For most of the past century and a half, anyone who mentions Catholicism and immigration would immediately have been confronted by the word ‘Irish’. To some extent, this immediate association was a justified one; in 1829, for example, as the Catholic emancipation act was being passed, there were a reported 500 Irish Catholics in the city of Perth, or, to be precise, 500 Irish Catholic adults.
There are, however, many serious problems with this assessment, and there have been some serious challenges to the prevailing equation that, in Scotland, Catholic equates Irish. These challenges are very new.
As recently as 1996, one of Scotland’s leading historians could still claim that, by the 1840s, the Catholic Church in Scotland was almost entirely made up of Irish immigrants. One has no intention of minimising the Irish contribution to the Catholic Church in Scotland. Indeed, without the enormous influx of Irish settlers in Scotland between the 1790s and the 1950s, the Church would have been much poorer culturally, and much smaller. The 228,000 Catholics who put down ‘Ireland’ as their country of birth in the census of 1861 speak volumes, particularly when one considers that there were about two to three children per adult at this date. Let us return to those 500 ‘Irish’ Catholics in Perth, however, and examine the facts as they emerge from the records of the church of St John the Baptist in Perth, one of which is on display in the exhibition.
They commence in 1831, and give an exhaustive list of those new-born babies receiving the sacrament of baptism. Naturally, the names of the
parents are also entered, and these provide much information on the ethnic or regional origins of the early community. For the 1830s, and even for the early 1840s, Irish names do not predominate. Instead, one finds a large number of names from the traditional Catholic regions of Scotland: Macdonalds from the lands of Glengarry and Clanrannald, Gordons and McPhersons from the north-east. These predominate, and it is no coincidence that the first Perthborn priest to be ordained since the Reformation, Fr. Archibald MacDonald, carries an Highland name. There are also a rather large number of Italians, which is perhaps rather surprising. It seems that the Italian community of Perth has longer antecedents than is traditionally assumed. Also present are a few French names, possibly those connected with the exiled French court resident in Edinburgh at the time, or descendants of refugees from the Revolutionary wars. To these, one can add a sprinkling of German names, most probably merchants or, less likely, associates of the Schottenkloster. There are, of course, quite a few Irish names, and, as one may expect, they came mostly from the six northern counties of Ulster.
How to explain this seemingly anomalous situation? Well, it may not be as anomalous as one expects. Initial studies into the ethnic composition of Catholics in Edinburgh around this time show a similar profile. Irish Catholics were frequently resident for short periods of time, many of them employed in seasonal farm work. In addition, there was the well-known friction between Irish and Scottish Catholics, particularly between Irish immigrants and Scottish priests. These revolved around significant differences in interpretation of Catholic worship and culture between the immigrants and the native priests. Irish Catholicism lacked some of the more sober traits that marked the Church in Scotland. In addition, it would not have been unusual for Irish Catholics to take communion in an inebriated state.
For Continental immigrants, the Scottish priests were rather less alien: the ones serving the Perth mission had all studied in Continental seminaries, where they had imbued elements of an international Catholic culture. One explanation for the relative dearth of Irish names in the baptismal register may be that rather few Irish Catholics attended Mass: the Church calculated that only three out of every ten Irish Catholics partook of the Eucharist in the mid-nineteenth century. This would climb gradually to a peak of around 65 to 70 percent in the mid twentieth century, but that figure encompassed all Catholics, of every cultural background.
In Scotland, the ethnic mixture of Catholics was relatively simple until fairly recently. Four other groups stand out amongst the migrants in terms of numbers and cultural cohesion. The first amongst these has already been mentioned: the Italians. Very little proper research has been done on the Italian presence in Scotland before the middle of the nineteenth century, but the figure of 119 Italians in 1861, which has been widely accepted, must be wrong. There were at least thirty Italians in Perth alone in the 1830s, and the census must have missed many of the itinerant Italians.
The census of 1901 is more useful. It reports over 4,000 Italians, and is at least an indication that real growth had taken place. Intensely Catholic in both religion and culture, this group did not always fit in well. Like the Irish Immigrants, they faced hostility from some Protestant quarters, and there was also some friction within the Catholic community itself. This reached its crescendo during the Second World War, when many from this community were imprisoned as enemy aliens. Since 1945, this group has become a more accepted part of the Catholic and Scottish community.
The second group came in two waves. Polish migrants first reached Scotland in the 1830s, fleeing the oppression by Czarist Russia. This was only a small group, and the first real wave of Poles began to arrive during the 1930s. The 1931 census reveals a total of 40,000 Poles in the UK, with a small proportion in Scotland. They arrived in numbers in Perth only during the Second World War, when the Polish exiled army had camps around the city. In total, 120,000 stayed on in the UK after the war ended, and they never suffered the same discrimination as other Catholic groups had done. The respect which they had earned during the war made sure of this.
The second wave has come since their country joined the EU. There are now an estimated 100,000 Poles living in Scotland, the largest influx of Catholics for a century. To what extent these will stay and integrate into the wider community remains to be seen, but the Polish presence has certainly altered the public perception of the Catholic Church.
Finally, and at the same time as the Poles, a small group of Ukrainian Uniate Catholics arrived, refugees from dreadful persecution in the USSR. They were never very numerous, and their liturgy is centred on the Cathedral in Dundee. The last forty years has seen further immigrants arriving to strengthen the numbers of the cultural variety of Perth’s Catholic community. These range from Filipinos and Indians to Hong Kong Chinese; from Ugandans to Ghanese and people from the Caribbean, and include a wide variety of Europeans. Immigration has not only assisted the growth of the Catholic community in Scotland, it has enriched it culturally, and it has ensured that it is a reflection of the global family of Christ.
Dr Harry Schnitker
