John Fitzsimmons was one of the more controversial Roman Catholic priests of his generation. A popular broadcaster and theological radical, he was hailed by some as an intellectual crusader but resented by others as a self-publicist whose espousal of the certainties of 1960s liberalism was out of touch with the increasingly nuanced, reflective mood of the modern Roman Church.

An undoubtedly able and charismatic man, for three years he was the Rector of the Scots College in Rome, responsible for preparing the brightest students for the priesthood. He was eventually removed by the Scottish bishops, who felt that the academic training he provided was misrepresenting Catholic orthodoxy.

In particular, Fitzsimmons’s enthusiasm for modern biblical criticism was unpopular with some in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. To bishops who feared that the faith of their congregations might be disturbed by the sort of scholarship which questions, for instance, whether the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually said by Him, Fitzsimmons replied that the people in the pews had already intuitively reached the same conclusions as the biblical scholars he admired.

It would be easy to misrepresent this — as Fitzsimmons’s supporters and detractors alike were apt to do — as a 20th-century rerun of the battles fought by Wycliffe, Cranmer and the like. In fact, the modern Church’s view of biblical scholarship is more subtle and complex than Fitzsimmons was willing to believe, as may be seen from Pope Benedict XVI’s thoughtful exploration of the subject in his book Jesus of Nazareth.

John Fitzsimmons was born in Paisley. His father was Catholic and his Protestant mother of Huguenot stock later became a devout Catholic too. From St Mary’s Primary School in Paisley he went to Blairs College, the magnet for those set on the priesthood, and then to the Scots College in Rome, an austere seminary where only the annual Gilbert and Sullivan operas, in which Fitzsimmons always took a leading role, relieved the disciplined atmosphere. He took a degree in philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University.

These were the days of Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council. Fitzsimmons was chosen to be a stenographer at the council, whose refreshing spirit he welcomed wholeheartedly.

His later conflicts with the church hierarchy, and in particular with the head of the Church in Scotland, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Thomas Winning, stemmed from a profound difference of opinion as to the meaning and legacy of the council. Under the long pontificate of John Paul II, these disagreements became more bitter, with many Catholics of Fitzsimmons’s generation and bent coming to feel that the radical hopes they had invested in the council had been betrayed. In response, the hierarchy would argue that it was simply a mistake to see Vatican II as representing a dramatic break with the tradition of the Church.

Fitzsimmons pursued postgraduate work in biblical studies at the Gregorian University, then in Beirut, Jordan and Jerusalem. Fluent in Italian, French and German, he was well versed in the languages of biblical scholarship, Greek, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic and Syriac. He worked for a while with the archaeologist Roland de Vaux on the Dead Sea Scrolls site at Qumran.

Returning to Scotland in the 1960s he was appointed curate of St Mary’s Greenock. He subsequently taught biblical studies at St Peter’s College in Cardross, at St Andrew’s Training College for Roman Catholic teachers in Glasgow and lectured at the University of Glasgow for Professor Robert Davidson.

He was a member of the important International Comission on English in the Liturgy, which often took him to the commission’s headquarters in Washington, and he was joint chairman of the Church of Scotland/Roman Catholic Commission on Doctrine. By the early 1980s he was a curate at St Joseph’s in the Clarkston area of Glasgow, where the academically minded congregation loved him.

In 1982 the Pope visited Scotland, and Fitzsimmons was invited to write the Pope’s homily at the huge Mass in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, including the famous passage in which John Paul II spoke about a pilgrimage “hand in hand” with other Christians. He also edited the commemorative brochure for the visit. It was no surprise when in 1986 he was appointed Rector of the Scots College in Rome.

Fitzsimmons was critical of the academic standards there and soon found himself at loggerheads with the hierarchy and the Scottish bishops who finally brought him back to Greenock where he spent 12 happy years in the parish of St John Bosco in Erskine —“I was exiled to Siberia,” he used to say, “and to the great annoyance of the Church I loved it!” He continued to be outspokenly critical of the church hierarchy, and eventually was instructed to retire, and he moved to a clergy house in Gourock near by.

A fine preacher, Fitzsimmons was also an effective broadcaster, presenting a programme of popular music and greetings on BBC Radio Scotland.

He could be tactless, but the qualities that put him at odds with the hierarchy made him popular with parishioners and many of his fellow priests. Ultimately, however, for all his disagreements with his bishops, he was motivated always by his own particular loyalty to the Church he loved and to the people he served.

Father John Fitzsimmons, biblical and liturgical scholar and parish priest, was born on December 2, 1939. He died after a long illness on May 17, 2008, aged 68