He gave Catholics a voice, but it was a voice from another age;

NOW that Cardinal Winning has passed into history as a great Scotsman and honoured as a priest of the people, what will the Catholic Church do to restore its intellectual base?

The Cardinal's impact was indeed profound and, when he died, he was honoured most where he had his most profound effect - in the media.

The great challenge acknowledged by the Christian churches lies in the endemic scepticism of wealthy Western society. We are a people with few spiritual needs and declining faith because we have wealth. Peace has made us comfortable here and now. Politics has emancipated women and disengaged the law from affecting private sexual behaviour. The freedom of the individual to speak out, to worship without hindrance and to participate in government is the basis of this society. Yet the Catholic Church has persisted with an oligarchic gerontocracy, failed to harness its laity, resisted review of celibacy and maintained its women in secondary status. Oh, yes, and it has all but lost its intelligentsia. All this happened in Scotland as elsewhere.

There have been remarkable changes in the Scottish society that brought a cardinal to prominence in his own country and found him the recipient of praise from all political parties at the time of his death. Tom Winning was a product of the dark Lanarkshire that sheltered anti-Catholicism and characterised his co-religionists as foreigners in their own country. His assertiveness in the media was, no doubt, a continuing reaction to the second-class citizenship endowed on his community at that time. He was rightly determined the views of his Church would be heard. Again, the happy circumstance of the Pope being received by young men in kilts at Murrayfield must have made Winning the Scotsman swell with justifiable pride. There were very many people at those gatherings who, like him, wanted to assert and celebrate publicly their Catholic version of being Scottish. If ever there was a mass "coming out", that was it. What the future Cardinal missed was that the new Catholic middle class would then disappear into anonymity, indifferent to a Church unwilling to move with the rest of society and hostile to intellectual questioning.

Cardinal Winning was indeed a man of the people but he often seemed to be more especially a man of one section of the people: the working class, Celtic-supporting Catholics who were comfortable with the old-time besieged religion and its structures. Ironically, Tom Winning's later disputes with the Labour Party opened the way for dialogue between Catholic cleric and SNP leadership in a way that superseded a century's blind loyalties to Labour almost overnight. That was one of his great triumphs: Cardinal Winning made the Catholic Church Scottish.

His encouragement of young journalists in the 1960s to report news from Rome after the Second Vatican Council, despite the Scottish Catholic hierarchy's attempt to suppress this information, did him great credit. But on the whole, Tom Winning was neither politician nor diplomat. He was a fighting parish priest more in the mould of Barry Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and Don Camillo.

When he tried to be a politician - someone who translates a policy into legislative action - his bravery was breathtaking but foolhardy, and sometimes near disastrous.

The Church is an organisation as well as a mission and it needs good administration. The notorious case of the #8 million deficit in the Glasgow Archdiocese was an example of his not-thought-through style. Again, the money to prevent abortions is a unique example of someone who adopts a high moral tone but puts money where his mouth is. Although it was sincere, such a policy is not sustainable in the end. As a way of dealing with unplanned pregnancies, it was woefully short of understanding the context of poor sex education, the need for contraception and the endemic sexual pressures of contemporary society. And yet some of these factors were affecting, depleting and even corrupting the priesthood itself.

The Church is not an alternative government and it should not behave as one. The welfare of children is the highest good yet the Cardinal's buccaneering action was in many ways counter-productive. It postponed again the Church's acknowledgement of the reality of our society: sex between consenting adults over 16 is agreed in law. Politics established that moral choices belong to the individual. Yet his Church continued to oppose contraception, refused the debate on sexuality and failed all those ignorant and hapless teenagers who fell pregnant.

Cardinal Winning shouted loud and it was refreshing to find a churchman with the courage to oppose the immorality of, for example, the Falklands and the violence against Afghans at home. But he made no progress at all in opposing the wrong-headed policies of his own Church. The issue of secularising the Church itself was never even on the agenda. Cardinal Winning gained his red hat because he operated well within the conservative parameters of the present Pope. For a British churchman to criticise government still creates a frisson but how much more valuable it would have been to his flock and the community in general if the Cardinal had also moved his own Church along the road of reform.

His legacy is two-fold: the Catholic Church in Scotland is no longer for foreigners; it is part of the community. The Catholic Church in Scotland is also intellectually enfeebled, it has lost its middle class, it has stuck with its calamitous teaching on contraception and done nothing to secularise its governing establishment nor lobby in Rome for those sorts of changes.

The diplomats and intellectuals like Bishop Joseph Devine have grown old in post. Where is the Archbishop who will shout loudly within the Church itself?

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