Last week we reported on the pressure on bishops to downsize from large residences. In Scotland, the newly installed Bishop of Paisley, John Keenan, is leading by example by choosing to live in the Clydesdale town of Greenock, described by the novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp as a “cemetery with two lamp posts”. Bishops past have lived in a grand sandstone villa in a leafy corner of Renfrewshire. The 49-year-old bishop is living in a church property in St Laurence’s, in the east end of Greenock, an area once generously described as “socially ambiguous” and where even the police cars are said to go round in pairs. It isn’t an entirely surprising decision for Bishop Keenan, who grew up in a high-rise block in Glasgow’s Maryhill (universally know
16 April 2014, The Tablet
Resurrection of Greenock
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