Interview: Cardinal Keith O'Brien

CARDINALS of the Roman Catholic Church wear scarlet robes to symbolise a willingness to shed their own blood in defence of the faith. Cardinal Keith O'Brien, in almost six years as leader of the Church in Scotland, has been associated more closely with black and white, the colours of the headlines in which his outspoken comments are reported.

He wants the front pages and knows how to get them – describing this country's abortion rate as equivalent to "two Dunblane massacres a day", likening homosexuality to paedophilia and bestiality, and condemning the human fertilisation and embryology bill as a state endorsement of "Frankenstein" science. He treats the media like a sort of collection plate – tossing in his tuppence-worth on whatever issue catches his eye. The cardinal has gob on his side.

What's he really like, though? He is 71 and nearing the end of his time as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh; he will retire at 75, having held the position since the mid-1980s. Yet for all this lengthy period in the public eye, O'Brien remains enigmatic.

The difficulty in getting to know the real man is compounded by the fact that he appears to show different faces on different occasions. A colleague of mine remembers seeing him working the room at a party at the Irish consul's house in Edinburgh. He seemed more louche than farouche, easy charm personified; if it hadn't have been for the dog collar, he might have been taken for an old roué, years of pleasure written into his twinkly eyes and smile. A few months later, at a midnight Mass, my colleague was amazed to see O'Brien deliver a sermon in "Mr Couthy" character – avuncular, ambling, rambling and parochial. Was this really the same priest?

"There's Keith O'Brien who is a cardinal," is how he puts it when asked about any disparity between the public and the private man. "It's not two different characters. It's just me."

O'Brien has lived for almost a quarter century in a leafy street of solid and impressive Victorian villas in Edinburgh. It's whimsical to ascribe human characteristics to architecture, but even in blazing sunshine these grey houses seem to brood a little. His home, with its crowstep gables and corner tower, is enclosed by a high wall and black iron gates that, when shut, form a saltire. In the garden there's a milk-white statue of the Virgin, and attached to the house is the green-domed chapel where the Cardinal celebrates Mass for his staff and guests.

Norah, his secretary, answers the door and leads the way into the "Green Room", a cosy space busy with personal memorabilia. There are lots of framed photographs, including one of O'Brien with the present Pope and another with John Paul II. A large glass-fronted book-case is full of mostly religious titles, but a copy of a Tony Blair biography stands out, as does a collection of poems set around Ballycastle, O'Brien's home town in County Antrim. Taking these as clues to his character, one might speculate that he has both political nous and a nostalgic streak.

The man himself walks in ten minutes late. He is always coming from or about to go to another meeting. He pushes himself hard, working seven days a week from early morning to about 9pm or later. This room, with its plump armchair and footstool, its flat-screen TV and dinner tray, speaks of late meals eaten in front of Newsnight.

O'Brien, dressed in black, shakes hands, apologises for not wearing his hearing aid, and asks me to sit closer. Such casual admissions of frailty are easy to make when your energy levels are as high as his. He doesn't look his age either. His dark eyebrows, white hair and aquiline nose give him an imperious look. He'd suit a laurel wreath better than his biretta.

When in 2003 the Pope made him a cardinal, O'Brien stated that the importance of family and married life would be one of the key themes of his cardinalcy. So it makes sense to ask about his own upbringing. "We were an ordinary family," he begins, his native Northern Ireland audible in his voice. "We didn't have silver spoons in our mouths." His father, Mark, a gunner in the Royal Navy, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for bravery during the Second World War.

O'Brien was born in 1938 and raised initially among an extended matriarchy dominated by his black-clad maternal granny. His father was away at war for most of the first years of his life and more or less a stranger when he came home. As a result, O'Brien was especially close to Alice, "a mother as I imagine most folk would like to have. She was always there for us." He remembers, in an impressionistic way, his mother going out to the red public phone box and trying to reach her husband. She protected her eldest son and his brother Terry, two years younger, from the knowledge that their father was in great danger, protecting the Russian convoys from U-boat attacks. Ballycastle, a small seaside town, seemed very far away from the war.

It was a culture shock for the 12-year-old when, in 1949, the family moved to Scotland. Having left the navy, O'Brien's father wanted a job in the civil service, but this was impossible in Northern Ireland as he was Catholic. So they crossed the water to "a nice wee room and kitchen" in Clydebank, and he found work with the customs and excise in Glasgow. Post-Blitz Clydebank was a mess. The family lived in an area where their home and the La Scala cinema were among the few buildings left standing. "But there was the stability of our Catholic home," says O'Brien, "and the Catholic church and the Catholic school." His deep faith was a foundation on which a new life could be built. This seems a key factor in understanding O'Brien. Again and again, his belief has buttressed him against life's tremors and spasms.

When O'Brien was in fourth year of secondary school, his father secured a promotion and the family flitted to Edinburgh. They lived in a tenement in the next parish to where he lives now. "But then tragedy hit us in that Mum got some sort of brain virus," he says, matter-of-factly. "You weren't told very much in those days. I was sitting my Highers and she was dead by the time I had finished."

He was 16 or 17 at the time, and his mother was in her mid-40s. It was, of course, a shock. "I remember realising something must be seriously wrong when she didn't ask me how my exams were going. I'd come in from school and she would be in bed, and she wasn't one for staying in bed if it wasn't necessary. She was moved to the Royal Infirmary, to the ward of Professor Dott, a famous brain surgeon at that time, but she didn't survive whatever it was. I remember it was the morning of my Higher chemistry that she was buried. And then the parish priest…" He points to an oil painting high on one wall. "That's him up there, Canon Willie McLaughlin. He got the undertaker to take me in his car, after the funeral, for my Higher chemistry exam in the afternoon."

Remarkable that O'Brien should sit an exam in the circumstances. Even more remarkably, he passed it, and chemistry, together with maths, became one of the subjects he went on to study at Edinburgh University. His background in science, interestingly, makes it possible for him to admire the ingenuity of embryology research while simultaneously despising it.

Following his mother's death, O'Brien grew closer to his father. Along with Terry, they would go to visit Alice's grave. It's a sad picture, the two boys and the grieving widower, a square forced to become a triangle.

During these regular visits to Mount Vernon cemetery, O'Brien found comfort in praying at the shrine to the revered Scottish nun Margaret Sinclair, another woman who died too soon. "It took a lot of readjusting as a young family, only being one year in Edinburgh, to cope without your mother," says O'Brien. He often says "your" instead of "my", "you" rather than "I", when talking about emotional moments; it seems a way of distancing himself from pain. "Women are better at putting down roots in a new place, and it wasn't until I was older myself that I realised how hard it must have been for my dad."

Later, his father would say, "It's okay for you. You chose to be celibate. It wasn't in my plans at all."

I ask O'Brien a few times to reflect on how he was affected by his mother's death and how it shaped him. But he never seems to give a full answer. Maybe it still hurts too much, or maybe it's simply wrong to expect a public venting of feeling from a 71-year-old whose idea of confession is very different from most of us in a society increasingly used to personal frankness. Rather than talk about the pain of bereavement, O'Brien says, quite simply, that he saw God's will in his mother's death.

Was he really able to accept it as calmly as that, though? "As a young boy, you were naturally upset, as were my brother and father. But our basic faith in God was strong. My mum had lived life to the full. In normal circumstances she could have had another 40 years of life. But it's that old phrase – 'God gave. God has taken away. Blessed be the name of God'. You had nothing else to do but accept that your mum was dead. The three of us had to get on with the job. You'd to try to get the tea made and the potatoes peeled before Dad came back from work."

Fascinating, the quick leap from tragic to mundane. For a Catholic, O'Brien has a great Protestant work ethic. A pragmatist, he's constantly stressing the importance of "getting on with the job". His father was just doing that when he moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland. There was to be no outrage about the institutionalised bigotry that made him move. What was important was working hard and providing for the family. Similarly, your mother dies suddenly? "It was an awful event in my life. But you get on with the job." Peel those tatties. Say those prayers. Go back to school in your mourning clothes and pass that exam.

It's an interesting irony that O'Brien is ardent about changing society, yet he's passive about the events of his own life. He seems to feel that God's will exerts a force on him that it does not exert over Scotland. "I can see what you're getting at," he says when I mention this. "Maybe I don't often show it, but I am quite an emotional character. But I've got a public persona, as it were. I can cry in my own house over the death of a close friend, but I've got a public job to perform as leader of the Church. Maybe I do bottle up publicly a lot of my emotions, but that's not to say I don't feel deeply."

This bottling up was surely learned when his mother died. He mentions also the deaths of three close friends, which have caused him pain. One, Canon Willie McLaughlin, the priest who had buried O'Brien's mother, died in 1985. "He was a real mentor and father figure. I was at his deathbed with two sisters when he died in a nursing home. As an individual, I get emotional about all that sort of thing, although the public persona mightn't show it."

Sometimes his strong feelings do seem to burst through, though. For the ceremony in which he became a cardinal, O'Brien chose to wear the scarlet cassock of the late Cardinal Gordon Gray, his predecessor as archbishop – a sentimental gesture in honour of an old friend.

Paul Chitnis, chief executive of the Catholic aid agency SCIAF, recalls visiting Burma with O'Brien at the start of this year and his speaking to a man who had lost his family in the floods. The man hoped for a simple blessing, but O'Brien, terribly moved, placed his own rosary in his hand, a spontaneous gift intended to comfort.

It seems likely, too, that some of O'Brien's intemperate language when talking about abortion, for example, is based on his own emotions welling up. Not that he'd admit it. When I suggest to him that his tireless advocacy of the standard family unit – mother, father, children – can be understood as a response to his own early loss, he just murmurs a noncommittal, "Mmm-hmm," and changes the subject.

Yet O'Brien does seem to have a deep attachment to the idea of family, and an instinctive dislike of modern variations – such as civil partnerships, same-sex foster parents and the like. Media dogma has it that he is a liberal who became a conservative when he was made cardinal, the idea being that he fudged his principles for the sake of the red hat and future advancement. It's even said that Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope but then a senior Vatican figure, tried to block his elevation because of comments he had made in support of ending the celibacy rule for priests. Is that true? "Not that I know of," O'Brien says, laughing it off. "Like, he's never told me that."

I'm not convinced by the liberal theory. O'Brien's dislike of homosexuality, for example, seems visceral not simply a scriptural position. "Well, I'm not sure if 'dislike' is the right word," he counters. "I am aware that there is a reasonable percentage of the human race who have homosexual inclinations, and I am sorry if that's the way John Smith or Mr Y feel it's necessary to exercise their sexuality. I would say it's against the natural law which governs the human race. Not any man-made law or church-made law. It's just against nature."

So it's pity he feels for gay people? "Yes, I feel sorry that people aren't able to fulfil their sexuality in the normal way of human beings."

What about comparing homosexuality with paedophilia and bestiality? And, for that matter, standing outside St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh and comparing abortion with the Dunblane murders. Does he honestly believe that these things are morally equivalent? "No, when I mentioned the Dunblane massacre it was a statistical thing. Of course, I'm seeking publicity. Church leaders have been speaking against abortion for years and nobody has paid the blindest bit of attention. So when I was being harangued by the press outside after my sermon, I said, 'It's the equivalent of the Dunblane massacre every day.' Just because there's a few years separating the child in the womb from a child in primary one, we made a big hoo-hah about the Dunblane massacre. And rightly so. But abortion is going on day by day in our hospitals."

On any level, though, does he regret the comparison? After all, it must have been hurtful for both the families of the Dunblane victims and for women who have had abortions. O'Brien looks shocked at this. "Do you think so?"

Yes.

"Well, I didn't. And I'm sorry if I hurt anybody. But we use examples all the time."

He says he might instead have used the Lockerbie bomb as a comparison. He also makes the point that his job is to hand on the word of Christ, regardless of whether that makes him unpopular. "Sometimes my teaching will be unwelcome, but that's what I see as my vocation."

Vocation is a key word for O'Brien. He's a Godfella – as far back as he can remember, he always wanted to be a priest. He was 12 when he first applied, but was turned down when it was discovered he had a heart murmur. He applied again, not long after his mother's death, and was told by Gordon Gray that he should go to university first. If he survived that then he might survive the seminary.

O'Brien loves to make a joke of this, but I wonder what it was really like for him not only to be rejected twice but to be told the reason was that he might die before his time? Typically, he says that he simply accepted the decision, and he never felt frightened about the problem with his heart. He was determined to become a priest, though, and during his time at university lived a celibate life, as if he had already been ordained.

Recently, I interviewed seminarians in Glasgow who had sexual relationships with women before deciding to enter the priesthood. They felt that this would be an advantage when they became priests as they would better relate to their parishioners. O'Brien says, though, that he has never felt a lack in his life. He says he understands relationships even though he has no personal experience. One of his closest friends lost three children in quick succession; after the third, the man and his wife invited O'Brien to tour Northern Ireland with them in a Volkswagen Beetle, a trip which seems to have helped lift their grief. "I learned a hell of a lot about marriage on that drive," he says, "and they had a lovely family of three after that. I might be celibate myself, but I appreciate the wonder of the sacrament of marriage."

It's a nice story, but has he never wanted something like that for himself? Has he never felt romantic love for someone? "Uh, no. I've liked women but I've never felt I wanted to give up my life completely. Like, I rely on women a lot. Norah, there at the desk, and Theresa the housekeeper, and so on."

But he has never had feelings for anyone that went beyond those of friendship? "No. I've never wanted to go to bed with anybody."

Not even if it meant having children? Isn't it a regret in his life that he has never been able to give a child the sort of upbringing he so values and promotes? "When you say 'regret', I prefer to look on the positive," he replies. "I am father of this family in the diocese, the family that was entrusted to me 24 years ago. I lead a very busy life and I think I would be neglecting one or other family if I had my own blood family. I think I would have found it very difficult getting the balance right."

He does work hard. I spent a couple of days following him as he went about his business. His itinerary was packed with events in Scotland, including talking to school children about fair trade, addressing a meeting about the cruel regime in Burma, and visiting the Royal Highland Show. None of this stuff is news, so it doesn't get reported, but it does rather counter the impression that the cardinal spends all his time railing against a lustful, sin-soaked world.

In addition to his domestic work, he makes regular aid missions to the world's most desperate places. O'Brien admits to having inherited his father's wanderlust and sense of justice. In the last few years he has visited Burma, Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Ethiopia and post-tsunami India. Three times this year he will travel to the Vatican, and also plans a journey to El Salvador to mark the 20th anniversary of the assassinations of Jesuit priests there.

It is a punishing schedule that would tax a man half O'Brien's age, but he is blithe about his years. In 2008, on Palm Sunday, shortly before morning mass, he collapsed in the hall next to St Mary's Cathedral. "I'd had wee fainting fits before, dizziness in my room, but I had just put it down to the rush of getting out of bed or my high blood pressure."

A doctor came and asked him to go to hospital for a thorough examination. He refused. The next day, his own 70th birthday, was also the funeral of his colleague Monsignor David Gemmell, and it was unthinkable that he wouldn't preside over the Mass for his old friend; he had been devastated by his sudden death. After the funeral he went to the infirmary and was told he ought to have a pacemaker fitted. Fair enough, he said, but it would have to wait until after Holy Week. He had the operation on Wednesday, 26 March, was discharged from hospital the following day, and on the Friday gave a high-profile speech against the UK government's embryology bill at the church in Kirkcaldy where Gordon Brown's father had once preached. This behaviour can be taken either as total commitment to his cause or total recklessness with his own health, maybe both. "I hate letting folk down," is his only comment.

Although he will be cardinal until he dies, O'Brien says he is looking forward to a quieter way of life following his retirement as archbishop. It was said of the late Thomas Winning, O'Brien's predecessor as cardinal, that he feared death. O'Brien doesn't feel that way at all. "I see death as the culmination of my life's work, bringing me complete union with God in the next life," he says. "Having now lived my three-score years and ten, I would like some short time of retirement to physically unwind and do some of the things that I have neglected during my very active life, such as more time for prayer, reading, enjoying the fresh air at the seaside etc before my final meeting with my Maker. If He calls me before that, I would like to think that I am like the late Pope John XXIII: 'My bags are packed and I am ready to go!'"

He is bullish about the future and the time remaining to him. On being elevated to cardinal, he called for the re-Christianisation of Scotland, and though the last decades have seen society become increasingly secular, he believes he can see signs of a change. As the public lose faith in finance and no longer expect a moral lead from politicians, it could be that Christian leaders such as O'Brien will grow in influence over the next few years. He feels that his views reflect that of a great many people in Scotland whose moral outlook is not represented by the political orthodoxy.

On my way out from his house, O'Brien leads me into the chapel, pointing out the chair where the Pope sat when he came to stay in 1982, and the motto over the altar – which he chose when he became an archbishop – "Serve the Lord with Gladness," a line from the Psalms. It's how he feels about his work, he says: a great happiness. And for all the clashes and controversies of his public life, I think he means it.

Here in this quiet space there is a deep sense of the peace he must get from a life of prayer. I had expected to meet an anti-establishment figure, a truculent priest putting the fear of God into the liberal elite. Instead, O'Brien is surprisingly gentle, a dove in hawk's plumage. The word "cardinal" is taken from the Latin for "hinge", and I can't help but remember this as he shows me, with a slight air of impatience, the door. He doesn't mean to be rude but, my God, he has a job to be getting on with.