From the soap-box to the pulpit

PROFILE
Card Godridge talks to George Thompson, a former MP, recently ordained a priest
IN the church of St Theresa's in Dumfries recently, the assembled congregation of parishioners, visiting clergy, friends and relatives witnessed the ordination of a 60 year old man to the Catholic priesthood.
It was not a remarkable event save for the age of the newly ordained priest and for the fact that the invitations, written in Lowland Scots said simply; "Hae mind afore God o George Thompson ordainit priest."
Kneeling at the altar was the man known throughout Galloway as the former Scottish Nationalist MP for the constituency. The first time I met George Thompson, he was leading the march of some hundreds of people up the slopes of Mullwharchar in the remote Galloway Hills in protest at the government's proposals to dump nuclear waste in one of the last great wilderness areas of the UK. Working with the Scottish Conservation Party he was at the forefront of the campaign which lead eventually to a government climb down, a campaign which was fought long and hard and included an impressive case presented at the public enquiry held in Ayr. The campaigners' fight was made all the more effective by the barrister acting for them whose services were paid for by a loan from George.
The transition from politician to priest may seem a dramatic leap, but it has been a road that George Thompson has pursued from boyhood.
Born in the parish of Kells in the Glenkens of north Kirkcudbrightshire, he left school in 1947 and served in the Army Education Corps for two years before going to the Scots College in Rome where he attended the Gregorian University to study for the priesthood. But it was not to be.
When his father died in 1953, George returned home to look after his mother who was unwell. She remained in ill health until her death in 1973, by which time George had decided that his ambition would never be realised. In the interim he became a forestry worker for the next few years.
The Thompson family were not of Catholic persuasion. George had converted to the faith at the age of 20, motivated, he says, by a sense of Scottish history. He felt that his ancestors had lived for a thousand years in communion with the Roman see, and it seemed to him that the Reformation had simply opened the way to an English takeover of Scotland which would otherwise have been resisted.
He was also convinced by the theological arguments that the Bishop of Rome is the focal point for the unity of the Christian Church. He describes the decision to become a Catholic as "part of his Scott ishness".
He is passionately interested in the first 1,000 years of the Church's history and believes that the reunion of the Christian churches will come about through penetrating back to that early period and a "reunderstanding" of themselves through that connection with the early church.
In 1960, George decided to pursue an alternative career as a teacher. As long as his mother was alive, and as she was not herself a Catholic, it would not have been feasible to become a priest in a situation where she could not share his life and his home. He read Modern Languages at Edinburgh University, and trained as a teacher at Moray House, graduating in 1965, before returning to teach at his old school in Kirkcudbright.
The years as a teacher were rewarding, and it was during this period that his enthusiasm for Scottish self-government lead him to join the Scottish Nationalist Party and to help establish branches in Galloway. George believes that the only way for Scotland to have a future as a people and as a nation, is by having control of its own finances and resources.
This was a time of upsurge in the fortunes of the SNP and in successive campaigns George and his fellow activists found a growing response to their message. Always a modest man, he was persuaded with difficulty to stand for the constituency. In 1974 he was elected with a majority of 30.
The next four and a half years were hectic and exciting. With the labour government in power on a knife edge, the 11 SNP members were in a powerful position through many cliff-hanging votes. George felt at that time that it looked as if the Scottish people had "finally made up their minds to go forward" and there was all the work of putting together the Scottish Act leading up to the referendum,
The result of that vote was a tremendous disappointment. He had hoped that the Scots would "have enough guts to overcome the 40 per cent barrier", but fear had prevented this from happening. He takes the historical perspective though, seeing each reverse in the history of the Scottish self-government movement as part of a tidal wave that reaches higher up each time, and he looks forward with optimism to the next upsurge in the process.
In 1979 the Conservatives regained the Galloway seat and George returned to teaching.
Twenty years had passed since George's original ambition to go into the priesthood had been thwarted and he had long since decided that he was too old to try again. But at a time when he had been defeated as prospective parliamentary candidate, a chance meeting with an old colleague from his college days in Rome brought the idea back into the forefront.
The result was that in 1986 George Thompson finally entered St John's Seminary at Wonersh near Guildford in Surrey, for a shortened training for the priesthood. He spent three fruitful and happy years there. It was a great joy to be "doing theology in the modern way" in contrast to the regime in Rome in the early fifties.
Following his ordination, George has now taken up his new life as a parish priest in Dumfries. Whilst he will no longer be actively involved directly in the political arena, he sees a role in assisting the Church's backing for the Scottish Assembly campaign, and in furthering the cause of Scottish language and culture.