IT IS the Thursday before Easter and in St Patrick's Church, Edinburgh, the images of Christ are veiled for Holy Week. In the Resurrection Chapel lie the mortal remains of Margaret Sinclair, who was baptised and worshipped here, died in 1925 in her mid-twenties, and is the subject of a passionate campaign to have her declared a saint.
She has a great advocate in Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of Scotland's Catholics. His mother died when he was a boy, and he took comfort in praying by Sinclair's grave. It emerged recently that he has lobbied the Vatican for canonisation.
The f
ormer disc jockey Jimmy Savile is also fighting Sinclair's corner. He says that as a toddler he had a bad fall and was certified dead, but recovered at the exact moment his mother prayed to Sinclair. He visits St Patrick's from time to time and draws smiley faces in the prayer book.
Sinclair rests, like a Russian doll, within a lead coffin within a zinc coffin within a wooden coffin, beneath a marble slab carved with her portrait and designed to be lifted with ease in the event of exhumation. She was wrested from the hungry earth twice before coming here in 2003. If her journey towards sainthood progresses to the next stage, beatification, she will be exhumed again, to verify the body is hers. A bone will be removed, most likely a finger or toe, and venerated as a relic.
Since she moved to St Patrick's, visitor numbers have quadrupled. People are always slipping in and praying before her shrine. Two middle-aged women enter the church, light candles, and sit with heads bowed. After a couple of minutes, one says, in a stage whisper: "This is where I was married. His mother was dead against Catholics, auld bitch that she was."
Her friend, laughing, tries, without success, to shush her. "And she warned him that he shouldn't marry me because I'd get fat like my mother."
St Patrick's was built towards the end of the 18th century. It is located off South Gray's Close, a cobbled lane that runs down from the Royal Mile to the Cowgate. Now hemmed in by those cathedrals of transience, a Holiday Inn and Travelodge, it was in its heyday the hub around which Edinburgh's poor Irish immigrants revolved. Margaret Sinclair grew up in a tenement in Blackfriars Street, the daughter of a dustman, and worked first as a French polisher then in a biscuit factory, where she campaigned for equal pay for women.
She was pretty. In one portrait she looks like she could have been a member of the Bloomsbury Group. The accounts of her life stress that she was an ordinary girl who loved to go dancing and took pleasure in looking in the windows of Princes Street shops at clothes she couldn't afford, but I'm struck by the things that set her apart.
She would pray for hours and was considered to be in direct touch with God. While she was dying of tuberculosis, and gasping for breath, a wasp flew into her mouth and stung her throat; she smiled and declared satisfaction at feeling some of the pain Christ experienced on the cross.
Sinclair died in the south of England, having moved to London to become a nun two years before. Soon after her death, people began to call for her to be made a saint. She has progressed past the first two stages towards canonisation, and has two to go. "It's a rigorous procedure," says Father Ed Hone, the parish priest at St Patrick's. "You don't want to declare somebody a saint then discover some shady part of their past that means they are not going to be a good example to other people. So every aspect of their life is investigated. Everyone who knew her has been interviewed and their opinions recorded. A whole office in the Vatican is dedicated this process."
Pope John Paul II declared more people saints than all his predecessors put together: 482 in 27 years. Benedict XVI is said to be less keen, and has canonised only 14 people since taking office in 2005. There is no guarantee that Sinclair will achieve sainthood. It helps your case if you were martyred for your faith, which she wasn't. It helps if, when your coffin is opened, your body has not decomposed; she is a skeleton. What her supporters need now is a miracle. Literally. In fact they need two. One for her to be beatified, the other to qualify her for canonisation.
Two years ago a baby boy was born premature and weighing just one pound. The family were told there was no hope of survival. Desperate, they placed in the incubator a relic of Margaret Sinclair – a piece of cloth which has been pressed to her body immediately after death – and their baby rallied. The child is now flourishing, apparently, but the family are concerned for his privacy and have not allowed St Patrick's to put this forward to Rome as evidence of a miracle.
Mark McManus, a 23-year-old parishioner of St Patrick's, tells me of his own devotion to Margaret Sinclair. "My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I prayed for her to get well," he says. "I very much credit Margaret Sinclair's intercession to God with my mum's recovery."
It's fitting that Sinclair believed in trade unionism as, in death, she has become a sort of union rep negotiating with God on behalf of her members.
A great many people believe in her power to do so. Near her chapel there is a book in which hundreds of visitors have written prayers: "Please help me keep my job"; "Please give my brother back his speech"; "Please cure my addiction to pornography/prostitution"; "Dear Margaret, please ask our lord to bless us with a baby. And please look after our baby who is with you in heaven. Give him a big hug and kisses from his mum and dad. We miss you, lovely boy."
Not everyone is so convinced. One man brings his elderly mother to visit Sinclair's shrine. She prays for hours, and he kills time. "I don't believe in that saint rubbish," he says. "I visit Greyfriars Bobby and pray to him. He's a great example of patience."
The full article contains 1064 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
