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Sunday, January 28, 2018

Church of Scotland Anti-Papism

Speaking during Christian Unity Week, Rev Dr John McPake, the Church of Scotland’s ecumenical officer, said there is ‘profound regret’ in his Church over historical anti-Catholicism in Scotland. Rev McPake said that while sectarianism has not gone away and ‘continues to raise its head,’ the ‘vast majority of sectarianism’ in Scotland is ‘no longer motivated by spiritual faith but is ‘animated by historical division.’

He pointed to poverty as one cause of the problem, saying that ‘sectarianism is found where communities are broken and divided for other reasons,’ adding that we have ‘common cause in building resilient communities which share in economic and social growth.’
It is appropriate to re-post what the Socialist Courier blog messaged back in June 2012
The Anti-Irish Church of Scotland
The national church in Scotland today is the Church of Scotland, which is legally recognised as such. The Church of Scotland is the largest religious grouping in Scotland with 36% of Scottish population nominally as members. The second largest religious grouping in Scotland is Roman Catholicism, with 16% of the Scottish population, most of which are of Irish descent. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the immigrants from Ireland were Catholic. From the 1960s, when almost everyone claimed a religious label, the “no religion” identity has grown considerably and people who profess no religion actually outnumber either those in the Roman Catholic church or Church of Scotland in Scotland.

In 1922, incited by a Kirk minister, a Protestant mob stoned and bottled buses carrying Catholic women and children to the Eucharistic Congress in Morningside, Edinburgh. In 1923 an official Presbyterian campaign against Irish immigration not only demonstrated the anti-Catholicism present in the Presbyterian churches at this time but also emphasised race and tried to portray differences as national, not just simply religious. This campaign has later become known as “The Kirk’s Disgrace”. It was about singling out an ethnic minority whose presence in Scotland was to be regarded as an evil, polluting the purity of the Scottish race and culture 
The campaign started at the Church of Scotland General Assembly, with a report called "The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality " which protested that Catholics had “most abominably abused the privileges which the Scottish people had given them...Already there is a bitter feeling among the Scottish working classes against the Irish intruders. As the latter increase and the Scottish people realise the seriousness of the menace to their own racial supremacy in their native land, this bitterness will develop into a race antagonism which will have disastrous consequences for Scotland." At the same General Assembly, it was warned that the presence of “Irish Catholic aliens … would soon bring racial and sectarian warfare to Scotland”.

The expressions "racial supremacy" and "aliens" makes the report sound like it could have been written by Hitler's Nazi propagandists or white supremacists of the American south. Yet this report by Rev. John White's Church and Nation Committee was accepted by the General Assembly and a sub-committee formed to promote the anti-Irish cause

Restrictions on immigration from Ireland and the revision of the Education Act were proposed and passed. As the campaign was adopted by more senior church figures, more emphasis was put on what was meant to be “respectable” arguments surrounding race and national character. In 1928 the churches presented their case to the government. They complained that Scotland had become a “dumping ground” for Irish immigrants after the USA had reduced their quota and that 70% of parish and other relief funds, were spent on the Catholic Irish. The Church of Scotland's Church and Nation Committee called for the deportation of unemployed Catholics to Ireland - a country most of them by then had never seen. Scottish Catholics from the Highlands and Irish Protestants, however, could stay, because  "they are of the same race as ourselves"

Attempts to get government support collapsed when first the Glasgow Herald demonstrated that the immigration was not at all as high as was claimed, and when the government after an investigation of their own refused to have anything more to do with this campaign. The campaigners then decided to redirect their efforts and the 1930 General Assembly decided that the church should instead focus its attention on businesses and have them “employ Scottish labour where such is available”.  Now that the Kirk understood that no government would halt Irish immigration then they would appeal to the patriotism of Scottish employers to practice job discrimination in their hiring. 

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