by Mary Cullen

I want to begin our shared reflection on Scotland’s synodal journey with a focus on the way history has shaped the Scottish Catholic church and its culture.

This is a good place to  start: in a room dominated by the portrait of Glasgow’s first archbishop of modern times, Charles Eyre, an Englishman who came here to bring order and stability to a church marked by tension between Scots and Irish clergy; and overlooking the river Clyde, which brought many of the Irish immigrants to Scotland who were to change the face of the church.

The Scottish Church

The Scottish Catholic Church of the 19th century was made up of three very different groups: the remnant which had survived the Reformation in small pockets in the north east, the south west, and remote parts of the Highlands and Islands; immigrants, many of them Irish, especially those who came after the famine of the 1840s; and a small group of wealthy and influential lay people, many of them converts to Catholicism, who looked to Rome and to the British state for their identity.

The Scottish mission, as it was called, was numerically small and weak at the start of the century: around 30,000 out of a population of around 1.6 million. Its titular bishops, known as vicars apostolic until the restoration of the Scottish hierarchy in 1878, were keen to reassure those in authority that Catholics posed no threat to the political and religious establishment. In a pastoral letter of 1793, Vicar Apostolic George Hay advised Catholics to be ‘extremely cautious not to give the least cause of offence to anyone’.

All that changed with Irish immigration. Catholicism’s centre shifted from the rural North East to the new industrial centre of Glasgow. In the 1830s an estimated 65,000 Catholics were settled in the Glasgow area; in 1847 alone, 50,000 arrived in the wake of famine.  The Glasgow Herald noted in December, 1846,

‘Our poor Irish friends should understand that the city of Glasgow is overrun with poor, and by flocking hither in droves they are only exposing themselves to certain misery…’

The church struggled to respond. It had to find a way of establishing a structure to help meet the spiritual and practical needs of a burgeoning, shifting, desperately poor population; to minimize anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments in the wider community; and to guard against expressions of support for Irish nationalism, which would have been perceived as a threat to the state.

The church as perfect society

A zealous assertion of loyalty to Rome provided the key. As its political power ebbed away in the wake of the French Revolution and the development of modern industrial capitalism, the church withdrew from what it saw as an apostate world and promoted itself as a perfect society, over and above any temporal power. Pius IX condemned any suggestion that popes should come to terms with ‘progress, liberalism or modern civilization’ (1864).

This model of church stressed the dogmas that challenged the perceived errors of modernity, such as the right of Christ to rule over society and culture; encouraged devotions that would provide a popular reinforcement of this faith, such as the Immaculate Conception and the Sacred Heart; promoted distinctly Catholic associations to solidify a sense of identity among Catholics, immunize them from contamination by the world, and mobilise them to restore the world to Christ; and fostered uniformity with a standardised Roman liturgy, Roman devotions like the 40 hours; Roman colleges for foreign seminarians, and Roman clerical titles like monsignor.

There was an increasing centralization of authority in Rome, and an exaltation of the role and person of the pope; the high point of which came with the definition of papal primacy and infallibility in 1870.

This was the model that shaped the church in Scotland. As Bernard Aspinwall observed, Scottish Catholicism underwent a revolution: faith was systemised through a proliferation of parochial organisations, schools, confraternities, devotional and welfare bodies. It was a church which closed ranks against mixed marriages, looked after its own poor, provided for its own schools, and created a state within a state with its focus on parish devotions, social events and saving schemes.

A remarkable achievement

The creation of the Scottish church was a remarkable achievement which formed generations of Scottish Catholics. I still have my school hymn book with hymns like ‘Full in the panting heart of Rome’. On the opposite page is a hymn called ‘Ever faithful to the Church’ which has the following line: ‘We’ll cling to the priest and we’ll cling to the pope…’

But this model of church was achieved at the cost of a deeply clerical culture, a distrust of the world, and a profoundly unequal relationship between ordained and lay people. Four years after the death of Archbishop Eyre, Pius X described the church as ‘essentially an unequal society… comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock… the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow their pastors’.

This culture continued to shape the church Scotland, up to and after the Second Vatican Council: research carried out in two Scottish dioceses between 1998 and 2000 reveals how difficult it was for priests and people to develop shared responsibility for the church and its mission in the light of the Council’s great image of the church as the people of God.

And while some lay people who took part in the research spoke of the Council’s new understanding of church, some priests described clergy ‘still wanting to run everything and dominate everything’. Lay people expressed anger about ‘priests who took decisions without consultation or explanation’; and, in an echo of Bishop Hay’s concerns of 200 years before, one woman said she found the idea of mission difficult because Catholics had been encouraged to keep to themselves and live quietly. ‘Because it was this way in the past, it is hard to go out and talk about faith’.

Parish priests

Key to the transformation were parish priests. They established the discipline that shaped the Catholic community through regular Mass attendance, confession and opposition to mixed marriages. Parish missions enabled the church to win the masses with what Bernard Aspinwall calls a ‘portable religion of medals, scapulars, and rosaries…’ Irish identity was subsumed within local pride as people contributed funds to build and decorate Churches. Parish savings banks and building societies promoted community formation and ensured that family income was not spent on drink. Temperance organisations reinforced clerical leadership and helped the slow integration of the poor into society.

The promotion of organisations loyal to the Church helped contain Irish nationalist movements. Aspinwall cites a Jesuit Mission to Saltcoats in 1860 which heard 478 confessions, reclaimed 460 souls and made 19 converts. Significantly, it also reclaimed 100-150 Ribbonmen (members of an Irish nationalist group) and effectively destroyed their local organisation.

Despite their numbers, Irish priests were excluded from positions of authority. Aspinwall points out that there were more Irish than Scottish priests among secular clergy in Scotland between 1830 and 1878 – 103 were Irish, while 98 were native Scots – yet apart from a brief period when James Lynch served as Coadjutor Vicar-Apostolic between 1866 and 1869, no Irish born bishop was appointed until Keith O’Brien became Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 1985. It was to be a Scottish church. Aspinwall suggests that:

‘Fear of Protestant reaction, misgivings about image, education and even commitment to Scotland rather than to Irish exiles, fostered resistance to Irish ecclesiastical advancement. They remained infantrymen or at best NCOs in the Church militant’.

This drive towards order and stability was underpinned by the third group within Scottish Catholicism: wealthy middle and upper class Oxbridge Catholics, many of them converts to Roman Catholicism, who brought with them prestige, patronage and substantial funds. They were detached from the cultural friction that coloured relations between Irish and Scottish Catholics and were intent on promoting a cohesive community that was firmly committed to Britain and to a Roman-dominated Church. They were instrumental in the appointment of Charles Eyre to to Glasgow in 1868, where he improved the efficiency and discipline of what was then called the Western District; ten years later he became Archbishop of Glasgow following the restoration of the Scottish Catholic hierarchy.

Synodality

We have now embarked on the path of synodality. As Werner Jeanrond pointed out in his Open House obituary of Pope Benedict, Benedict’s resignation in 2013 marked the end of the model of church as perfect society. The decreasing number of priests has made it impossible to maintain, and the dynamic of reform opened up by Vatican II, however unevenly it has taken root, endures.

That dynamic has been given new life by Pope Francis. Two years after his election as Pope, in an address to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the institution of the synod of bishops, he described synodality as ‘the path God expects of the church of the third millennium’. It is the new model of church which draws together ‘the faithful people, the college of bishops, and the bishops of Rome’ in a shared process of ‘mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn’. This describes a very different relationship between ordained and lay.

Tom Magill is going to tell us how far we have come on this journey in Scotland, but I would like to end by giving two examples of the way in which synodality already seeks to address the legacy of the past.

Clericalism and sexual abuse

A new report on the impact and implications of clerical child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in England and Wales was published in April by the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham. Entitled The Cross of the Moment, it addresses the connections between what it calls a church culture imbued by clericalism and the scandal of sexual abuse and its coverup. It cites the synod preparatory document (2023), which states that:

’The whole church is called to deal with the weight of a culture imbued with clericalism that she inherits from her history and with those forms of exercising authority on which the different types of abuse (power, economic, conscience, sexual) are grafted.

For too long the cry of the victims has been a cry that the Church has not been able to hear sufficiently. These are deep wounds that are difficult to heal… which constitute obstacles… to advancing in the direction of journeying together’.

One of the report’s proposals is that synodal processes, like the one we are following today, can help Catholic communities gather together to reflect on the abuse crisis, and recognise what needs to be healed and changed.

The church and the world

In her book, Postsecular Catholicism (2018), American professor of sociology Michele Dillon highlights the way in which Pope Francis affirms the link between the sacred and the secular. She cites the first major interview he gave as pope in September 2013, in which he said:

‘God is in history and its processes. God is certainly in the past, because we can see his footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the concrete God, so to speak, is today. For this reason… the complaints of today about how barbaric the world is… sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defence. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today’.

She sees this as a turning point in the church’s understanding: Francis explicitly recognises that the secular and the religious are mutually intertwined rather than polarized; and he positions the church as affirming, and not simply criticising, secular culture.

She examines the way this played out in the synod on the family and observes that the church’s willingness to examine its teachings on marriage and family life and its openness to Catholics’ secular experiences helped shape a new inclusiveness towards divorced and remarried Catholics.

Conclusion

I will end with a thought from the Jesuit theologian Gerry O’Hanlon, who has shared the Irish church’s experience of synodality here in Scotland. Speaking at a Newman Association meeting in Edinburgh, he reminded us that what is most distinctive of the synodal process is the way in which it is rooted in a faith encounter with Jesus. It is not an exercise in church renewal or reform, he said, necessary though they both are; rather it is precisely because of our faith that we work with God’s help to make the church a more effective sign of the loving mercy of God. It is in this sense that encounter leads to mission, the raising of a banner of hope to our suffering world, from a church that wants to be of and for the poor and become more like a field hospital for humanity.

Perhaps this, above all, is what connects us with those who came before us and responded to the poverty and hardship of their day.

Sources: Bernard Aspinwall ’Catholic Realities and Pastoral Strategies’, The Innes Review, Spring 2008; ’Children of the Dead End: the Formation of the Modern Archdiocese of Glasgow 1815-1914’ The Innes Review no 2 1992; ’The formation of British identity within Scottish Catholicism 1830-1914’ in RG Pope, Religion and National Identity, Wales and Scotland c1700-2000, Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2001.

Mary Cullen is editor of Open House. She holds a PhD in theology and religious studies from the University of Glasgow.