by Michael Briody

In November 2024, Pope Francis wrote that the study of church history is about keeping ‘the flame of collective memory alive, so that the faithful can navigate the present with a clearer sense of perspective, rooted in the Church’s lived experience across the centuries’. In the Jubilee Year 2025, we are invited to look back over the story of Catholicism in Scotland.

The life on earth of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the central event of human history. ‘The Word who is Life: this is our subject’ (1 John 1:1). Anything before was leading up to it; nothing after will compare ‘until he comes again’ at his Second Coming. Church History is about how well we have followed the Lord, and also how badly, down through the centuries.

The Gospels tell us about the Lord’s birth, his teaching and his miracles, his crucifixion, death and resurrection, and his ascension into heaven. The Book of The Acts of the Apostles records the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles at Pentecost and how they were willingly propelled out across the face of the known earth to bring the message of Christ to the furthest corners. Saint Peter eventually settled in Rome where he was martyred about 65 AD. He was hurriedly buried on the Vatican Hill where today Saint Peter’s Basilica stands over the resting place of his bones. He was the ‘Rock’ on which Our Lord built the Church (Matthew 16:18), on which it could lean and depend, and his successors, the popes down through the centuries, have inherited that role, including our present Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV. We Scots Catholics have always been known for, and have always prided ourselves on, our loyalty to the Pope in every age.

Father Michael Briody is a priest of Motherwell Diocese.