Catholic realities and pastoral strategies: another look at the historiography of Scottish Catholicism, 1878–1920

Abstract

Catholic realities and pastoral strategies:another look at the historiography of Scottish Catholicism, 1878–1920 Bernard Aspinwall (bio) Keywords Irish, poverty, marriage, children, temperance, revivals 'What can you see with your Second Sight?''The past and the future. Only the present is dark''But that's where we live'1 Catholics in Scotland and their historians have recounted their past in several ways. We have many celebrations of the faithful Irish immigrant steadfastness while their Scottish-born brethren have had at best negligible recognition.2 At the other extreme the Banffshire-born conservative priest Rev. Aeneas Dawson airbrushed the Irish from his massive nineteenth-century history: even Daniel O'Connell did not merit a mention. On the other side, the pioneering lay activist James Walsh virtually ignored native-born Scots in his monumental study.3 In more recent times several historians have begun to capture something of the complexity of the Catholic experience.4 The independent-minded Catholic laity, restless Irish-born clergy and working class leaders have received consideration. Highlanders, Italians, Lithuanians, Belgians, Poles, English, converts and religious orders of men and women have received some long overdue attention.5 Some leading clerical and lay [End Page 77] figures who tried to create and sustain a sense of community now have their biographers.6 Our roseate view of the past has been further jolted in recent times. The past was as chequered as the present. Family relationships of earlier generations, for example, were not always perfect. Evidence of the continuity of mixed marriages before, during and in the wake of Ne temere (1908) has further challenged older notions.7 The late Cardinal Winning was deeply distressed by his father's illegitimacy, his grandfather's abandonment of his family.8 Even the great hero of the Celtic faithful, Jock Stein was a nominal Presbyterian with Orange links and married to a lapsed Catholic.9 Mixed marriages throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were far more common than imagined. Evidence of a loose floating group of affiliated Catholic laity in the last century is becoming more apparent.10 Relations between clergy and laity were not infrequently strained: clashes in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh or mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow, late nineteenth-century labour movements or early twentieth-century socialists or Sixties radical laity are rarely seen as a common thread.11 Even in earlier days some clergy abandoned their calling through drink, women or a spiritual crisis: abandonment of a priestly vocation, whatever a selective [End Page 78] Catholic memory would like to believe, is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon.12 But like the old 'invincible ignorance' of pre-Vatican II days, the entrenched stereotypes still persist, particularly in any debate about sectarianism.13 We should be mature and honest enough to follow Pope John Paul II, accept our failings of the past and apologise profoundly for any offence given. Poor law records allow us to re-examine many stereotypes. A largely neglected area, they provide detailed personal histories. They allow us to see how and why individuals fell through social and religious safety nets and give an indication of successful pastoral care. Displaced, aged, ailing or unemployed poor were a permanent feature of the fluctuating Victorian economy. The records of their desperate plight help to explain why the Church adopted a particular pastoral strategy and to what extent it succeeded. The Scottish Poor Law (1845) sought to regulate the poor, to inculcate the 'right' ethos and contain challenges to the existing order: a righteous alliance of evangelical religion and political economy would, according to Rev. Thomas Chalmers, prevent irresponsible benevolence.14 In the wake of that legislation Glasgow had set up four poor law administrative units; Glasgow City parish poorhouse, established on Parliamentary Road, and the Barony with its poorhouse at Barnhill, while Govan and Gorbals administered the areas south of the Clyde. In the later nineteenth century these units consolidated: in 1873 Govan and Gorbals merged and in 1898 Glasgow and the Barony also merged. [End Page 79] The Barony parish covered a considerable area beyond the then existing Glasgow City municipal boundaries. It covered between two and five or six miles of the city except south of the...