Scottish Catholic Research Articles

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.

Historiography of the Scottish Reformation: The Catholics Fight Back?

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in the Records of the Scottish Church History Society: ‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’s History, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).

John Carmont, The Mitchell Trust and Scottish Catholicism, 1865–1885

This article will consider the mismanagement during the years 1865–1885 of the benefaction made by Thomas Mitchell, a convert and one-time military man, to the Catholic Church in Scotland, as well as a number of other financial difficulties that beset the Church during this period. In doing so, it will reveal how the Scottish bishops, under enormous pressures because of Irish migration, acted in ways not only unbecoming of their offices, but also beyond the scope of both civil and canon law. Yet, as will be seen, the Church was developing as an institution and, in many ways, the difficulties of these years were necessary if it was to re-develop as a fully-fledged and autonomous national Church.

The Revival of Music in the Post-Reformation Catholic Church in Scotland

This article presents a narrative description of the state of music in the Scottish Catholic Church from the Reformation up to the publication of George Gordon’s collection of church music c.1830. For the first two hundred years after the Reformation, Scottish Catholics worshipped in virtual silence owing to the oppressive penal laws then in force. In the late eighteenth century religious toleration increased and several members of the clergy and other interested parties attempted to reintroduce singing into the worship of the Scottish Catholic Church. In this they were thwarted by the ultra-cautious attitude of the Vicar-Apostolic for the Lowland District, Bishop George Hay, who refused to allow any music in Catholic churches in case it should inflame Protestant opinion. Only after his retirement could the reintroduction take place, and the speed at which it was achieved bears witness to the enthusiasm and commitment of Scottish clergy and laity for church music. Research in this area is long overdue, and it is hoped that this article will form a basis for further investigations.

Scholars and Spies – Three Humanists in the Service of James VI/I

Three humanist scholars, alumni of the Scottish Catholic college of St Andrew in the Spanish Netherlands, were recruited into the spy service of King James VI/I as intelligencers and couriers. As members of the ‘Republic of Letters’ Thomas Dempster, Thomas Reid and Thomas Seget were well placed to travel throughout Europe as well as correspond with fellow humanists at all the major courts. In doing so they were able to provide intelligence which helped James in his ambitions of becoming king of England and obtaining dynastic marriages for his children but they also pandered to his vain belief that he was a scholar of distinction. This paper attempts to show how their relationships to the King developed and what benefits these scholars derived from their service.

Modern Scottish Catholicism A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning

Modern Scottish Catholicism <i>A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning</i>

Being Scottish in an Irish Catholic Church in a Scottish Presbyterian Settlement: Otago's Scottish Catholics, 1848–1895

This article examines the contribution of Scottish Catholics to the development of Catholicism in Otago, New Zealand in the later nineteenth century. In particular it looks at the curious position they occupied in a colony defined by the religious and national identity of its founding group: Scottish Presbyterians from the Free Church. For over two decades a nascent Catholic Church in Otago was led by Scots and ministered to by French missionaries. As the colony progressed, however, and its population became more heterogeneous, this pioneer Scots Catholic leadership was sidelined. From 1871 an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic community was led by Bishop Patrick Moran who played on national and religious loyalties to fuse an Irish and Catholic identity among his flock. Scots nonetheless continued to make a distinctive contribution to Catholicism in southern New Zealand, adapting to the Irish flavour of the colonial Church but bringing to it useful elements from their Scottish background.

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.

&lt;em&gt;Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Frank Ferguson and James McConnel

Reviewed by: Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century Crawford Gribben (bio) Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Frank Ferguson and James McConnel; pp. 182. Dublin and Portland: Four Courts Press, 2009, £50.00, $70.00. This wide-ranging collection of twelve essays complicates the stabilities of the Victorian age in Ireland and Scotland. Its authors, many of them early career academics, consider topics as variant as tourism, agricultural technology, economics, tuberculosis, and [End Page 334] sectarian parades. A number of chapters make significant contributions to their individual fields of study. Each investigates the "cosy roseat glow of pan-Celticism" (7), and many of the finest chapters unpack aspects of the "complicated nature of Ulster-Scottish identity" (9), an identity that, Clare M. Norcio explains, inhabits a "cultural no-man's land between Irishness and Scottishness" (31). Thus the volume's editors are at pains to emphasise that "this book is not simply about varieties of Hiberno-Scottish tension," and that "dissonance is one of the central themes to emerge from this collection" (7). Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century is at its stongest when its contributors adopt the comparative approach that makes best sense of the project's objectives. Kevin James's essay on "Scotland and 'Tourist Development' in Late-Victorian Ireland" is a suggestive exploration of a theme that is increasingly recognised as important across disciplines. James's account demonstrates that national image was being formed in tourist discourse in comparative and often evaluative terms. Norcio's study of "Societies and Seminaries: Technological Exchange in Ulster Agriculture" provides a nice case study of the means by which farming in northeast Ireland was supposedly improved by those who were and those who merely believed themselves to be Scots. Andrew R. Holmes's discussion of "Irish Presbyterian Commemorations of their Scottish Past, c. 1830–1914" contextualises the complexities of one kind of identity formation in the largest Protestant denomination in the northeast and advances the conclusions of his important recent work in this area. Frank Ferguson's consideration of "'The Third Character': The Articulation of Scottish Identities in Two Irish Writers" similarly observes the tensions and opportunities provided by this juxtaposition, if not combination, of nations, literatures, and cultures. Peter Gray's investigation of "Thomas Chalmers and Irish Poverty," meanwhile, is a masterful discussion of an unjustifiably overlooked theme in nineteenth-century Irish-Scottish relations, and Patrick Maume's essay, "From Scotland's Storied Land: William McComb and Scots-Irish Presbyterian Identity," provides a thorough and insightful analysis of one of the period's most widely read representatives of this distinctive confessional and cultural tradition. Matthew Potter's essay, "The Urban Local State in Scotland and Ireland to 1900: Parallels and Contrasts," demonstrates a series of parallels that appear surprising in the context of the political differentiation that had, historically, marked these islands. Susan Kelly's "Tuberculosis Cures Used in Ireland, 1700–1950" strays outside the collection's chronological boundaries to extremely good effect, drawing especially richly on the older folkways, the influence of which lingered into and beyond the nineteenth century. Richard B. McCready's investigation of Dundee St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the second half of the nineteenth century offers a surprising account of a diaspora's construction of a national identity in exile, as well as a description of national difference within the boundaries of Scottish Catholicism. Finally, Amy O'Reilly's study of the Hibernian Society of Glasgow from 1792 to 1824, though oddly placed toward the end of the collection, neatly juxtaposes its conclusions with those of S. Karly Kehoe's "Irish Migrants and the Recruitment of Catholic Sisters in Glasgow, 1847–1878" to demonstrate the complexity of the often transreligious character of Irish institutions in Scotland and the frequent divisions between Irish and Scottish adherents within the institutions of Scottish Catholicism. Despite these and other achievements, the essays in this volume do not address the breadth of topic promised in the title. A subtitle would have clarified those [End Page 335] aspects of Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century with which the collection aimed especially to deal, and might have explained the rationale for including the final essay...

A Scottish Jesuit from Antwerp: Hippolytus Curle

A memorial for Mary, Queen of Scots, and for two of her ladies-in-waiting, Barbara Mowbray-Curle, wife of Gilbert Curle, a secretary of the queen, and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Curle is kept in St Andrew's Church in Antwerp (Belgium). The monument was founded by Barbara's son, Hippolytus. After the execution of the queen the ladies left England and settled first in Paris and afterwards in Antwerp. The article concentrates on the two sons of Barbara, who became Jesuits. Little is known about the elder, James. He died in 1615 in Spain, probably still a Jesuit student. The younger one, Hippolytus (who died in 1638), acted as a manager in the Scots College in Douai (France). He is praised as one of the principal benefactors of the college. More particularly the article comments on the testament he drew up when he joined the Jesuit order in September 1618, of which an authenticated copy is kept in the Scottish Catholic Archives. It offers a telling insight into the situation of the Curle-Mowbray family in exile. It reveals also the family's major concern: the restoration of Catholicism in Scotland through the training of a suitable clergy.

Gospel, poverty and Catholic schools

Catholic schools in Scotland have a long history of serving the needs of the poor and are called to share in the contemporary Catholic preferential option for the poor and the international and national initiatives that include addressing the problem of child poverty through school education. The Catholic preferential option for the poor and the international/national discourse on the eradication of poverty in relation to Catholic schools are, however, underpinned by some fundamental concepts and discussions that require deeper exploration. First, the gospel conceptualisation of poverty, heavily rooted in the Jewish understanding of the poor and the role of the poor, requires elucidation as it is often underdeveloped. Second, the contemporary discussion about the nature and scope of poverty in the Western world and, in particular, how this impacts on children and their education, also requires attention as this will have significant implications for Catholic schools. This article aims to provide an initial exploration of these fundamental concepts and discussions and attempts to identify possible correlation and links between the gospel concept of poverty and the contemporary discussion on Western poverty. The article will explore the Lukan concept of the poor as ‘the excluded’ and the contemporary potential for exclusion within school contexts experienced by children from poor backgrounds within Scotland, focussing on Catholic schools. This will be followed by a reflective response to the issues raised in this article by Mr Michael McGrath, the director of the Scottish Catholic Education Service. The article will conclude by suggesting that this correlation and these links are important for Catholic schools in Scotland if they are to be consistent in their preferential option for the poor. This may also have implications for the wider international network of Catholic schools.

The Scottish Catholic Mission Stations in Bauchi Province, Nigeria: 1957-1970

AbstractIn 1963 the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Gordon Joseph Gray, asked for volunteers to staff a mission station in the Bauchi province in the north of Nigeria. By the end of 1969 the Bauchi experiment was deemed a success; however, the process of establishing the mission was littered with complications. Not only had this station been abandoned by the Society of African Missions since 1957, it was also firmly located in an Islam-dominated area where Catholic priests had to compete not only with Muslims but also with American Protestant missionaries and indigenous religions. To make matters worse, the years between 1963 and 1970 included two coups and a civil war during which religion became the focus of much of the violence. This article looks at the correspondence between Archbishop Gray and the volunteers in Bauchi in order to provide insight into how the missionaries experienced their task of establishing a Scottish Catholic presence an area others considered too hostile.

The Historical Development of the Library of St Mary's College, Blairs, Aberdeen, 1829–1986

Catholic libraries are an under-researched area in library history. That of St Mary's College, Blairs, the Scottish national junior seminary from 1829 to 1986, is noted for its historical importance and holdings, but how the library operated within the seminary is less known. The library had an important place in seminary life from the beginning, with dedicated accommodation within the college, ongoing purchases, and the central place of reading in the daily routine. However, staffing was inconsistent and few administrative records survive for the library, giving the impression that it was managed informally. The distinction was made between the historical college library and the students' working library. The former grew to be a significant collection, reflecting the education and resilience of Scottish Catholics at home and abroad following the Reformation, but it had little use for junior seminarians. The student library had a direct role in supporting the boys' education, showing wider-ranging, more modern subjects as the twentieth century progressed.

English Catholic Attitudes to Irish Catholics1

This essay explores the various paradoxes of the Roman Catholic Church in England, and to a degree in Scotland, beginning with the consideration that in the modern period, a large majority of the members of the English and Scottish Catholic Churches have been of Irish birth or descent. After the years of the great mid nineteenth-century immigration from Ireland, these Catholics in Britain found in their faith, rather than in any abiding sense of Irish nationality or consciousness of their place of origin, the central element of a distinct identity which was neither wholly native nor Irish, but lay in a strange middle ground between the two. Catholicism was a mark of separation in spite of the fact that the Church in Britain was served by a predominantly English priesthood and an overwhelmingly English episcopate, so that it never became a province of the spiritual empire of Irish Catholicism across its international diaspora, and was also an instrument of assimilation. The differences were masked by the fact that the romanisation and ultramontanisation of Catholicism in both islands made their Churches look very similar, with a common Latin liturgy, priesthood and devotional culture. English Catholicism had its own separate agenda, of converting England rather than serving the immigrant Irish, yet there is the further paradox that while the native English Roman Catholics could be as hostile to Irish Catholics as any English Protestant, especially over Irish nationalism and republicanism, there were also English converts to the faith who were positively attracted to the Church by the political and economic radicalism of Irish Catholicism, like Frederick Lucas and G.K. Chesterton.

‘They must have their children educated some way’: the education of Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland

This paper examines the provision of schooling to Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland. In the first half of the century, schools established in the Highlands by the SSPCK mainly served a religious purpose, because Protestants were convinced that education was both a preservative against and an antidote to popery. As for the Catholic Church in Scotland, it concentrated its efforts on providing education to those boys intended for the priesthood. However, as the century wore on, there was a clear shift in the attitude of Scottish Catholics towards education. This paper presents evidence which suggests that Catholics came to regard education as an asset rather than as a threat, and that the changing perception of the uses of education mirrors the evolution of the standing of Scottish Catholics in British society.

Secessionist Politics and Religious Conservatism: The Scottish National Party and Faith-Based Interests

The Scottish National party's 2007 devolved election campaign was endorsed by two prominent ‘conservative’ Christians – Brian Souter, one of Scotland's richest men, and Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of the Scottish Catholic Church. The article offers two explanations for this, both linked to the improved opportunity structure created by devolution: first, the Scottish Labour party lost the trust of these faith-based interests over the ‘Section 28’ episode, a significant factor due to the more competitive devolved party system; second, there is evidence to suggest that these faith-based interests believe an independent Scotland would create improved opportunities for influencing social policy.

The Role of the Scottish Catholic Society in the Determination of the Antigonish Movement

The Role of the Scottish Catholic Society in the Determination of the Antigonish Movement

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

The Venerable Margaret Sinclair: An Examination of the Cause of Edinburgh's Twentieth-Century Factory Girl

Catholicism's precarious position in twentieth-century Scotland was in part a reflection of continued anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments, but it was also the result of new political doctrines, growing worker movements and the introduction of complete female suffrage. These challenges were met, in part, by Margaret Sinclair, in religion Sister Mary Francis of the Five Wounds. The cause for her beatification and canonization was unofficially launched in 1926 and met with a groundswell of support, extending beyond Scotland to Europe and North America as the working-classes embraced her as one of their own. Not only was she declared `Angel of the Factory', thereby extending the Church's influence to the factory floor, but her image was grafted to that of the nation as `Scotland's Little Flower'. She was to symbolize feminine piety, the working-class struggle and the epitome of Scottish Catholicism.

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...