Thomas Cardinal Winning, leader of the Catholic church in Scotland, who died on June 17th aged 76, was praised by Pope John Paul 11 as a "man of the people".
As well as a huge appetite for work he had a very keen sense of humour which was recently demonstrated at the Irish College in Rome after the elevation of Dr Desmond Connell to cardinal. Following the ceremonies in St Peter's Square an assorted group of media and clergy, including Cardinal Winning, gathered at the foot of the stairs in the college.
He was in full flow, talking about Scotland's Labour politicians when out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Cardinal Connell descending the stairs resplendent in scarlet. He gave a wolf whistle and said to the new cardinal "you're gorgeous!", followed by a loud laugh.
When he arrived in hospital earlier this month following his first heart attack, that humour was in evidence again.
"Hello, I'm Jane," said a nurse, introducing herself. " . . . and I'm Tarzan," he responded. It was why the Scots and many others liked him. He was their "bull in the ecclesiastical china shop", their "antichrist of the politically correct", as he has been described.
He was also a "lad", in that last great male supremacist institution of the western world, the Roman Catholic Church. A man's man, who was very comfortable with that. His was a world of clear, masculine lines where women have their place but not in the priesthood. His was what has come to be described as "muscular Christianity", which many find attractive and was why he had such a following from way beyond his own 800,000 flock of Scots Catholics.
He was a son of the Irish diaspora who, as others have in different spheres, represented history triumphing over experience. His origins were in Donegal where his father's family were known by the more familiar Wynne, which was altered through illiteracy and accent to Winning. His mother's people were Cannings.
The cardinal's ancestors had been based in the Pollokshaws area of Glasgow, but he was born at Wishaw in Lanarkshire on June 3rd, 1925 in a house that was later demolished to make way for an Orange lodge.
His father was a miner and steelworker who was unemployed for the first 15 years of the cardinal's life while his mother performed the daily miracle of making ends meet. To help as far as he could during the hungry 1930s, his father made and sold sweets .
The cardinal claimed to have realised his vocation early in life. He attended St Peter's College in Glasgow before going to the Scots College in Rome where he was ordained on December 18th, 1948. His father sold his confectionary-making equipment so the family could attend. Later he returned to Rome to study for a doctorate in Canon law after a period serving in Scotland. He perfected his Latin then by translating Celtic football reports.
From 1958 to 1961 he served in the Motherwell diocese in Scotland before returning to Rome as spiritual director of the Scots College. In 1966 he returned to Motherwell where he was parish priest and the diocese's vicar episcopal and officialis. In 1971 he became an auxiliary bishop in Glasgow, becoming archbishop of Glasgow in 1974.
In his first homily in that post he called for a "rejection of bigotry and discrimination based on religion" striking an ecumenical theme that was to dominate his ministry.
In 1975 he became the first Catholic bishop to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), an event that was greeted as a major success for inter-church relations.
In 1976 he abandoned plans to spend £1.6 million on refurbishing his cathedral and used the money on a campaign against urban poverty in Glasgow. He was a strong supporter of the Birmingham Six and opposed the Falklands war as he would later oppose the Gulf war. In 1978 he challenged Prince Charles on why he could not ascend the throne if married to a Catholic.
But it was following his appointment as cardinal in 1994 - becoming Scotland's third cardinal since the Reformation - that he began to hit the headlines.
He criticised the Tory Government "who came across as robbing the poor to help the rich". In 1997 he had to deal with the fall-out when Bishop Roddy Wright, of Argyll and the Isles, left the church after a relationship with a divorcee and on admitting he had a son from another affair. Celibacy was not the issue, "one man's highly publicised indiscretions do not constitute a crisis for the church," he said.
In 1997 he attacked the Labour party's stance on abortion. From old Labour stock this underlined his suspicions of new Labour, of which he said "the embers of totalitarianism are never far away from the surface." He denounced Tony Blair for heading "the most pro-abortion Cabinet in Britain's history" while being preoccupied with banning fox hunting. "What's a fox got that a baby hasn't?" he asked.
That same year he set up a scheme offering counselling and financial support for pregnant women who decided not to have an abortion. It attracted huge attention when a 12-year-old girl was one of those offered such assistance.
The scheme was imitated across the Catholic world with Germaine Greer among its more surprising supporters.
He was a strong supporter of the new Scottish parliament, which he would later describe as "an utter failure" due to the dominance of a politically-correct Labour grouping there and, as he believed, best illustrated by its attempt to repeal Section 28 which prevented homosexuality being dealt with in schools.
In line with his church's teaching - that homosexual inclination is objectively disordered - he said "it pains me to use the word 'perverted' when discussing the homosexual act, but that is what it is." Last year he condemned the use of human embryos in stem cell research as "morally repugnant" and just last month, on another topical issue, he said the negative attitudes to asylum seekers made him almost "ashamed to say that I live and work in Glasgow" .
He knew that it was for such outspokenness he would be remembered, but protested indifference. "When they come to write my obituary, I won't be very interested anyway," he said.
He is survived by his sister, Margaret McCarron.
Thomas Cardinal Winning: born 1925; died, June 2001