Bishop Hugh Gilbert, the Bishop of Aberdeen and President of the Bishops' Conference of Scotland, was the main concelebrant at Archbishop Philip's Requiem Mass, and was joined by Mgr Hugh Bradley (Archdiocesan Administrator) and Canon Gerry Tartaglia (Archbishop Philip's brother).

Bishop Hugh's lovely homily is reproduced below:

“Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day.”

There are so many settings in which to have known Archbishop Philip: as a member of his family, or in his school and student days, in Rome, in the seminaries and parishes he served, as Bishop of Paisley and Archbishop of Glasgow. There were the many circles he moved in: of ecumenical dialogue, Catholic education about which he was so engaged and realistic, the civic life of Glasgow, not forgetting its sport. So many people touched by him, so many aspects to a life, so many perspectives to view it from. Three score years and ten. Our memories are fragments of a greater whole, and that whole – the mystery of a person - is in the mind and hands of God. “On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven a perfect round.”

Today, in Christ, we remember Philip’s life, we give thanks for it and we pray for its completion and the comfort of the bereaved. We bring him and ourselves before God in a literal and metaphorical great Eucharistic prayer of hope and affection.