Catholics In Scotland Research Articles

Celtic FC’s 1967 Lisbon Lions: why the European Cup victory of the first club from Britain was a defining moment for the Irish diaspora in Scotland

ABSTRACTIn 1967, in Lisbon, Celtic Football Club, won the European Cup becoming the first club outside of Portugal, Spain and Italy to win it. The win was and is totemic for the Irish Catholic immigrant community in Scotland that has historically supported Celtic. We suggest the significance of the win reveals intersections of ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and the politics of ‘sectarianism’ in Scotland. During a period of discriminatory practices and attitudes towards Irish descended Catholics in Scotland, this iconic win for a Scottish based club born of Irish Catholics personified for this diaspora that (on one level) their day had arrived. This article explores the socio-cultural significance and legacy of ‘Lisbon 67ʹ for insider and outsider groups in Scotland. We reveal that soccer remains a central component of group memory connecting the past, present and future. We suggest Celtic’s win offered confidence and hope to a marginalized group within Scotland.

Does equality legislation reduce intergroup differences? Religious affiliation, socio-economic status and mortality in Scotland and Northern Ireland: A cohort study of 400,000 people

Religion frequently indicates membership of socio-ethnic groups with distinct health behaviours and mortality risk. Determining the extent to which interactions between groups contribute to variation in mortality is often challenging. We compared socio-economic status (SES) and mortality rates of Protestants and Catholics in Scotland and Northern Ireland, regions in which interactions between groups are profoundly different. Crucially, strong equality legislation has been in place for much longer and Catholics form a larger minority in Northern Ireland. Drawing linked Census returns and mortality records of 404,703 people from the Scottish and Northern Ireland Longitudinal Studies, we used Poisson regression to compare religious groups, estimating mortality rates and incidence rate ratios. We fitted age-adjusted and fully adjusted (for education, housing tenure, car access and social class) models. Catholics had lower SES than Protestants in both countries; the differential was larger in Scotland for education, housing tenure and car access but not social class. In Scotland, Catholics had increased age-adjusted mortality risk relative to Protestants but variation among groups was attenuated following adjustment for SES. Those reporting no religious affiliation were at similar mortality risk to Protestants. In Northern Ireland, there was no mortality differential between Catholics and Protestants either before or after adjustment. Men reporting no religious affiliation were at increased mortality risk but this differential was not evident among women. In Scotland, Catholics remained at greater socio-economic disadvantage relative to Protestants than in Northern Ireland and were also at a mortality disadvantage. This may be due to a lack of explicit equality legislation that has decreased inequality by religion in Northern Ireland during recent decades.

Education, employment and school religious denomination in Scotland in the 1950s

Newly available survey data allow the investigation of the educational and employment opportunities open to Roman Catholics in Scotland in the mid-20th century. Previous research has shown that Catholic disadvantage in education and the labour market in the early 20th century had weakened or vanished by the end of the century, and that the main change in that respect had come with the advent of comprehensive secondary schooling in the 1960s. However, the extension of Catholic secondary schooling started in the 1920s. The data used here allow an investigation of whether the Catholic disadvantage was mitigated by these earlier reforms, and thus allow an assessment of whether a selective school system was able to overcome an important dimension of social disadvantage. The data come from a cohort study of a representative sample of people born in 1936 (first surveyed in 1947 and followed up annually to 1963). Evidence is available on social background, on cognitive ability measured at age 11, on secondary school courses, on educational achievement after leaving school, and on social-class status at age 27. The conclusions are that the continued social disadvantage of Catholics was not due to any aspect of the school education which they had received.

Representations of the ‘State of Popery’ in Scotland in the 1720s and 1730s

This collection of documents mainly consists of manuscripts held in the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. The records all relate to Catholics in Scotland in the 1720s and 1730s and to the state of the Scottish Mission in that period. All but one were penned by Church of Scotland ministers and Royal Bounty catechists. The remaining item is a memorial to Propaganda Fide written by a Scottish Catholic. These riveting accounts shed valuable light on the Scottish Mission and on the contrasting perceptions Protestants and Catholics had of the ‘State of Popery’ in the early eighteenth century.

Unionism, Nationalism and the Scottish Catholic Periphery, 1850–1930

This article investigates the relationship between nationalism, unionism and Catholicism between 1850 and 1930 and proposes that ideas about the Scottish nation and national identity had a strong connection with the re-emergence and development of Catholicism. The presence of a large Irish-born and Irish-descended Catholic population meant that although there was a peripheral sensitivity to Ireland and an intellectual curiosity with Home Rule, indigenous Catholics remained deeply committed to the Scottish nation within the British state. A majority of Catholics in Scotland saw themselves as loyal British subjects, as nation builders and as the ambassadors of an imperial ideal. Understanding how Catholic identity was defined and how far this influenced, or was influenced by, the construction of a national identity is critical for achieving an understanding of the complexities of nationalism in Scotland. The parallels that exist between Catholicism's position on the periphery of Scottish society and Scotland's status within Britain is an overarching theme in this article that focuses on a period of intense national self-reflection and identity construction.

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

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 figures who tried to create and sustain a sense of community now have their biographers.6

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

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...

‘How the Irish Paid Their Debt’: Irish Catholics in Scotland and Voluntary Enlistment, August 1914-July 1915.

The Irish in Scotland were accustomed to a measure of flattery from visiting political luminaries. John Dillon’s platform performance on 18 April 1915 was no exception. Yet amid the florid tributes, his message was a grave one: ‘...of all classes of the community, there was none who contributed so many recruits in the new army as the Irish in Great Britain’. Drawing on statistics compiled by the United Irish League of Great Britain (UILGB) from district and parish returns, he declared that 27,511 Irishmen or sons of Irishmen had joined the colours, in addition to the 10,000 who were already serving as regular army soldiers or reservists. Statistics from the same source indicated that by the end of 1914 Glasgow alone had provided 8000 enlistments, Edinburgh 1648, and Dundee and Clydebank some 2000 each. The Rolls of Honour of individual parishes across Scotland told the story in microcosm. St Joseph’s, a small parish in the North Woodside area of Glasgow, had 273 men serving with the colours in October 1914, while St Peter’s in Partick and St Luke’s in Govan had 526 parishioners in uniform between them by the end of the year. An estimated 251 from St Andrew’s congregation in Dumfries were on war service, while in Stirling 60 members of the Catholic Young Men’s Society enlisted together in Kitchener’s Army, swelling the total from the parish in the forces to 154. The great majority of these men served in Scottish regiments. Logistically in the opening months of the war, these local units were simply the most convenient to join the young men who made the long journey from Balerno in January 1915 to join the Dublin Fusiliers at their Irish depot were untypical in this respect. In time, this pattern of recruitment was to become a political issue for leading Irish Nationalists, but in the The Scottish Historical Review, Volume LXXXII, 2: No. 214: October 2003, 261–284

Sectarianism at work: Accounts of employment discrimination against Irish Catholics in Scotland

This article examines accounts of discrimination in employment against Irish Catholics in Glasgow from both majority and minority ethnic and ­religious perspectives. It reveals evidence of continuing experience of sectarian discrimination in work. Of particular note is the existence of discriminatory practice affecting Catholic (Irish-descended) attempts to move up the social scale. This evidence disputes the thoroughness of analyses which ignore discrimination experience as relevant to the current social-class position of Glasgow's Irish Catholic community. The analysis presented here also questions the practice of excluding 'white' ethnic groups from most studies of ethnicity in Britain and considers whether sectarianism or racism might most aptly describe experiences marked out by religious belonging but clearly denoting ethnic origin. As part of a wider study of prolonged and continuing health disadvantage among the Irish in Britain, it is suggested that discrimination is one component in any explanation of the health of the Irish or Irish Catholic minority, whose minority experience is usually overlooked by researchers of ethnicity.

The transatlantic Catholic conservativism of Colm Brogan

'What is wrong with the modern world is not that there too many Capitalists, but that there are too few.'1 So wrote Arnold Lunn in 1939. In a sense he was simply reiterating the teachings of Rerum Novarum, the ideas of Chesterton and his enthusiastic, if unsuccessful, Scottish Back-to-the-Land followers. Admittedly he then proceeded somewhat further in an ultra-conservative direction than the vast majority of Catholics in Scotland would have in his hostility to the political Left. To Lunn the unprincipled, irreligious creed of Socialist revolution, bureaucracy and repression inevitably meant a totalitarian state. If his views, like many of his English contemporaries, were coloured by the Spanish Civil War, they did strike a chord with some significant Scottish Catholic figures who nurtured and developed them during the Second World War and the post-war era. Those Catholic writers and activists rejected both the welfare state and Communism, and later the momentous changes of Vatican II. This essay seeks to challenge some prevailing Scottish Catholic historical orthodoxies. It questions the simple ethnic 'Irish' character, poverty, social exclusion and the inevitable mass support for the Labour party within Scottish Catholicism in modern times: Catholic virtue did not necessarily find expression at Parkhead.2 In doing so it argues that there is a neglected resurgent conservative and Conservative tradition within the community; a concern for independent spirits, a deep suspicion of the state and an enthusiastic pursuit of respectability. Such apprehensions were well founded among Irish, Italian, Lithuanian and Polish migrants. The state at home or in Scotland had often appeared hostile to their ethnic and religious interests. It reflected

Morbidity and Irish Catholic descent in Britain: Relating health disadvantage to socio-economic position

In common with some other ethnic and religious minorities whose forebears migrated from their country of origin, Irish Catholics in Britain are less well off than the host population in terms of socio-economic position and health. Results are presented from a Scottish study, where Catholic religion of origin mainly indicates Irish ancestry, and it is estimated that about one-third of the population is of significant Irish descent. In this study, excess of physical and mental health problems and disability have previously been reported for those of Catholic background, particularly in the eldest cohort (aged 56 in 1988), and have not been fully explained by health-related behaviour. In this paper, we examine a number of key health measures, namely self-assessed health, number of symptoms in the month prior to interview, sadness or depression, disability and lung function, and various indicators of socio-economic position (head of household social class, main source of income, car ownership, housing tenure and school-leaving age), which all show Catholic disadvantage. Using longitudinal results from the 723 respondents who completed interviews both at sweeps one (1988) and three (1995), it is estimated that about half of the morbidity excess amongst middle-aged Catholics in Glasgow can be explained by socio-economic disadvantage. The health and socio-economic position of white minorities and disadvantaged religious minorities like Catholics in Scotland should be monitored by a co-ordinated information strategy.

The Social Class of Catholics in Scotland

Summary The social status of people brought up as Catholics in Scotland, as measured by their occupational class, is analysed by using cross-sectional survey data gathered in 1997. The main finding is that Catholics have probably risen in social status to a greater extent than non-Catholics. The experience of Scottish Catholics seems to be distinctive, because no such patterns are found for England, and indeed in this respect Scottish Catholics more closely resemble members of non-Christian religions in England than they do English Catholics. The most likely explanation is the particular role which state-funded Catholic schools have played in Scotland, especially the system of comprehensive secondary schools that was set up after 1965. However, the analysis is suggestive rather than definitive and needs to be replicated on cohort data with larger sample sizes.

Profile of a Roman Catholic Parish in Scotland

In 1755, Alexander Webster estimated there were just 16,490 Catholics in Scotland. By the last quarter of (he 18th century the economically discarded Catholic peasants of the Western Highlands and Islands began to migrate either to the New World or to the industrialising Lowlands. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the numbers of Catholics in Scotland rose dramatically as a result of Irish immigration.

CATHOLIC MARRIAGE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTLAND

The marriage customs of Scotland's Catholic minority, though they made up only one twentieth of the eighteenth-century population, may nevertheless be of general interest to social historians.1 Mainly confined to the Gaelic north-west and to the Gordon lands of the north-east, these survivors were able to maintain their rites of passage within a sternly anti-Catholic state. The eighteenth century provides a convenient illustration of their changing circumstances. It started with a reaffirmation of the penal laws after a brief period of indulgence under the Catholic James VII and II, last of the Stuart monarchs. The defeated Jacobites were sustained politically during the first half of the century by hopes that the dynasty would be restored, until they were finally crushed in 1746. There followed a fresh period of repression, but the century ended with relieving legislation to secure Scottish Catholics in their property. This effectively removed the penalties attached to their marriages, though full acceptance of the ceremonies performed by clergymen outside the Established Church was delayed until 1834. It was in the period after the penal laws affecting marriage had been repealed that very high levels of illegitimacy were recorded in Catholic baptismal registers. In some areas a late nineteenth-century peak of 50 per cent illegitimacy was recorded, and although this was associated with social disintegration it was also attributed by Catholic authorities to a 'cursed inheritance' .2 Did the roots of illegitimacy lie in the difficulty which unlawful communities had earlier had in marrying before a lawful clergyman? The Catholic Church's traditional teaching on marriage was that a clergyman did not have to be present. The question of whether the sacrament occurred at the exchange of consent or at consummation was debated by canon lawyers,3 but its validity owed nothing to the priest. This was clarified for Scotland by one of the last pre-Reformation bishops4 and passed into the irregular marriage of Scots Law. Both Reformation and Counter-Reformation authorities sought, often unsuccessfully, to bring marriage under church control, but the Council of Trent's decree that it should be a public affair, involving banns, priest and congregation, was not proclaimed for Catholics in Scotland until 1908. Three forms of irregular marriage were recognised in Scots Law until 1940 (when registry-office weddings were introduced): public consent of the couple, with or without consummation; public betrothal, followed by intercourse (as usually evidenced by pregnancy); and, mainly of concern to children after the death of a parent, marriage 'by habit and repute'. Church and state agreed that a marriage which had been made public in any of these ways was valid, but in ecclesiastical terms it was unlawful. In Canon Law a marriage had to be solemnised in facie ecclesiae. The Reformers, while abandoning most of the impediments of consanguinity and affinity and introducing divorce for adultery,

POLITICS AND THE CATHOLIC COMMUNITY SINCE 1878

This essay tries to examine some aspects of the political attitudes of Catholics in Scotland as they have developed in the last 100 years. Some of these aspects have been discussed or touched on in articles and books which have appeared over the last thirty or forty years most notably in J. E. Handley's The Irish in Modern Scotland (1947).1 These have, in the main and quite properly, tried to assess Catholic political reactions in such terms as the effect of the Irish Home Rule struggle

THE MASS STONES OF LOCHABER

Of the great number of letters and documents that have survived to illustrate the history of the Catholic community in Scotland during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only a small proportion deals with the Catholics who lived in the Highlands and in the Hebrides. We are not well informed on the practical details of the religious observance of Gaelic-speaking Catholics in Scotland and to fill out our meagre information on the subject, we have to deduce what we can from contemporary practice in the Lowlands of Scotland and also in Ireland which, throughout this period, was always in close communication with the Catholic population of north-west Scotland. Among these practical details of religious observance were the circumstances in which mass was celebrated in the Highlands and Isles during the two centuries which followed the Reformation. Travelling missionary priests were not always available, but when a priest was resident for a time in any particular district, how often did he say mass and where was mass celebrated?