by Mary Cullen

‘Celestial Fireworks – Father Malachy’s Miracle’

Michael T. R. B. Turnbull

The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, Volume 9, Number 1, June 2023, pp. 125-155(31)

University of Wales Press

DOI here

In Bruce Marshall’s satirical novel, Father Malachy’s Miracle (1931), an elderly Benedictine monk, Fr Malachy Murdoch, is sent from his monastery in the Scottish Highlands to improve the singing and the manners on the altar of St Margaret’s Church in Edinburgh.  After a chance meeting with an Episcopalian clergyman who challenges the monk to prove that miracles can really happen, Malachy decides to petition God to move an adjacent dancehall of ill repute (along with its clientele) onto the windy summit of the Bass Rock.

Inexplicably, the displacement immediately becomes a tourist attraction – for which Malachy is roundly admonished by a cardinal newly arrived from Rome. He begins to grasp the wider implications of what he has done and implores God to restore the seedy dancehall to its former site beside the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland.  What follows is a titanic struggle between God and Mammon as Malachy’s miracle is appropriated by the secular world of entertainment and he finds himself in the eye of a financial storm.

Why, asks Michael Turnbull, has this comic masterpiece by Bruce Marshall, the Edinburgh-born author of over 40 books, been almost forgotten?  In his article in the Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, Turnbull draws on new research to reveal the thinly veiled characters and events behind the novel.  In so doing, he provides a fascinating glimpse of the Catholic Church in 1930s Edinburgh.

Dr Mary Cullen is editor of Open House.