Forging the compact of church and state in the development of Catholic education in late nineteenth-century Scotland

Abstract

Introduction: the contexts of Catholic schooling As post-devolution Scotland passes the milestone of a third Scottish parliamentary election, the question of state-suppo rted Catholic education, and the peculiar nature of the 1918 UK l egislation that underpins it, is once again the subject of intense scrutiny. Emboldened by devolution and fuelled by a wave of progressive UK and European law concerned with issues of equality and diversity , opponents of separate Catholic schools have renewed their demands for the provisions of the 1918 Act to be reviewed or, indee d, abolished. With the ninetieth anniversary of the passage of the Act approaching, influential commentators from across the political spectrum have argued that its principal terms reflect the social and religious controversies of a distant era, increasingly incong ruent with the inclusive culture of a multiethnic and mostly secul ar twenty-first century Scotland. 1 The character and scale of the objections currentl y levelled at the continued existence of Catholic sch ools in Scotland suggests that reconsideration of the transactions b etween Church and State that led to the signing of the 1918 Act is pe rhaps overdue ‐ especially as a realignment of the relationship bet ween the two forces seems currently to be well advanced. This article examines a particular phase in the rel ationship between the Catholic Church and the Scottish state authorit ies with reference to the development and reform of the Catholic schools system leading up to the watershed settlement of the 1918 Education A ct. It analyses the collaboration of Church and State in the context of wider developments in the culture of Scottish education in the period 1872‐1918, focusing particularly on the experience of Glasgow and the e mergence there of a fully state-supported network of Catholic schools. It brings to bear on the material from this period an interpretation tha t places greater emphasis than previous studies on wider state attit udes to institutional religion and changing perceptions of the role of Ch urches in the provision of mass education in a modern society. Th e concordat struck between the Scottish authorities and the Catholic C hurch in Scotland regarding the governance of schools in the early pa rt of the twentieth