Catholic Church in Scotland
The Catholic Church in Scotland, overseen by the Scottish Bishops' Conference, is part of the worldwide Catholic Church headed by the Pope. Christianity first arrived in Roman Britain and was strengthened by the conversion of the Picts through both the Hiberno-Scottish mission and Iona Abbey. After being firmly established in Scotland for nearly a millennium and contributing enormously to Scottish literature and culture, the Catholic Church was outlawed by the Scottish Reformation Parliament in 1560. Multiple uprisings in the interim failed to reestablish Catholicism or to legalise its existence. Even today, the Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560, while no longer enforced, still remains on the books.
Throughout the nearly three centuries of religious persecution and disenfranchisement between 1560 and 1829, many students for the priesthood went abroad to study while others remained in Scotland and, in what is now termed underground education, attended illegal seminaries. An early seminary upon Eilean Bàn in Loch Morar was moved during the Jacobite rising of 1715 and reopened as Scalan seminary in Glenlivet. After multiple arson attacks by government troops, Scalan was rebuilt in the 1760s by Bishop John Geddes, who later became Vicar Apostolic of the Lowland District, a close friend of national poet Robert Burns, and a well-known figure in the Edinburgh intelligentsia during the Scottish Enlightenment.
The successful campaign that resulted in Catholic emancipation in 1829 helped Catholics regain both freedom of religion and civil rights. In 1878, the Catholic hierarchy was formally restored. As the Church was slowly rebuilding its presence in the Gàidhealtachd, the bishop and priests of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, inspired by the Irish Land War, became the ringleaders of a direct action resistance campaign by their parishioners to the Highland Clearances, rackrenting, religious discrimination, and other acts widely seen as abuses of power by Anglo-Scottish landlords and their estate factors.
Many Scottish Roman Catholics in the heavily populated Lowlands are the descendants of Irish immigrants and of Scottish Gaelic-speaking migrants from the Highlands and Islands who both moved into Scotland's cities and industrial towns during the 19th century, especially during the Highland Clearances, the Highland Potato Famine, and the similar famine in Ireland. However, there are also significant numbers of Scottish Catholics of Italian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Polish descent, with more recent immigrants again boosting the numbers. Owing to immigration, it is estimated that in 2009, there were about 850,000 Catholics in the country of 5.1 million.
The Gàidhealtachd has been both Catholic and Protestant in modern times. A number of Scottish Gaelic-speaking areas, including Barra, Benbecula, South Uist, Eriskay, and Moidart, are mainly Catholic. For this reason, Catholicism has had a very heavy influence upon Post-Reformation Scottish Gaelic literature and the recent Scottish Gaelic Renaissance; particularly through Iain Lom, Sìleas na Ceapaich, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Allan MacDonald, Ailean a' Ridse MacDhòmhnaill, John Lorne Campbell, Margaret Fay Shaw, Dòmhnall Iain Dhonnchaidh, and Angus Peter Campbell.
In the 2011 census, 16% of the population of Scotland described themselves as being Catholic, compared with 32% affiliated with the Church of Scotland. Between 1994 and 2002, Catholic attendance in Scotland declined 19% to just over 200,000. By 2008, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Scotland estimated that 184,283 attended Mass regularly. Mass attendance has not recovered to the numbers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, though there was a dramatic rise between 2022 and 2023.
History
Establishment
Christianity may have been introduced to what is now Scotland by soldiers of the Roman Legions stationed in the far north of the province of Britannia. Even after the 383 withdrawal of the Roman garrisons by Magnus Maximus, it is well documented in sources about Saint Mungo, St Ninian, and in locally composed works of early Welsh-language literature, like Y Gododdin, the Book of Taliesin, and the Book of Aneirin, that Christianity survived among the Proto-Welsh-speaking kingdoms in Scotland, which are still referred to in Modern Welsh as the Hen Ogledd. Like it's faithful, however, Christianity was slowly driven westward with refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. The Picts, Anglo-Saxons, and Gaels of modern Scotland, who were traditionally tribal peoples, were mainly evangelized and converted between the fifth and seventh centuries by Irish missionaries such as Sts Columba and Baithéne, the founders and first two abbots of Iona Abbey, St Donnán of Eigg, and St Máel Ruba, a monk from Bangor Abbey who became the founder of Applecross Abbey in Wester Ross. These missionaries tended to found monastic institutions, which expanded to include schools, libraries, and collegiate churches whose priests both evangelized and served large areas. Partly as a result of these factors, some scholars have identified a distinctive Celtic Church, to which Catholics, Protestants, Miaphysite Orthodox, and Eastern Orthodox, have all claimed in historical debates to be the only legitimate heirs. In the Celtic Church, attitudes towards clerical celibacy were more relaxed, a differing form of monastic tonsure was used, the use of prayer beads known as the Pater Noster cord as a means of "prayer without ceasing" preceded the invention of the rosary by St Dominic, and the lunar method was used for calculating the date of Easter. During the 1960s, Frank O'Connor explained that the reason why, on both sides of the Irish Sea, abbots were often more significant than bishops is because a Church governed by an Episcopal polity, "in a tribal society was a contradiction in terms. No tribe, however small or weak, would accept the authority of a bishop from another tribe; but with a monastic organisation, each tribe could have its own monastery, and the larger ones could have as many as they wished."Also, despite a shared belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and shared use of the Ecclesiastical Latin liturgical language, as is documented by primary sources such as the Stowe Missal, there were often significant differences between the Celtic Rite and the mainstream Roman Rite and evidence of a distinctive form of Celtic chant in Latin, which is most closely related to Gallican chant, also survives in liturgical music manuscripts dating from the period. The Culdees, an eremitical order from Gaelic Ireland, also spread to Scotland, where their presence continued at least into the 11th-century. In his life of Saint Margaret of Scotland, Turgot of Durham, Bishop of St Andrews, wrote of the Culdees, "At that time in the Kingdom of the Scots there were many living, shut up in cells in places set apart, by a life of great strictness, in the flesh but not according to the flesh, communing, indeed, with angels upon earth."
At the same time, the erenagh system in Gaelic Ireland of hereditary lay administration of Church lands by family branches deliberately appointed from within the derbhfine of local Irish clan chiefs led to notorious abuses; like monasteries warring against each other and the infamous Irish "royal-abbot" of Cork and Clonfert Abbeys, Fedelmid mac Crimthainn, who personally led armies into battle against other Irish clans and abbeys and routinely sacked and burned other monasteries. Due to the close ties between the Church in both countries, the erenagh system also spread to Gaelic Scotland, with at least some similar results. For example, during the 11th-century reign of the Scottish High King Macbeth, which was later fictionalized by William Shakespeare, the High King's greatest domestic foe by far proved to be his own uncle, Crínán of Dunkeld, the warrior-abbot of Dunkeld Abbey, Mormaer of Atholl, the legitimately married father of the late High King Duncan I, the grandfather of King Malcolm III of Scotland, and progenitor of the Scottish Royal House of Dunkeld.
Despite the ongoing religious persecution and expulsion from their monasteries and convents of "Romanists" like St Mo Chota, who opposed how much the Celtic Church had been, "absorbed by the tribal system" and lost its independence from control by local secular rulers, at least some of these issues had been resolved on both sides of the Irish Sea by the mid-seventh century. After the conversion, successful war for political independence from Norway, and increasing Gaelicisation of Scandinavian Scotland and the Isle of Man under Somerled and his heirs, the Roman Rite Diocese of the Isles under bishops appointed by the Holy See became the dominant religion.
Medieval era and Renaissance
During the reign of King Malcolm III, the Scottish church underwent a series of reforms and transformations. Through the influence of his Hungarian-born wife, St Margaret of Scotland, a clearly defined hierarchy of diocesan bishops and parochial structure for local churches, in line with the queen's experiences in Continental Europe, was developed. Following the 1286 extinction of the Royal House of Dunkeld and the subsequent invasion of Scotland by Edward Longshanks, the political purge of Scottish clergy from the hierarchy, religious orders, and parishes, and their replacement by English clergy was one of the root causes of the Scottish Wars of Independence and is part of why so many of the Scottish clergy defied the pro-English policy of Pope John XXII and signed the Declaration of Arbroath. Following the Battle of Bannockburn, large numbers of new foundations, which introduced Continental European forms of reformed monasticism, began to predominate as the Scottish church re-established its independence from England and developed a clearer diocesan structure, becoming a "special daughter of the see of Rome" but lacking leadership in the form of archbishops. During the Late Middle Ages, similar to in other European countries, the Investiture Controversy and the Great Schism of the West allowed the Scottish Crown, like Scottish clan chiefs using the erenagh system during the time of the Celtic Church, to gain greater influence over senior appointments to the hierarchy and two archbishoprics had accordingly been established by the end of the fifteenth century. While some historians have discerned a decline of monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, the mendicant orders of friars grew, particularly in the expanding burghs, to meet the spiritual needs of the population. New saints and cults of religious devotion also proliferated. Despite problems over the number and quality of clergy after the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and the efforts of Hussite emissary Pavel Kravař to spread doctrines considered heresy; the Renaissance in Scotland also saw wider availability of books, including the Classics and newer works of early modern Scottish literature, due to Androw Myllar and Walter Chepman's introduction of the Gutenberg Revolution to Scotland in 1507. The printing press also helped spread the "New Learning" known as Renaissance humanism, which was also embraced and spread by many Catholic clergy. This is not to say that everything was perfect, however.The tradition of Crown-appointed "lay abbots" was reintroduced during the reign of James III of Scotland, with similar results to the time of the Celtic Church. King James V even appointed five of his illegitimate sons, with the assent of the Holy See, to the wealthiest abbacies in the Kingdom. According to George Scott-Moncrieff, "Such men were naturally opposed to administrative reform and as naturally enthusiastic for a revolution that would make them absolute possessors of property to which otherwise they would only claim the life-rent..." For this and similar reasons, many Scottish Catholic priests and monks who were also Renaissance humanists, such as Archbishop Andrew Forman, Quintin Kennedy, and Ninian Winzet, "felt bitterly the failure of their fellow clergy to live the life they proclaimed", and called for an internal restoration of Christian morality, that would later be dubbed the Counter-Reformation. Similar critiques and calls also appear in the Middle Scots poetry of Makars William Dunbar and Robert Henryson. Therefore, the Church in Scotland remained relatively strong and stable until the Scottish Reformation in the sixteenth century.