by Ian Dunn

Fr Martin Chambers 8 June 1964 -10 April 2024

I couldn’t believe it. A text came through on Wednesday lunchtime. Fr Martin Chambers had died in his sleep the night before.

He was just 59, fit and healthy, and was due to be installed as Scotland’s newest bishop just two weeks later.

Like many others, I felt a grief with a real sharpness to it. We had lost a great priest, and a better man.

The grief rippled far beyond the parishes of his native Ayrshire where he had served for decades. Hundreds of Catholics who had travelled with him to Lourdes on HCPT pilgrimages when he was a chaplain added their voices. As did those in Ecuador where he spent five years working as a Missionary and founded a parish, and a charity to support the neediest in that parish when he returned to Scotland.

The news, a few months ago, that the Pope had appointed him Bishop of Dunkeld had been a surprise. He didn’t fit the traditional profile for a bishop, few of whom take a five-year sabbatical from parish life in their own diocese to work with the poorest of the poor on the other side of the world, but many of us were excited to see what he would accomplish there.

Deep faith

Yet reading through the reactions on social media from Catholics of every hue, bishops, priests, and laity, mixed with the grief was a common thread of laughter.

His great friend, the recently installed Bishop Frank Dougan of Galloway, said, ‘It was with a heavy heart and the deepest sadness that he learned of the news. To know Martin was to know a man of love, enthusiasm, humour, and a deep faith which enlivened all that he did’.

Erin Robertson, who went with him to Lourdes, said, ‘he changed my life! He taught me not to take myself seriously but my faith. I’m devastated and heartbroken’.

Archbishop William Nolan of Glasgow said he was shocked and saddened at the news. He added: ‘Martin’s death is a huge loss not only to his own diocese, and the diocese of Dunkeld where he had been appointed bishop, but for the whole Catholic Church in Scotland. When I was Bishop of Galloway I knew him well – a great priest, always welcoming, friendly, with a good sense of humour who worked so hard for his people’.

So many of the tributes mentioned the humour, the laughter, the songs, the dancing.

He was a man of great joy in his faith and he spread that joy freely. And he was funny.

I have met a lot of priests in my life. He’s the only one who ever made me fall off a bike laughing. Years back at a charity cycle, he told me a story about a funeral, the fast and the furious film franchise, and a packet of cooked meat that ended me. Shamelessly I have retold it many times since, always to howls of laughter.

That commitment to joy is something that was redoubled when he returned to Scotland after his time in Ecuador. He told me once that on his first night there he looked out and saw mile after mile of houses made of bamboo. ‘It was extreme poverty. I wondered what I was getting myself into’.

However, in time he came to love the ironically named shantytown of Nuevo Prospero where he was based and especially the people there.

‘The greatest joy of my time as a missionary priest came in walking the dusty streets of the shantytown, meeting the poor people, visiting their homes, and hearing their joys and sorrows’, he said.

‘Even though they had nothing, they had such joy. Despite all the poverty, there was a lot of happiness there. When I came back to Scotland, I was struck by how miserable a lot of people seemed. We have so much in comparison yet often it seems we don’t know how to be happy’.

Fr Martin Chambers found that joy in his faith.

It seems to me that all too often we have let the greyness of reality infect the carnival of Catholicism. That we have let our religion be defined by its most sober elements. That we have lost the joy of it.

Fr Martin Chambers crusaded against that his whole life. As we mourn him, we can best honour his memory by taking joy back into our Churches and out into the world. May he rest in peace.

Ian Dunn is a journalist and friend of Martin Chambers.