| Admin_History | Born at Fort William in 1871. Educated at the Abbey School, Fort Augustus and in Germany .Entered the Benedictine Order in 1889 and made his final profession as a monk in 1890. He was ordained priest in 1896 and held various posts of responsibility in the Abbey between 1896 and 1905. In 1906, he took charge of St. Machan’s Parish in Lennoxtown and gained further parochial experience at St. Anne’s Benedictine Parish in Liverpool as curate and rector. In 1923-4, carried out an extensive lecture tour in universities and colleges in the United States. Elected Abbot in 1927 and consecrated Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh two years later. Died at Edinburgh on 22nd May, 1950.
The appointment of Andrew Joseph McDonald as Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh was a departure from normal practice in Scotland where bishops were usually secular priests rather than members of religious orders. He was a Benedictine monk, Abbot of Fort Augustus, who added to his administrative experience within the order experience of parish work in England and Scotland and he was in demand to give retreats and missions in many parishes. He was also involved in the establishment of Benedictine foundations in the United States. Despite being frequently away from his monastery, he was known for his faithful observance of the Benedictine rule and for a certain dislike of the exclusiveness and ceremonial which went with the position of Abbot and still more that of Archbishop and Metropolitan. His black Benedictine habit marked him out from other ecclesiastical dignitaries.
As Archbishop, he succeeded Archbishop Smith whose prolonged poor health had resulted in the Edinburgh Archdiocese being run by his auxiliary Bishop Henry Grey Graham. The new Archbishop was a man of vigour and enthusiasm and the twenty years of his episcopate were exceptionally demanding- the Great Depression, mass unemployment, the rise of the dictatorships in Germany, Italy and Spain, the threat of international communism, the Second World War- all threw up many problems for a man who was instinctively a leader. He faithfully followed the lead of the Pope in regarding communism as the major menace of the times and in believing that churchmen should be leading a crusade against it. His zeal for this crusade brought him into conflict with the British establishment but this did not deter him from publicising the message in the pulpit, in the press and through pamphlets. Another oft-repeated message was about the need for the laity to be more actively involved in the liturgy and here his words and ideas presaged the developments which the Second Vatican Council would later bring into Catholic worship.
Some thought he showed poor judgment- pointing to the tight control he imposed on his priests which made him “a man loved and admired by many but feared and unloved by others.” It may have been poor judgment to provoke the anti-Catholic suspicions of Edinburgh citizens, not all of them merely ignorant bigots, by holding the Eucharistic Congress there in June, 1935. McDonald would have argued that Catholics had a right to the protection of the civil authorities when, as predicted, street rioting broke out and lasted for several days. Another example of what some saw as delusions of grandeur was his plan to purchase one of the most conspicuous buildings in St. Andrews in Fife in order to establish a national seminary for the training of priests and a Teachers’ Training College for Catholic Men- a proposal which had to be abandoned because of the local hostility it aroused.
But unquestionably he changed the way the Catholic community was seen and saw itself within the wider national community. |