Creating a Scottish Church: Catholicism, Gender and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Scotland by S. Karly Kehoe (review)

The growth of Catholicism in nineteenth-century Scotland was astounding. At the beginning of the century, Scotland was overwhelmingly Presbyterian and Calvinist, and part of a United Kingdom that perceived its identity as fundamentally Protestant. There were only about thirty thousand Scottish Catholics, representing less than two percent of the Scottish population—a small remnant that had survived centuries of persecution and was confined largely to the more remote Highlands and Islands. For most Scots, their national identity was defined by the Reformation and the Covenanting struggle. During the 1820s, the leader of the Church of Scotland, Thomas Chalmers, and his followers could campaign effectively for the revival of a Presbyterian “godly commonwealth.” By 1901, however, Scotland’s religious landscape had changed. The number of Catholics had increased to 433,000, and represented over ten percent of the Scottish population. The Catholic population, moreover, was now concentrated in the industrial heartland of Scotland, and was becoming increasingly confident and politically organised. When the Church of Scotland campaigned during the 1920s and 1930s for the removal of this so-called Catholic menace and a revival of the Presbyterian “godly commonwealth,” the campaign failed miserably. Although sectarian tensions continued to rankle, Catholics were now part of a Scottish civil society that was increasingly pluralist in nature.

In this valuable study, S. Karly Kehoe explores the growth and assimilation of the Catholic community in Scotland during the nineteenth century, drawing upon the work of such scholars as James E. Handley, John F. McCaffrey, Bernard Aspinwall, Martin J. Mitchell, and Tom Gallagher, as well as her own doctoral research on the religious sisterhoods in Scotland. She gives particular attention to the large-scale internal migration of Irish Catholics into industrialising Scotland during the nineteenth century, a migration that accounted for most of the growth in Scotland’s Catholic population. This Irish Catholic migration also brought major problems. The migrants, mostly poor and unskilled, came to Scotland in search of employment and not a new home; many had bitter memories of the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852. They would long perceive themselves as Irish. They were drawn to Irish nationalist politics, especially the movement for Irish Home Rule, and they could view the British (including the Scots) as their oppressors and enemies. The Scots, for their part, could view the migrants as competitors for jobs and housing. This included Scottish Catholics, who often had little love for Irish Catholic migrants. Scottish Catholics had learned to survive in a hostile Presbyterian environment by being cautious and accommodating, and emphasising their loyalty to the Crown and British state. The Irish Catholic migrants were often outspoken and volatile with their loyalties to Irish nationalism.

Despite these tensions, as Kehoe demonstrates, the Catholic Church in Scotland proved remarkably successful in subsuming its ethnic divisions and achieving unity by the late nineteenth century. This organised Catholic community ultimately contributed significantly to the development of a more open, pluralistic civil society in Scotland, a civil society in which different religious denominations were relatively equal under the law. Irish Catholic migrants became increasingly Scottish in their social and political orientation, and increasingly prepared to work for reforms in Scottish civil society. It was by no means a straightforward process, and ethnic and sectarian tensions would contribute to sporadic violence, often associated with football (soccer) rivalries and street gangs. But the Irish Catholic migrants came to see Scotland as their home, and a Scottish Catholic Church was created. During the later nineteenth century, it was significant that the migrants embraced football, rather than the Irish sports promoted by the Gaelic Athletic Association after 1884, and that the two Catholic football clubs, Celtic of Glasgow and Hibernian of Edinburgh, joined the Scottish League in 1890.

A key factor in this creation of a Scottish Catholic Church, Kehoe argues, was the...