Addressing a dinner last year in Glasgow's Hilton Hotel, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, turned to one of the principal guests, Cardinal Thomas Winning, and lamented that because Cardinal Cahal Daly was over 80, the age of electoral ineligibility, Ireland will not be represented at the next conclave to choose a successor to Pope John Paul II.

"Your Eminence," the Taoiseach intoned chirpily, "will be called upon to act as Ireland's proxy voter in the conclave."

Along with everyone else, Cardinal Winning laughed heartily at this official enlistment into the ranks of Ireland's ecclesiastical Diaspora. However, underlying the Taoiseach's jocular remark was the serious observation that the Archbishop of Glasgow is the elder church statesman of the worldwide Irish religious empire.

Since then, Winning, who is from working-class third generation Irish stock in Scotland, has enhanced his international stature by his widely-praised contributions at the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome. His statements against abortion and his practical aid programme for unmarried mothers have given him massive world profile. It is not for nothing that the clerical joke is that the motto Christus vincit should be translated as "Christ is Winning." Winning's seniority in the English-speaking world has also been boosted by the death of Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster and by the announcement of the forthcoming retirement of the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O'Connor.

At the very least, Winning, a superb political operator and good public speaker, will be a key "Pope-maker" in the secret conclave consultations among the Princes of the Roman Catholic Church.

There are even mutterings that the Rome-educated Winning, aged 74, might fit the bill as a transitional Pope in the event of a deadlock between the liberal and conservative wings of the Church. (In such an event, would he become Pope Andrew or Pope Patrick?).

Whether or not he becomes the Vicar of Christ, Winning has achieved the remarkable distinction in Presbyterian Scotland of being signalled out as the official voice of Christian opinion in an increasingly secularised society. This is the opinion of Mandy Telford, the women's officer of the National Union of Students of Scotland.

Though not a Roman Catholic, and not necessarily in agreement with Winning's utterances, she observed admiringly: "If it were not for his watchful presence and willingness to put himself at risk of controversy (and sometimes insult), it seems as if there would be no "official" Christian opinion heard or read in the media in Scotland today."

This opinion was given weight by the columnist, Alan Massey, who noted in The Scotsman that the Church of Scotland had decayed to such an extent that when the media sought a Christian spokesman, they turned to either Winning or the Episcopalian Primate, Richard Holloway for comment.

AS if to oblige, Winning currently finds himself at the centre of two controversies: his campaign to allow the heir to the British throne to marry a Roman Catholic through the repeal of the 1701 Act of Settlement and his warning that the removal of legislation which bans the promotion of homosexuality in schools could expose children to "predatory and abusive" relationships and put their lives at risk.

Winning's supremacy in public polemics contrasts sharply with the days when it was Church of Scotland heavyweights such as the Very Rev Lord MacLeod of Fuinary and the Rev. Harry Whitley who dominated the pulpits and soap-boxes of a Scotland that was still soaked in sectarian antagonisms. Massie has suggested that the Church of Scotland is in terminable decline, because it lacks ministers with national reputations To be fair to the Presbyterian Church, its system of rotating Moderators of the General Assembly means that the media find it difficult to pounce on well-known names. Managing to jump this hurdle is the present Moderator, John Cairns, who started his year with a controversial speech in the company of top television and media personalities. Cairns criticised the quality of their work particularly in regard to the production of soap operas and "red-top" tabloids.

It was arrogant of them to claim that everyone was talking about EastEnders, for example, when the truth was that many Scots never bothered to switch into either that, Coronation Street or any of the other soaps.

Cairns was in the Moderatorial chair when the Rev Helen Percy applied for readmission to the ministry following a widely publicised sex scandal in her Angus parish and he was praised for his deft handling he offered her sympathy but refused to allow her in.

The Primate of the Episcopal Church and Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway has been involved in a widely publicised campaign for gay rights, and Scotland also has the most senior Anglican clergywoman in Britain in the Rev Miriam Byrne, a former Carmelite nun in the Roman Catholic Church who has been appointed to the Cathedral in Dundee, much to the dismay of the local bishop.

Today, pace the claims of the composer James MacMillan, the level of sectarianism has diminished considerably in line with a sharp decline in the membership not just of the Church of Scotland but also of the more fundamentalist Free Presbyterianism: and leakage is detectable in Winning's Catholicism especially in the wake of the abandonment of priestly celibacy for the marriage bed by the former Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, Roddie Wright.

According to sociologist, Iain Patterson, Scottish Catholics are becoming less submissive to ecclesiastical control. "Adherence to church teaching is now a matter of individual spirituality," writes Patterson, who also concludes that Catholics in Scotland now enjoy equal occupational status with their Protestant and secular neighbours.

Under Winning, Scottish Catholicism has come of age: but at a heavy price of slackening membership.