On Clydeside in Glasgow, beside the early 19th-century Catholic Cathedral, there now stands a substantial modern glass building reminiscent of an oil company HQ or international bank. It is the new Curia for the Archdiocese of Glasgow, a gleaming symbol that the Catholics ‘have arrived’. Inside, the presence of a portrait of the Queen alongside one of the Pope underlines the political message behind the concrete and tinted glass. Catholics in the West of Scotland have come out of their mental and physical ghettoes and now feel secure enough to take to task, in a much more critical manner than hitherto, the establishments which govern Scottish society.

In one sense, it is amazing that the Scottish hierarchy, of all episcopal conferences, should take such a consistently radical stance, though I am sure most bishops would baulk at the phrase. The change was a long time in coming, in part because of the introversion of native Scottish Catholics and in part because the incoming Irish kept their heads below the parapet and concentrated on material improvements for their community. They faced considerable prejudice from a Presbyterian Scotland where the calvinistic version of the Reformation had taken deeper root than anywhere else in Western Europe. 1923 is not that long ago—the time when the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved a report on ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality‘.It was little wonder that the Catholic bishops kept stumm on social issues.

Yet lay Catholics, after 1906 and the emergence of the Catholic Socialist Society, gradually took an active part in Labour Party politics, breeding a mafia which is still strong in the City Chambers of Glasgow and other West of Scotland towns.