was a dirt track—there was no greenery at all—and they didn’t have running water. I’ve always had an admiration for those who live and work in the challenging conditions in mission countries and territories.

“And that’s why we should support the work of Missio Scotland. We are all blessed by having our Catholic Faith. We need to appreciate it and appreciate that it's been given to us for us to share. So, we have to share it and sending missionaries abroad, supporting the Church in other countries, where there can be great poverty but also great oppression as well, that's an obligation that comes with being Catholic.”

However, while mission has, in the past, alluded to the foreign missions and helping support the priests and religious sisters who feel called to live and work there, Archbishop Nolan feels that the meaning of the term mission has a far wider scope than that and, in fact, relates to Scotland too.

“We have a mission here too,” he said. “If you read some of the books going back to the 19th century about the Church here in Scotland, they would talk about the mission and they wouldn't talk about the priest in this parish, they would talk about this priest in this mission and they were seen as mission stations. We have to see them as mission stations now, because we became so focused on the parish and looking after the parish that we forgot that the parish is not an end in itself, the parish is a mission station, to go out to the whole world, to everybody. So it's not just the looking after the people that come to Mass on Sunday, but spreading the Good News to everybody in your area, everybody in your town, everybody in Scotland and so, for me, that's the mission.”

Picture perfect

Hopefully this feature has provided a snapshot of the life of a priest, bishop and now archbishop, but just on that note, to conclude, Archbishop Nolan shared with us a much loved passion of his that not a lot of people will know about.

“ I used to take a lot of photographs and when I was in the seminary we had a dark room and all that and I used to develop film and print for example,” he said. “I don't do that anymore because you don't need to. We’ve got these fancy phones, never mind cameras, but I still take photographs maybe when I’m on holiday and then I put together a calendar every year. My mother, when she was alive, was a great one for reminding everybody next week is so and so's birthday or next week is so and so's wedding anniversary. When she passed away, I thought I'll carry on that duty and I do that by giving everybody in the family a calendar with all the dates and everybody's birthdays and all the dates of these wedding anniversaries and so on and so forth and other important days so they don't forget!”

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