There’s a word guaranteed to strike fear in anyone’s heart when it is yelled at them. Cardinal Keith O’Brien will have heard it muttered in his direction over the last days.

What a very sudden, public and large fall from grace he has suffered. How very easy it would be for each one of us to point the finger, and jeer. Before we do that, though, we dwellers in glass houses might just look at our own lives and see if we are as pure as the driven snow… or maybe in our case, like his, we’re only as pure as the driven slush!

Whatever our own personal failings this whole episode seems to me to point up the fact that structures and organisations tend to force people to comply with rules, standards, sets of behaviour they don’t always fully agree with, and can’t totally accept, because human beings are complex creatures, not “things” to be pigeon holed or boxed up.

One commentator remarked on tv last week “If you don’t like the rules, then leave the club.” How easy to speak like that. How hard when a person can obey 9/10 of the club rules, and contribute hugely to its good. Would we really deny that person membership?

I hope that the poor Cardinal’s enormous efforts on behalf of the Church, the people he has served, and, of course, on God’s behalf, will not be completely devalued and ignored because he has made a very foolish, and possibly hurtful, mistake.

One of the hallmarks of God we think about during Lent is compassion. I hope that we - the armchair jury, the Church, and the people the Cardinal has hurt, can find some compassion in our hearts.