(Picture of ‘The Confidence’, dedicated to St. Therese of Lisieux - Pope publishes new Apostolic Exhortation dedicated to St Thérèse of Lisieux - Catholic Bishops’ Conference)

In 2009, England and Wales had the opportunity to venerate the relics of St. Therese, fondly named ‘The Little Flower’. The tour of her relics started in Portsmouth and ended in London, which is meaningful, as these two cities featured on a map of the United Kingdom that a young then-Marie Francoise-Therese Martin drew as a child.[1] It was reported that a whopping two thousand people attended the final Mass dedicated to her at Westminster Cathedral.[2]

(Picture of map hand-drawn by a young St. Therese of Lisieux – provided by St Thérèse’s Scotland map proves relics’ visit ‘fulfils her wish’ - SCO News, 2019)

This map, drawn in pencil, and composed when she was at school, includes a light and impressive sketch of the United Kingdom. Not only that, but a few Scottish cities are also pinpointed like Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen.[3] It is unknown what this map was drawn for, and it is up to the observer’s imagination – but in 2019, it became a part of St. Therese’s mission.

From 30^th August to 20^th September 2019, The Little Flower’s relics were on display for veneration across the country.[4] The tour of her relics ventured to the dioceses of Motherwell; Galloway; Dunkeld, and Argyll and the Isles. Most meaningful were her visits to the archdioceses of St. Andrews & Edinburgh; Glasgow; and the dioceses of Aberdeen and Paisley.[5] The latter four mentioned were all places listed on the map drawn by the Carmelite nun when she was a young girl.

St. Therese of Lisieux’s religious life began at the young age of 15, when she sought to become a cloistered, monastic nun at the Carmelite monastery of Lisieux in France.[6] A priority of St. Therese was evangelisation, and she cared for the souls in every corner of the world. Praying for the salvation of all became her intention.[7] Though she passed away at twenty-four in 1897, she informed her friend who was a Carmelite missionary that she would spiritually intercede from Heaven to save souls in abundance.[8]

Retroactively, her map now becomes a mission statement, as the cities dotted around can be seen as checkpoints on her eternal journey. By her relics being shown on display across Scotland in 2019, it is unknown the blessings that might have came as a result.

[1] ‘Little Flower’ arrives in Garden of England - Catholic Bishops’ Conference

[2] St Thérèse of Lisieux • V&A Blog

[3] St Thérèse’s Scotland map proves relics’ visit ‘fulfils her wish’ - SCO News

[4] Relics of St Thérèse to visit Scotland - Carmelite Nuns in Britain

[5] Relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux arrive in Scotland | ICN

[6] Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

[7] Daniel Acharuparambil, OCD, ‘St. Therese of Lisieux and the Missionary Role of the Contemplatives’, 1996, p. 419

[8] Joan Monahan, ‘St. Therese of Lisieux: Missionary of Love’, 2003, introduction p. ix

A Catechesis on Corpus Christi

Bishop Hugh Gilbert gave a video talk on this important feast. Please click the link here to have a listen.

Scotland’s Saints for June

In this month we have 2 of Scotland’s most consequential - St Columba (9th June) and St Moluag (25th June). We also have St Ternan and St Baithen, both significant in their own way and worth a read on our Calendar page.

We all have our favourite and chosen Saints we ask for intercession from - but do not forget our own Saints who are just as lively and active as your st Pio of Pietrelcina or st Therese of Lisieux. We have an extensive list on this website which we invite you to explore.

Rackwick Bay, one of the most important and recurring places in George Mackay Brown’s work, is a splendid valley located in the north-western part of Hoy, the second largest island of the Orkney. Brown visited it for the first time with some friends in the summer of 1946, during a particularly bleak period in his life, marked by semi-debilitating tuberculosis and days that followed each other with a sense of aimless monotony. He was captivated by it, and no other place would ever have such an intimate impact on him. From that moment on, the bay represented for him a sort of “Tir-nan-Og,” an earthly paradise, an inexhaustible source of inspiration, and a haven of peace and security. His friend, composer Peter Maxwell Davies, also fell in love with Rackwick, even wanting to move there, to a small farmhouse he had renovated.

However, even a wonderful place like that concealed its shadows, of which Brown was perfectly aware: in the mid-19th century, Rackwick had a population of about 150 inhabitants working small crofts, but at the time of his visit, only a handful of them remained, almost completely isolated from the rest of the world (twenty-five years later, there would be only one resident farmer). After all, life in the bay was far from easy, and it was capricious nature that dictated the law. Sometimes there could be unexpected strokes of luck, such as when, before the advent of coastal lighthouses, ships were wrecked, leaving their precious cargo on the beach, but these were still rare occurrences. Even the inhabitants could be the cause of their own misfortunes, as evidenced by the sad story of Betty Corrigall, who committed suicide around 1770 after being impregnated and abandoned by a sailor.

Aside from this, Brown sensed something positive underlying the existential rhythm of the valley’s farmer-fishermen, marked by an endless cycle of “birth, love, labour, death” that had remained unchanged for generations. Moreover, it was by meditating on Rackwick’s tragic fate that he came to develop the idea that it is “Progress” that leads to worsening things, severing the essential bonds that exist between people, the earth, and Heaven. Electric light, improved transportation, and mechanization are therefore, according to Brown, some of the manifestations of that new materialist faith that does nothing but drain the lifeblood from human beings, filling them with comforts and offering them the illusion of inexhaustible happiness. Rackwick has emptied precisely because young people have been driven elsewhere by the opportunities offered by an ever-expanding world, seeking less demanding employment than that of their ancestors. Hence the belief that the artist’s ultimate goal is to constantly remind people of their roots.

The bay appears in several of Brown’s works. For example, a chapter of An Orkney Tapestry (1969) is dedicated to it, and it is the setting for the events described in The Golden Bird (1987). The work that showcases it most, nonetheless, making it in a certain sense the protagonist, is the poetic cycle Fishermen with Ploughs (1971), whose title takes from a line from “Rackwick,” one of the poems of The Storm (1954).

Brown had been working on a series of poems that would tell the story of the valley, between glory and decadence, since the spring of 1965. It was a long and not always easy task, but he was rewarded by the positive response from the public and critics, so much so that a reviewer described him as “one of the consummate masters of poetry in Britain today.” Brown, generally highly self-critical, admitted in his autobiography that Fishermen with Ploughs contained some of his best poems, although in hindsight, the final section left him unsatisfied.

The cycle, dedicated to his friends Ian and Jean MacInnes, is divided into six parts based on interdependent poems that give the story a sequential form rather than a continuous narrative; Brown’s fixation with numbers also plays an important role. The poems, several of which had already been published previously, are characterized by an extraordinary metrical variety, and there are also prose passages. Each of them gains contextual strength from the overall concept thought they still retain a considerable measure of autonomy. Fishermen with Ploughs is also interesting for Brown’s bringing together the long-standing influence of Hopkins, his preoccupations with saga style, and linguistic experiments of the day.

The story begins in the 9th century, when a tribe of fishermen leaves the coast of Norway on a ship to start a new life in Rackwick. Their land is threatened by some evil, simply called “the Dragon,” a term that alludes to famine, pestilence, and war. The first section, “Dragon and Dove,” opens with the poem “Building the Ship,” which describes the construction of the vessel Dove, whose name alludes to the hope of lasting peace: “The bird would unlock the horizon westwards.” The subsequent lyrics recount the desperate struggle of the tribal chief Thorkeld against the Dragon and his inevitable death. His son, Njal, who is destined to abandon fishing for agriculture and to make Gudrun, his wife, “a mother of harvesters”, succeeds him (”The Blind Helmsman to Njal Thorkeldson the New Chief”). The fertile soil of Rackwick is ready to welcome the seed of the new inhabitants, just as the woman is ready to welcome her husband’s seed (women, who generally have a less superficial gaze than men in Brown’s work, are very often allied with reproduction).

The alliterative manner of Old English poetry gives way, in the second part, “Our Lady,” to a greater stylistic variation. The community has found stability, and its inhabitants’ days, though laborious, are made meaningful and happy by faith. In “Station of the Cross,” which Brown himself considers one of the key poems for understanding his writings, a comparison is made between the life of Christ and that of the peasants, while in “The Statue in the Hills,” people recite litanies to the Madonna to invoke her protection. The islanders are closely in tune with the Mother of God, a unifying force in medieval society.

“Hall and Kirk,” the third section, is characterized by concise and cryptic language. It summarises three centuries of history, from the 16th to the 19th, in which the first shadows of “Progress” gather over Rackwick, constituted by Calvinist fanaticism that condemns innocent old women to the stake (“Witch”) and by the arrogance of the powerful who demand increasingly expensive rents (“Taxman”) and services (“Grave Stone”). Brown’s polemic against Protestantism, the religion of the book that has reduced faith to a mere abstraction, forever severing the bond between the people and Christ truly present in the Eucharist, is combined here with his annoyance at all those who disturb the peace of the community, including those who seek to forcibly conscript people to fight wars that have nothing to do with them (”Buonaparte, the Laird, and the Volunteers”).

In the fourth and fifth parts, entitled “Foldings” and “The Stone Hawk” respectively, Rackwick’s decline between the 19th and 20th centuries appears unstoppable, and even the local nobleman laments the onset of poverty (”The Laird”). Work has become too arduous, with the result that the inhabitants eventually “will leave this keening valley” (”Crofter’s Death”). Life spent between land and sea now holds little promise (”Fiddlers at the Wedding”), and a sense of tragedy lingers everywhere (”Twins,” “A Warped Boat,” and “Funeral”). In “Homage to Heddle,” a once-vigorous man is forced by old age to sit and read the Bible, and solidarity among the community seems to have disappeared: “A fish-brimming corn-crammed house / But a hard door” (“Ikey’s Day”). Only “The Scarecrow in the Schoolmaster’s Oats” remains to watch over the fields, almost as if in parody of the crucifixion; tourists with a passion for ornithology overrun the bay (“A Child’s Calendar”), and the ancient religion has been replaced by the modern one of shops and technology (“Roads,” “Butter,” and “The Coward”). As the quality of life improves, depopulation sets in, and in the summer of 1952, following the tragic deaths of two children (“The Drowning Brothers”), its last remaining residents abandon Rackwick. The final poem of the section, “Dead Fires,” offers an image of utter desolation: “The poor and the good fires are all quenched. / Now, cold angel, keep the Valley / From the bedlam and cinders of a Black Pentecost.”

The concluding part, “Return of the Women,” written almost entirely in prose, witnesses the return to Rackwick by boat – called Truelove – of a group of survivors, composed of seven women and six men, after modern civilization has been destroyed by “The Black Flame,” presumably a nuclear holocaust. Technology has been swept away, and the valley’s new inhabitants, led by Saul the Skipper, settle in abandoned crofts, returning to traditional farming methods (there is even a reference to Edwin Muir’s poem “The Horses” when an old, rusty tractor is mentioned). Everything seems to be proceeding smoothly, although the death of a child and the indifference shown to the discovery of the old statue of Our Lady insinuate themselves into the story like sinister omens. Indeed, it won’t be long before Saul, tainted by “Progress,” reveals himself to be a brutal leader, and the others realize, with bitterness, that the land is not bearing fruit. They must therefore devote themselves to fishing, the opposite of what the Norwegian tribe in the first section did eleven centuries earlier.

Fishermen with Ploughs thus has an enigmatic ending: will the people surrender to Saul or rebel and go their own way? The story, as a whole, conveys hope for improvement, recovery at all levels, as a new cycle of ruin and regeneration begins. However, a melancholic atmosphere remains, and the final sentence states that the survivors have “returned, uncaring, into the keeping of the Dragon”.

By Luca Fumagalli

Image from: https://www.northlinkferries.co.uk/orkney-blog/the-story-of-rackwick/

The image of a pelican is commonplace in sacristies around the world. The self-sacrificial love of the pelican as she feeds her young is clearly symbolic of the self-sacrificial love of Christ as he feeds his Church through the gift of the Eucharist. As the pelican sustains her young with her own blood, so too does Christ.

On the night before he died, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to his disciples and said, “This is my Body, given for you” (Luke 22:19). By instituting this eucharistic sacrifice, Jesus was entrusting to his beloved bride, the Church, not just a memorial of his death and resurrection, but also a way of remaining with us res et sacramentum through his Real Presence. He was giving us the inexpressible gift of himself, so that, through this wondrous exchange, he may in turn fashion us for himself as an eternal gift to the Father.

It belongs to friendship to want to communicate oneself to one’s friend. When speaking on the topic of the Last Supper, St. Thomas Aquinas commented that: “Last words, chiefly such as are spoken by departing friends, are committed most deeply to memory; since then especially affection for friends is more enkindled, and the things which affect us most are impressed the deepest in the soul” (ST III, q.73, a.5). Simply put, we have a tendency to remember the words spoken by the people we love. Most especially when these words are spoken during an emotional farewell. It is unsurprising, then, that the disciples were able to recall the lengthy words spoken by Christ during his Last Supper discourse, “I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15) But to what extent can we truly claim friendship with God?

St. Thomas believes that for friendship to exist, there needs to be some measure of equality between the friends. Are we equal to God in anyway? Certainly not by nature. But in the totality of his great love for us, God has made us partakers in his divine nature in his Son. The original friendship that had been lost through disobedience has now been restored to us through the Blood of Christ. When commenting on the Gospel of John, in Homily 86, St. Augustine says: “Friendship is born between equals, or makes them so.” In this regard, it is through the instrumentality of Christ’s sacred humanity, and the grace that flows from it, that we become capable of friendship with God.

When describing the Eucharist, St. Thomas calls it “the sacrament of charity, the bond of perfection” (ST III, q.73, a.3). Through this sacrament of charity, the soul is united to Christ in love and brought to perfection through the gift of his divine grace. Just as love begets union, charity transforms the lover into the beloved. What does this mean for us? That through the reception of this sacrament our minds and hearts become slowly transformed by Christ’s grace; we begin to see as he sees, to think as he thinks, and to love as he loves. Through this great sacrament, our lives become patterned after that of Jesus Christ, so that, like him, we may learn to have an interior disposition toward the Father that is always ready to say: “Thy will be done.” Through our union with Christ, mankind’s relationship with God is radically transformed into one of friendship. Thus, each time we receive the Eucharist, we enter into an ever-deepening friendship with God through charity, in which He shares His very self with us through grace.

In the mystery of the Eucharist, mankind enters into the mysterious marriage covenant wrought between Christ and his Church on the wood of the cross. This marriage covenant, once believed by the Israelites to mean a simple standing in God’s presence, is now actuated by a sacramental union through which Christ shares his very Body with us in total self-gift. By the nature of this wonderous exchange, mankind is elevated to a level hitherto inconceivable; for grace alone makes us capable of receiving Christ’s perfect self-offering and of offering ourselves to him in return. As St. Thomas Aquinas penned in his famous Eucharistic hymn: O salutáris Hóstia, quae caeli pandis óstium. Christ came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

Are there social implications to this exchange? Indeed. In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that “union with Christ is also union with all those to whom his gives himself” (DCE 14). Thus, from our one intimate friendship with Christ flows a multitude of friendships with all he calls friend. From this one friendship ripples a sea of friendships effectuated by and sustained in the eucharistic communion of charity. Pope Benedict goes onto say: “Eucharistic communion includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.” We see this fragmentation perhaps most clearly in social relationships that are not grounded in true charity. Charity is, by its very nature, a unifying force that fosters bonds of authentic communion and has the ability to order rightly all lesser loves according to the pattern of Christ’s sacrificial love that we see so clearly from the cross.

Christ left us this example, so that we could follow in his footsteps. How is authentic friendship to be rightly understood then? Well, perhaps it involves not just willing the good of the other, but also a willingness to be vulnerable before the other. It involves a willingness to be seen in truth by the other, and to trust that you will be accepted despite your brokenness. When Christ instituted his eucharistic friendship with us, he did so not only in the glorified state of his resurrected body, but also in the wounded state of his sacred humanity. He was willing to be vulnerable and exposed on the wood of the cross, so that, by gazing upon the one whom we had pierced, we might come to know that no obstacle was so insurmountable, no sin of ours so great, so as to separate us from his invitation to friendship.

The reality of this great invitation to friendship holds true when we gaze upon his Eucharistic Presence in the monstrance. By gazing upon the one whom we have pierced, we see reflected back at us a love that is stronger than death. It is no great wonder then that, when speaking on the Eucharist, St. Thomas chose to include a quote from the Song of Songs: “Eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved” (ST III, q.79, a.1, ad.2). We see, exposed for us on the altar, the heart of one who was willing to be poured out and emptied of all strength and pretence to become a perfect receptacle for divine love. It is said that love abolished the chasm that separated the Creator from the creature, since the characteristic of love is to lower oneself. For this reason, Christ became poor for our sake, so that we might become rich by his poverty. During Eucharistic Adoration, we are met by the gaze of one who is not scandalized by our weakness, but who has been equally tempted in every way, yet without sin. We are met by the gaze of one who looks at us in the brokenness of our humanity and sees not problems to be fixed but persons to be loved, for charity is the best healer and grace the best medicine. And the healing balm of this grace, channelled to us through the sacramental economy, is sweeter than any medicine for, by it, Christ is able to unite those parts of our hearts that have been ruptured by sin. Through his eucharistic friendship, we are bathed in the sweetness of his grace and strengthened in our journey toward the heavenly realities foreshadowed therein (see Roman Missal, Preface for Corpus Christi).

When writing to one another, my religious sisters will often end their letters by saying: “See you in the Eucharist.” This is not a throw away comment, but the remembrance of a sacramental reality. A reality that, although we are scattered throughout the world, we are bound together by the noble bonds of charity, united in Christ by our common “yes” to Him. On this great Solemnity of Corpus Christi, may our collective “yes” as a Church continue to draw us into an ever-deeper friendship with the One we all call Friend.

By Sister Isabelle Marie

Sr Isabelle Marie part of the Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia whose Mother House is in Nashville but with a significant (and much loved) outpost in Elgin in the Diocese of Aberdeen. They run the Ogilvie Centre with a ministry toward young people, evangelisation and catechesis.

Image: The stained-glass window located in the Motherhouse sacristy of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A.

Scottish Catholicism is at its heart reflected in the lives of those who make it incarnate, the “living stones” of the Scottish Church. As a Church with Apostolic origins, we are never short of inspirational examples of what it means to be Catholic in Scotland. The Coracle has published on the Saints associated with this land, who often lived many centuries ago, but it has also given room for some lesser-known models of Holiness, from more recent times. There are already two articles dedicated to Priests who worked in the Outer Hebrides, most notably in South Uist: Fr. George Rigg and Fr. Allan McDonald.

This brief article is dedicated to another Priest, one who served with the Diocese of Paisley, and who was another son of the Hebrides, Fr. Douglas Macmillan. He was born on the 1^st August 1953, to an Irish Catholic mother and a Presbyterian father from Harris. His father was tragically lost at sea, while Douglas was still a young child. He and his brother were then raised by their mother in the south side of Glasgow, and it was a Catholic upbringing. Fr. Douglas recalled his Confirmation, in which he chose the patronage of St. Joseph, a Saint to whom he remained devoted. He studied at St. Aloysius’, and upon terminating his studies, he entered the banking sector to make his living.

Beginning initially at Victoria Road in Glasgow, his work ultimately took him to Fort William and to Oban, and he enjoyed living in the Highlands of Scotland. In this vein, he also recalled holidays to Ireland and to the Isle of Harris, stating that he felt quite at home in these places where he had roots. In any case, he succeeded in his work and attained to the position of bank manager. Always having a strong sense of humour, Fr. Douglas mentioned some of the characters who would ask for loans at the bank. On one occasion, a particularly passionate individual was attempting to convince the bank to finance his projects, and the response was clear: “While we recognise the great enthusiasm which you have for this enterprise, it is an enthusiasm which we do not share!”

During this time, his faith continued to deepen, and the Priesthood began to seem more attractive. In his own words, it was once Fr. Douglas began to make pilgrimages that the calling became clearer. He recalled fondly his studies at the Seminary (Scotus College, Bearsden) and had many anecdotes about those years. To quote just one of them, he confided that he took inspiration from Winston Churchill’s speeches to develop his own style of public speaking, an admission that wasn’t to be shared with everyone! Like Churchill, he also enjoyed cigars, albeit on rare occasions, and his preferred brand was King Edward Imperial.

Fr. Douglas was already in the category of a “late vocation”, and was Ordained on the 17^th April 1999, at the age of 45. His wasn’t the only religious vocation in the family, as two of his aunts were nuns. His priestly life was served in a few Parishes, beginning with the role of Assistant Priest in St. John the Evangelist, before serving at St. Mirin’s Cathedral. His first appointment as Parish Priest was to the Parish of the Holy Family in Port Glasgow. His second and final Parish was St. Bridget’s in Eaglesham, one of the oldest Parishes in the Diocese. It was here where I first came to know him, and his ministry of some nine years there was very fruitful. These years included the trauma of a fire which devastated the Church, followed by refurbishment, and a providential fraternity developed with the neighbouring Church of Scotland, who had given us the use of their buildings for weekly Mass during this time. All the while, Fr. Douglas shepherded the community, and made every effort to encourage people to become more involved in the Parish.

The strength of this ministry came from several defining characteristics and went beyond Fr. Douglas’ role as Parish Priest. In the first instance, it was clear that he had a great devotion to Our Lady, and he had made St. Louis Marie de Montfort’s Consecration to Her on a number of occasions, renewing it each year. Accompanying this devotion was a real passion for the Divine Mercy, and he never ceased to preach on this subject, weaving it into homilies, and promoting a prayer group devoted to it. Everyone in St. Bridget’s knew something of St. Faustina and her Diary by the end of his ministry there.

These devotions were also expressed in his continued commitment to pilgrimage. Speaking personally, one of the fondest memories I have of Fr. Douglas was a shared journey to Craig Lodge, where we joined a group of diverse pilgrims and spent a weekend in reflection. He never tired of visiting Medjugorje and may well have been one of its most committed Scottish Priests! He likewise retained an active interest in the supposed apparitions at Garabandal until the end of his life.

His faith was one that was ever open to the supernatural, and he would relish the opportunity to talk about miracles (sometimes even Catholic ghost stories) over a dram in the Parish house. At the same time, this same faith was centred on Jesus Christ, and on Salvation being assured in Him. This imparted a certain optimism to his perspective, one of his favourite phrases being “Praise the Lord!”

Besides his role in the Parishes he served, Fr. Douglas was actively involved in the RCIA, and offered spiritual direction to people across the Diocese. He was committed to Charismatic Renewal, and he was open-minded to the gift of “speaking in tongues”. As readers might surmise, his ministry was varied, and focussed on God. It was entirely given over to Him.

From his thirties, Fr. Douglas had began developing a progressive paraplegia (HSP), which gradually limited his physical capacities. When he first came to St. Bridget’s, he was already using two walking sticks, and preparing for Sunday Mass could be a challenge, not least because of a flight of stairs from his house to the chapel. His commitment to the Priesthood was exemplary, and many noted his extraordinary courage in the face of his physical suffering.

The Parish house (Mayfield) in Eaglesham was always well-ordered and it was graced with bookshelves holding hundreds of volumes. There was even a space dedicated to several first-class Relics, which were always in view. Often, Fr. Douglas would host people for several hours, and discussion would turn to theological debate, not least because one of his closest friends was a “die-hard atheist”. One point that is clear in retrospect is the generosity he made of his time: nothing at all was rushed, from the Holy Mass and Confessions, to the time spent with others. He was available at all hours, even on early morning emergency calls. Indeed, we might say that he really didn’t waste any time – either he would be in prayer, he would be celebrating the liturgy, or he would be engaged in pastoral work. His illness had forced him to slow-down, and he simply adapted with an intensity of commitment that is rarely seen.

After breaking his leg in the Parish house, his mobility declined further, and he was forced into retirement in 2019. His final years were spent in a wheelchair. He was based first at St. Laurence’s, Greenock and finally at St. Joseph’s, Bow Road. This period was significantly challenging for him, as he was effectively confined to his living room, and required carers to visit throughout the day. For some two years, being unable to access the nearby Church without help, he celebrated daily Mass on his dinner tray, with all due solemnity. It was a privilege to have been present at well over a dozen of these Masses. They were always followed by a pizza, on the house, which was always a treat.

He celebrated his Silver Jubilee of Ordination on the 17^th April 2024, and this was Fr. Douglas’ last major celebration, a gathering of his closest friends and family. His passing on the 6^th February 2025 was sudden, but not entirely unexpected. He had received the Last Rites, and the funeral was organised at St. Joseph’s, Clarkston. An impressive number of people attended, and he was buried with his mother at St. Conval’s. At the committal, a handmade St. Bridget’s Cross was placed in the grave, in a final gesture, highlighting a life marked with devotion, profound care for his flock, and a lively faith.

By Anthony MacIsaac

We’re diving into part two of our “Language of the Bible” series. The first part discussed how we can be confident that the modern Bible is an accurate translation, and this part will shift focus to the specific language used in the Bible itself, particularly with trees.

Though it may come as a bit of a surprise, trees are fundamental to the spiritual teachings of the Bible. Beyond God and humans, trees are the most mentioned living things in the Bible (The Bible Project). And while they may not naturally come to mind, today I hope to show how the core teachings, overall narrative arc, and methods of emphasis used in the Bible are very often centrally tied to trees. Much of the inspiration for this article comes from the Bible Project and their podcast on the Tree of Life—I recommend checking it out if you want to learn more.

Humans as Trees

Throughout the Bible, and especially in the Old Testament, trees are used as a mirror into humanity. Most often, linguistic and physical traits are shared between humans and trees, drawing a connection between human bodies and botanical structures—both humans and trees possess zera ‘seed’ (a deliberate connection to children and descendants) and both produce peri ‘fruit’ (the outcomes of their actions and life). The Bible also uses words such as ‘branches’, ‘shoots’, and ‘roots’—all obviously building a shared anatomy between trees and humans.

But the linguistic choice in these cases isn’t merely to build a visual bridge between us and trees, but to construct an anchor in which to extrapolate teachings for a righteous and virtuous life.

Take Psalm 1, for example, where a righteous person “is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers. Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away.”

Similarly, Jeremiah 17 discusses how “blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

But so too, like trees, are we fragile. Without the Lord, we will wither and even be chopped down when we are wicked, living without his water. The prophet Ezekiel (31) describes how “because the great cedar towered over the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height, I gave it into the hands of the ruler of the nations, for him to deal with according to its wickedness. I cast it aside, and the most ruthless of foreign nations cut it down and left it. Its boughs fell on the mountains and in all the valleys; its branches lay broken in all the ravines of the land. All the nations of the earth came out from under its shade and left it… Therefore no other trees by the waters are ever to tower proudly on high, lifting their tops above the thick foliage. No other trees so well-watered are ever to reach such a height; they are all destined for death, for the earth below, among mortals who go down to the realm of the dead.”

The line of King David, we are told, is dead. Isaiah 11 describes the seed of Jesse as a dead, chopped-down stump, but promises “a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” So, yet again, where out of death comes the hope of new life, and trees are at the centre of that message.

Sacred Spaces as Trees

Beyond humans, we find trees to be central to a sense of a “holy place”. The common theme of trees representing a holy temple may very well begin with the Garden of Eden, where the Tree of Life sat in the Holy of Holies at its center. There, of course, also grew the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The former represents eternal life and access to God’s direct presence, whereas the latter is heavily representative of God’s gift of freewill to humanity. Together, these trees symbolize a proximity to God and his divine blessing, which humanity lost access to with the fall of Adam and Eve.

With that core narrative in mind, it’s often found that temple and church architecture often feature tree imagery in tribute to that lost Paradise. One that comes to mind after a recent talk at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh is the Sagrada Familia, aimed to be completed by the 2030s in Barcelona. The interior is heavily inspired by nature (and trees more specifically), which, among other artistic reasons, is used to symbolize our desire to return to that blessed place.

Points of Emphasis in Scripture

Trees are also found at almost every major crisis, test, or encounter with God, usually also at a high place (mountain, hill, etc.). These moments of trees and high places often come at a crossroad between God and human decision-making. The Garden of Eden, where humanity chooses between trusting God’s wisdom (Tree of Life) or seeking to define good and bad on their own terms (Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), is of course an early example. Also in Genesis, Abraham builds an altar to Yahweh under the great trees of Mamre—here God (accompanied by two angels) visits him and prophesizes that Sarah would in time bear a son; it is also here that Abraham pleads to God to spare the righteous in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. A further example is in Exodus; God reveals himself to Moses through a burning bush (which uses the Hebrew word seneh, meaning a bramble bush or tree).

All these encounters and more leads to the most important point of a tree on a high place, namely Jesus’ death on the cross.

Jesus and His Death Upon a Tree

The narrative of the Bible culminates on Jesus’s death on the cross at Calvary. Evidence implies that this place must have been a hill or high place, including from the Aramaic name of Golgotha ‘The Place of the Skull”, elevation implied in Mark 15:40 (can be seen from a distance), archaeological findings of a rocky outcropping outside ancient Jerusalem’s walls, and the Roman practice of preferring raised, highly visible areas for public execution. And while one may not initially connect the crucifixion with a tree, the New Testament authors purposefully refer to the cross as a “tree” using terms like xylon in Greek, which can literally translate to ‘wood’, ‘timber’, or ‘a living tree’.

• Acts 5:30: “The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.”

• Acts 10:39: “We are witnesses of everything he did... They killed him by hanging him on a tree.”

• Acts 13:29: “When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb.”

• Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’”

• 1 Peter 2:24: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree...”

Deuteronomy 21:22 discusses how a person, who commits a crime worthy of death, is executed and hung on a tree. The New Testament authors are directly referencing this, indicating how Jesus died and took on the curse of human sin. Of course, this circles back to how the fall of humanity first began at a tree in the Garden of Eden; our redemption was also achieved upon a tree, but at Calvary. The crucifix—once a symbol of execution and death—has transformed into the new symbol for the Tree of Life.

The Ultimate Bookend

Finally, trees provide the backdrop to the wonderfully bookended story of creation. The Bible opens with the Garden of Eden narrative, and the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are absolutely central to the message and narrative elements. At the end of the Bible, in Revelation 22, the world is reconciled and Eden is restored—there, at the centre of a Garden-city, is a tree, also described with the same Greek word xylon. The tree and the fruit that it bears is to heal the nations; through this, Christ’s suffering upon the xylon of Calvary is bound to the redemption of humanity and our return to eternal life. The tree shows that history is not circling aimlessly with no end; on the contrary, it shows that we are growing for the ultimate and beautiful fruit of a restored and enhanced Eden. There we will sink our roots into rich earth and be nourished with living water; we will never again be thirsty.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” John 15:5

Amen.

By Jack Heitman

After many years of religiosity being on the decrease, it seems that interest in church attendance has piqued among young adults. But what exactly does this revival look like, and is it specifically a Catholic one?

In 2006, there was a piece of academic literature that suggested from the 1960s onward, Christianity was falling in numbers. But not just Christianity – complete dissatisfaction with religion, regardless of its origin, deity or convictions. The future was looking bleak and atheist, and that was the prospective future that Scotland was facing.^[1]

The same written work produced an assessment of the census figures for 2001, which highlighted the low number of religious affiliations across the country, and made the original sentiment from the 60s look like a prediction: the country was, indeed, moving away from God – but not completely by this point. 45% of the country still held a Church of Scotland membership and 17% followed the Roman Catholic Church.^[2] These numbers from 2001 imply that both the national church body and Catholicism to be the two major, religious sects across Scotland, and there were little numbers pertaining to church attendance across other Christian denominations and alternative religions alike.

According to an official government statistic, in 2011, there were 841,053 Roman Catholics across the country, and approximately 1,717,871 Church of Scotland followers.^[3] In the 15 years that have passed since then, the ecclesial framework of the Scottish Kirk has been in the throes of financial strain, budgeting struggles and a whopping 35% decrease in church membership.^[4] With these numbers in mind, it’s easy to worry about the presence of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

The Church introduced an impressive 549 people to the Sacraments during Easter Vigil Masses across the country (Archdiocese of St. Andrews & Edinburgh, 2026). This number is staggering because it is 224 more Confirmations than the Church welcomed in 2023. ^[5]

According to an article by the Catholic Herald in March 2026, the university town of St. Andrews is becoming its own hub of Catholicism among the young people, too.^[6]

In an article for EWTN, Archbishop John Wilson based in Southwark stated that there was a big resurgence in Catholicity among people in their twenties and thirties. EWTN made the point of saying in this article that both Southwark and Westminster were receiving a wholly unprecedented number of people into the church, with the former up to 450 individuals and the latter 500. Westminster had seen a 25% increase in their numbers, which was unlike anything they’d ever seen before in modern times.^[7]

The online Catholic news website, Aleteia, called it a “convert boom” that the Roman Church was witnessing in 2026. The author of the written piece states that it was unknown what effect Pope Leo XIV’s ascension to the papal office might have on the Catholic Church in the USA, but now it’s understood that it’s been received very well. A University of Illinois student recorded 120 Confirmations – the largest in her four years studying on the campus.^[8] It could be suggested that having an American pope has reignited this interest in Catholicism across the States – though this is conjecture.

These examples show that Scotland isn’t the only country witnessing a large amount of people enter the Church. What is happening here is happening internationally. But why, exactly?

Saint Carlo Acutis and Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati

The city of Edinburgh was blessed in September 2025, as the relics of the recently canonised Saint Carlo Acutis made their way to the city.^[9] These included a fragment of his pericardium, and a few strands of his hair. Here, there was veneration for the young boy who passed away at fifteen-years-old. Scots from all over the country came to visit the Archdiocese across the two days when Masses were being held for him, and there were a lot of numbers attending.

Side note: I was received into the Church on Sunday, September 7^th last year, the same day that then-Blessed Carlo Acutis became canonised and made a recognised Saint of the Catholic Church. I chose him as my Patron Saint.

I attended the three Masses held in his name at St Mary’s Cathedral, and it was incredible the amount of people my age (in their twenties), below and above were there. People of all generations chose to come and honour the young man. It is no lie that the younger generations are inspired by Saint Carlo Acutis, but why exactly?

The young Carlo Acutis was into computer games and using the internet to raise awareness of Eucharist miracles. The use of his computer was his main way of evangelising, and the playing of games made him a child of his time. Naturally, that is quite the juxtaposition, because “how could the internet ever be used for good?” society has asked for years, and “what good do videogames bring?” is a classic. But a young Carlo realised how to find the good in both worlds in the early 2000s.^[10]

In his tomb in Assisi, Italy, St Carlo is wearing his blue jeans, a sweatshirt and his sneakers. These are all representative of the fact that he was still a very young boy when he was called from his earthly life. But not only that, his clothes are a key reminder of the generation he was from. Carlo Acutis was born in 1991, meaning he would be classed as a “Millennial”.^[11] It is because of his Millennial-ness that people of the generation after him, “Generation Z”, find him to be so inspiring – he was close to us in age, had similar interests and most of all, was a fantastic ambassador of the faith while still a child.

At Saint Carlo Acutis’ final relic display at the Mass on Sunday, 15^th September at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, there was a large amount of pupils from one of the local Roman Catholic high schools in the city. The Mass and homily were being led by both His Grace Archbishop Leo Cushley and Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, who is the guardian of St Carlo’s relics. One thing that was of note was the attention paid to the reflection on St Carlo’s life growing up. It inspired all the young folk in the cathedral that afternoon. They were eagerly awaiting to meet face-to-face with the relics in a state of veneration.

On the same day in September 2025, Italian Catholic Pier Giorgio Frassati was canonised. He was a 24-year-old who died a hundred years before he was officially recognised in the Church as a Saint. This man inspires a lot of young Catholics today, too, through his popular adages like “joy through suffering”, which was quoted to be one of his responses to life and its many hardships.^[12] Naturally, because he was a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, that joy was found in a relationship with Jesus Christ in his life. The world that Gen Z was born into has experienced warfare, economical crises, the rise of social media and a lot more that can impact how we value our lives and where God sits in them – but Frassati offers a way forward. Joy through suffering – these powerful three words that can challenge the pessimistic mindsets we know all too well. Pope Saint John Paul II highlighted his own reason for being inspired by the example led by Frassati – he was steadfast and unwavering in his Catholic witness.^[13]

With these two Saints being recently canonised in the Catholic Church, and given their ages at their times of death, the “revival”, so to speak, can be attributed a lot to their models of faith. We’ve already seen that throughout the United Kingdom and the United States that interest in Catholicism has been on the up for quite some time, and it should come as no coincidence that it is happening around the same time as these two Saints have gained traction in the media. People are interested in them, investigating why they chose to consecrate themselves to a life of following the Lord in His Church and it is sparking conversation.

An article from 2016 looked at trends across the country pertaining to religiosity. The Church of Scotland was dwindling significantly in membership, and 2016 marked the year where membership was at 24% of the population – while Catholicism was sitting at 14%. The vision here was that, in the eight years after these figures were released, Catholicism with its statistical stagnancy may still manage to overtake the national Church of Scotland. The year 2024 was projected to be the year that this would come to fruition, and how remarkable is it that in 2026, the Church has managed to receive its highest ever number of Confirmations in the modern day?

After all is said and done, “the harvest is plenty” and the future is looking bright for the Catholic Church in not only the world, but specifically in Scotland.

By Dhylan Livani

^[1] Voas, ‘Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2006

^[2] Voas, ‘Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2006

^[3] Religion | Scotland’s Census

^[4] More difficult decisions needed to help Church balance the books | The Church of Scotland

^[5] Church prepares to welcome new Catholics - Archdiocese of Edinburgh and St Andrews

^[6] The quiet Catholic revival in a Scottish university town

^[7] Britain’s ‘Quiet Catholic Revival’ Is Lay-Driven, Mostly by Young Men – EWTN Great Britain

^[8] 2026 convert boom: Where around the world? And why?

^[9] SATURDAY: Carlo Acutis relics arrive in Edinburgh - Archdiocese of Edinburgh and St Andrews

^[10] Courtney Mares, ‘Carlo Acutis: A Saint in Sneakers’, 2025, p. 11-64

^[11] Here Come the Millennials | JACC

^[12] Pier Giorgio Frassati, a “True Brother” to be canonized by Pope - Vatican News

^[13] Brief Biography of St. Pier Giorgio Frassati | FrassatiUSA, Inc. | Nashville, TN

discusses the aftermath of the failed Assisted Dying bills and new writer ( and 2025 convert) Dhylan Livani on the recent announcent from the Bishops Council of Scotland about a restructuring of the Scottish Church.

As ever we list this months Scottish Saints and just to remind you that if you have not read the April edition - it was all about the Holyrood elections that are being held this week - click the link here.

May Saints

10th May sees the celebration of St Comgall, abbot of the hugely influential Bangor Abbey and was contemporaneous to St Columba. St Cattan of Bute (17th May), St Conval of Renfrew (18th May), St William, Martyr of Perthshire (23rd May) and St Dagnus of Galloway (29th May). But below we highlight two in particular:

3rd of May - Saint Fumac -

25th May - St Bede

I began taking notes for this article on the night that the Scottish Parliament voted on the Assisted Dying Bill which was introduced by Scottish Liberal Democrat Liam McArthur; thankfully it failed to win the majority vote. It was a close call, and every argument I heard for or against was very vague and didn’t seem to ever get to the very guts of the issue. I couldn’t put my finger on why, waiting for the result of the vote, this felt like a watershed moment; the dreadful realisation that our United Kingdom was built by people with a much firmer grasp on ethics and truth than those drafting bills now. So, I began to think about these concepts that kept being plated up, ‘rights’, ‘autonomy’, ‘dignity’ as if they’re self explanatory concepts. Well, to believe that they are self explanatory is to presume a moral foundation and I cannot see that any argument in favour of assisted dying can be resting on one. My fear is that this Bill should it pass at a later date, is the fruit of a long and slow degradation of truth and the abdication from natural law to moral relativism, and I fail to see how a coherent system of law can function on this basis.

“If God does not exist then everything is permitted.” – Dostoyevsky

The idea of a fundamental human right to life rests on the belief that human beings are uniquely made in the image of God and therefore have inherent dignity. We know that we are set apart from the animal kingdom because of two things: speech and reason. But these things don’t necessarily earn us ‘rights’, if we needed to earn our human rights, they would no longer be inalienable. Why should we have inalienable rights regardless of committing a heinous crime for example? Well, the assumption is that we are all equal in the eyes of God and despite our sins, Christ’s mercy is not limited nor prejudiced. If humanity creates it’s own rights, then they can be revised or removed according to, say, a vote.

So this brings us to ‘autonomy’, the right to refuse your inalienable right? Whether an individual wishes to refuse a human right or not, it cannot be acknowledged in law because the virtue of ‘justice’ involves the whole, not just the individual. The concept of autonomy in this instance is flawed since it is very conditional in that it requires others to partake in the suicide by making an assessment on eligibility and prescribing or administering the deadly drug. A patient must also be able to give consent to be eligible. This raises several questions: how does a physician measure suffering and how can it be legislated? If only those who are competent enough to consent are allowed to commit suicide, then surely this limits who actually has autonomy. The often discussed point of ‘compassion for suffering’ then becomes conditional also, how and why should compassion only be shown for those competent enough to consent? Suffering is surely a subjective experience and to deny a person’s reality could be considered prejudiced. If this question cannot be answered with empirical evidence now, then it will be answered if an assisted dying bill passes at a later date, and no doubt these points will be met with agreement.

In CS Lewis’s ‘The Problem of Pain’ he makes the point that kindness is not love, kindness is disinterested tolerance. Love expects much more, loving thy neighbour is not putting down a sick animal. If as a society, we legally accept that some lives are not worth living, it is inevitable that the group will expand from terminally ill adults who can physically consent, to those who cannot consent, to terminally ill children, to the elderly, depressed, disabled, poor. (This also begs the question, why not the death penalty? Is it only the innocent that can be killed by the State?) These are not medical assessments, they are philosophical and legal questions. To give powers to the State to legally take the lives of innocent people is a risk that tenuously hopes that a government will always remain politically sensible and never fall into tyranny. The ‘right to die’ is the removal of a human right, not the addition of one.

“The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” – George MacDonald

First of all, dignity is not bestowed on a person by the State, it is inherent in the human being. Secondly, as a Catholic whose God suffered for the sins of humanity, I cannot rightly agree that to suffer is to lack dignity. We can not also agree that all who suffer would be better off dead, whether they are suffering due to illness or in war zones or due to poverty. We have seen these arguments in the dialogue around abortion, if the existence of life itself is not outright denied, then the argument often switches to the circumstances of the mother. I think an unforeseen element of the cultural repercussions will be that it will become morally reprehensible to be ‘against suicide’ in a similar way to abortion, to talk someone out of the idea of suicide will be considered taboo, and perhaps we will see those talking to potential suicides or quietly praying for them arrested as with the case of the director March for Life (UK) arrested for silent prayer. The intrinsic value of a person’s life is not diminished by their experience of suffering, on the contrary many who suffer find purpose in ways that are unique to their experience and in helping others.

In the same way that the pharmaceutical industry depends on illness to make profits, it’s undeniable that assisted suicide is vulnerable to becoming a lucrative business, especially if outsourced to third parties. Organ harvesting could also easily fall into a moral black hole, if pressure is placed on potential donors and even due to the problem of ‘ischemia time’ whereby organs are damaged during the time that the donor dies and the organs lack blood flow before transplantation; how long will it take before donors who choose assisted suicide are having their organs removed alive? The UN reported that “the organ trade, which includes human trafficking for organ removal, is a lucrative criminal business, amounting to between 840 million to USD 1.7 billion USD annually.” If this trade is legalised with a fresh source of transplants and supported through official routes, I cannot see that the industry, already on morally flimsy ground, can retain watertight safeguards. The risk of cutting corners on psychological as well as social and welfare assessments to ensure individuals are not being manipulated by families and the temptation of financial incentives just looks like a march toward continued dehumanisation in an increasingly atomised world. If dignity and rights are not considered intrinsic to the human person, but rather given by the State, then they can be withheld, taken or outright denied with enough social conditioning.

“Without a theory of Immortality it leaves no room for the value of death” – CS Lewis

I cannot presume to know what it’s like to suffer with a terminal illness, the pleas for compassion from the assisted suicide lobby seem to stress the suffering of physical pain but really I think it is more about the psychological pain and more so even than that, a spiritual pain. The grief of being unable to live a normal life. Where medication can in most cases be used to alleviate physical pain, the spiritual suffering comes down to grappling with the rawness of the unique human experience itself. I think that is why the assisted dying debate generates such contention. Pope John Paul II articulated this unavoidable aspect of life perfectly:

“...what we express by the word “suffering” seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man. It is as deep as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense “destined” to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.”

Pope John Paul II goes on to say that humans are uniquely aware of our suffering and that an individual suffers greatly when he is deprived, according to the normal order of things, of what is ‘good’. It might seem extraneous to the debate, but I actually think the questions of good and evil are precisely what needs discussing, a ‘returning to the drawing board’. We instinctively perceive what is ‘good’ and according to the Church our awareness comes from God so that we are able to know ourselves and God, to witness and respond to the world. To reference CS Lewis again, we know right and wrong because ‘all men are conscious of guilt’, therefore guilt is either an ‘inexplicable illusion or else revelation.’

If what sets us apart defines us, i.e. communication and awareness, then to know and communicate the Good, the True and the Beautiful (the Transcendentals) and gain knowledge is to know God and find purpose. Aristotle says that happiness is not a state of being but is the acquisition of outstanding natural activity, aiming at ‘some good’ with every choice. So, the theft of self determination can be viscerally painful, especially in the West where this freedom is enjoyed by the majority.

In November of last year, the funeral Mass of Br Aidan John was held at Pluscarden Abbey. Br John took his monastic vows as he was dying of Cancer at 38. Some of the monks spoke of the beautiful and edifying experience of visiting Br John and offering Mass at his bedside before he passed. In the homily read at the funeral, Br John’s own words were shared where he reflects on his life’s purpose and failings and ultimately the gratitude he felt and the hope that his last days gave everyone around him; Br John’s vivid example of what suffering can even, perhaps, offer us, of which the truest of introspection is one:

“I spoke to Br. Peter yesterday and he mentioned again his trip to Iona and the idea of its being a thin place, where the boundary between heaven and earth is particularly narrow, and that death does something similar. What a beautiful thought, that the dying person is a thin place where the veil is drawn aside and heaven becomes close to all who approach! I see this now as my mission: to be a thin place where those around me, whether family, friends, carers or strangers, can see through the burden of illness to the beauty and joy of heaven, can see through the trials of this earthly human life to the glory of God and his unfailing, abundant love.”

By

The Death and Burial of Br. John Aidan Cook — Pluscarden Abbey

Salvifici Doloris (February 11, 1984)

Explainer: Understanding Human Trafficking for Organ Removal

Death by organ donation: Euthanizing patients for their organs gains frightening traction - PMC

Catholic parish priest, Gaelic poet, and folklore expert, Father Allan MacDonald was one of the most fascinating personalities of the Hebrides over the last two centuries and probably the most esteemed ecclesiastic in northwest Scotland after Saint Columba.

Born on October 25, 1859, he was the third of five children of John MacDonald and Elizabeth MacPherson, originally from Torlundy and the daughter of a farm manager. His father came from a family of carters and escorted carriages through the Highlands, from Loch Lomond to Fort William. He was a direct employee of the post office, and his job was to prevent mail from being stolen. When he married in 1852, he gave up his job and used the money he saved to buy a tavern overlooking the main street of Fort William.

The city was located in a relatively wealthy area, reliant on trade and tourism, and young Allan, named after his paternal grandfather, had the opportunity to grow up in a healthy and peaceful family environment. His father, a proud representative of the middle class, cherished aspirations for his children, and it is no coincidence that he wanted to give them an education in English, the language of commerce and empire, setting aside the Gaelic spoken by the majority of the population. Religiously, however, he held more traditional views: he was a Roman Catholic, proud to belong to one of the clans that had supported Bonnie Prince Charlie, the young pretender who in the eighteenth century attempted in vain to re-establish the Stuart succession in Britain.

Between 1867 and 1868, when Allan was still a child, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the first Catholic chapel in Fort William, was built, and the MacDonalds were among the first to receive communion there. Later, the boy attended the Fort William Roman Catholic School, run by a local priest and teachers mostly women, which provided him with a solid education in subjects such as Greek, Latin, French, English literature, and mathematics. The professors quickly recognized his potential and invited him to continue his studies at St. Mary’s College, Blairs, a minor seminary near Aberdeen, where the young MacDonald transferred in October 1871, shortly before his twelfth birthday.

Donated in the early nineteenth century to the Catholic bishops of Scotland by a wealthy member of the faithful, Blairs College, as it was commonly known, was at the time a rather small institution, housing students from not only Scotland but also England and Ireland. MacDonald was an intelligent and receptive student, but he resented the Spartan regime imposed by the rector, the Reverend Peter Joseph Grant, which contrasted with the cheerfulness he had experienced at home and in the small community in which he grew up. The school placed ample emphasis on the teaching of modern languages ​​such as French, Spanish, and Italian, because a large portion of the students would continue their studies at one of the Scots Colleges on the continent, established during and after the Reformation. Conversely, Gaelic was not particularly encouraged, and so MacDonald, who wished to speak it fluently, was forced to study it on his own, encouraged, among others, by Father James A. Smith – the future Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh – who also instilled in him his passion for philology. John Mackintosh, his classmate and future priest, who became his lifelong friend, also supported him.

After the death of both his parents, in September 1876, MacDonald was encouraged by his professors to continue his studies abroad. He chose Spain, more precisely the College of San Ambrosio in Valladolid, where he quickly adapted to a congenial environment, less harsh than the other institutions he had attended up to that point (the only trial was having to get used to the local climate, decidedly different from Scotland’s). Another stroke of luck was that the new rector, besides being a supporter of Neo-Thomism, encouraged his students to learn and practice Gaelic. Many of them, once ordained, would in fact serve in parishes where Gaelic was the first language and often the only one spoken and understood by the faithful. These communities had been incorporated into the newly formed Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, created following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland in 1878, and MacDonald, who at heart felt himself a proud son of the Highlands, could not have hoped for a better destination.

And so it happened: in 1882, after being ordained a priest, he was sent to Oban as assistant to Bishop Angus MacDonald. Although very few Catholics lived there, one a fisherman who introduced Father MacDonald to traditional Gaelic hymns and Hebridean folklore, the town had the great advantage of being well connected to the north-western islands and, at the same time, not too far from the archdioceses of Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was also the closest coastal town to the sacred island of Iona, the starting point from which Saint Columba, in the sixth century, began his preaching in Scotland.

After two years, Father MacDonald was offered a teaching position at Blairs College. He was almost inclined to accept, but when he learned that the community of Daliburgh, in the southern part of the island of South Uist, had recently lost its parish priest, he changed his mind and, packing his bags, moved there without hesitation.

South Uist, with a population of 3,600, mostly farmers, was one of those peripheral areas of Scotland where, with very rare exceptions, the people had always maintained the old faith, resisting the blandishments of the reformers. For them, Gaelic identity was part of a millennia-old bond with the Celtic Church, and for a priest, it meant finding himself working in a safe and welcoming environment that existed nowhere else in the country. Thus it happened that Father MacDonald, like his predecessors, easily integrated into the new environment, appreciating its rhythms and customs, and eventually representing his faithful even in political contests (in 1888, he was even elected to the island’s School Board). Tensions were not lacking, not only because of the effects of the Clearances of the previous decades – the forced and mass eviction of the rural population to benefit a handful of landowners – but also because the entire chain of Catholic islands in the Outer Hebrides, from Barra to Benbecula, was then under the control of Lady Gordon Cathcart, an aristocrat who exercised her prerogatives without too many scruples.

Father MacDonald landed on South Uist in the summer of 1884 and occupied the rectory near St. Peter’s Church, in what was then the largest of the island’s three Catholic parishes. The elderly Father Alexander Campbell, who would die only nine years later, and whom the bishop wanted to work alongside him to instruct him in the islanders’ customs and traditions, as well as to strengthen his Gaelic, welcomed him warmly. In his limited free time, Father MacDonald enjoyed long walks and climbing hills, or he fished, both in the sea and in the lochs. He also loved music, was an avid reader, and became an amateur archaeologist, exploring the prehistory of South Uist. Around 1887, after three years in the Hebrides, he began collecting information on local folklore, and a couple of years later he compiled a Gaelic hymnbook, which included a commentary on the sung Mass in the Highland and Island language. As might be expected, this work earned him a certain fame among late-Victorian enthusiasts of Celtic culture, some of whom came knocking at his door. Apparently, some even took advantage of his availability, stealing some of his notes and publishing them as their own.

In 1894, due to increasingly evident physical and mental fatigue, MacDonald was moved to Eriskay, a decidedly less demanding parish. Except for two or three perfectly assimilated Protestant families, the island’s 450 inhabitants, economically dependent on the sea, were Catholic, and almost all spoke Gaelic. In his rectory of Am Rubha Ban, the priest lived a frugal life, devoted to his duties and study. He also wrote sacred and secular poetry, songs, and hymns, and it was to Eriskay that he dedicated one of his finest poems, “Eilein na h-Òige,” or “The Isle of Youth.” Thanks to numerous donations from across Scotland –among the many benefactors, there was Marc-André Raffalovich, a close friend of the priest John Gray – he also managed to build a new parish church, inaugurated in 1903.

Father MacDonald, who by then had even become a character in a couple of novels, died on October 8, 1905, struck down by pneumonia that had degenerated into pleurisy. The funeral was unforgettable: no fewer than twenty-one priests crossed the waters of the Minch to be present, all the island’s inhabitants were in mourning, and the priest was buried amid the tears of strong men unaccustomed to weeping. Not only Eriskay but also a vast array of friends mourned the death of this heroic and humble parish priest, a remarkable scholar of Celtic culture and, above all, one of God’s greatest ministers in the history of the Hebrides.

By Luca Fumagalli

As Catholics we might feel familiarised with the words evangelization and mission. We normally hear these words in a catechesis either by our parish priest in his homily or by a lay catechist in a lesson, or sometimes when there is an appeal for a second collection on Sundays to support the mission of the Church. However, we don’t often stop and pay close attention to these words and what they mean to us personally. Specially so because we might feel or see ourselves detached from such actions. In contrast, in other contexts of our lives, we focus our attention and intellect into trying to look for a meaningful answer to the ever present question: what is my mission? what is purpose or meaning of my life?

Does it sound familiar to you? I’m guessing it does because we are in a restlessness quest for meaning and fulfilment. As late Pope Benedict XVI pointed out “(…) Possessions, pleasure and power show themselves sooner or later to be incapable of fulfilling the deepest yearnings of the human heart. In building our lives we need solid foundations which will endure when human certainties fail. (…)” (Verbum Domini 10)

This personal quest is the individual starting point of a much larger one which moves us out of our own self to the other. It is, in simpler words, a quest to feel connected. The late Pope, Francis, tells us:

‘The Gospel offers us the chance to live life on a higher plane, but with no less intensity: Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort. Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others’.

When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfilment. For “here we discover a profound law of reality: that life is attained and matures in the measure that it is offered up in order to give life to others. This is certainly what mission means”. (Evangelii Gaudium 10)

The meaning that Jesus’s words in the Gospels have in my choices and life is directly related to my free personal response to Faith. Faith is a grace as much as a human act (CCC 153 ,154). Looking at it closer we understand Faith not as an empty word but rather as profound encounter between two selves, that of God and that of the man, entering in a relationship. “…Faith is man’s response to God, who reveals himself and gives himself to man, at the same time bringing man a superabundant light as he searches for the ultimate meaning of his life (…)” (CCC 26). In the words of Pope Benedict XVI “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction”. (Deus Caritas Est 1)

This articles intent is to make us realise the deep interactions that exists between our own personal fulfilment in relation to how we might be living my faith and, more deeply, in relation to how our encounter with the Resurrected Christ makes us identify with the love of God and the Mission of the Church.

The joy of the Gospel and the call to Mission.

“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”

“Then Jesus approached them and said to them, ‘All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:18–20)

These words in Matthew’s gospel are so rich!. I would like to invite you to meditate upon them.

The evangelist starts by stating a fact “Jesus approached them”, here we understand it is God Who looks for us, come to our encounter and speaks to us. He reveals himself and His Divine nature. “Thanks solely to this encounter – or renewed encounter – with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being. Here we find the source and inspiration of all our efforts at evangelization. For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others? (Evangelii Gaudium 8)

Who did Jesus’s approach? To His apostles, it would be the immediate standard response. Let’s stop and think, once more, as our personal answer to this simple question describes how I feel before Jesus’s presence in my life, in turn our answer helps us understand where we are in the path of our personal conversion and that of our personal journey of faith.

“In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19). All the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients. The new evangelization calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized. Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love. Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are “disciples” and “missionaries”, but rather that we are always “missionary disciples”. ( Evangelii Gaudium 120)

“Faith thus takes shape as an encounter with a person to whom we entrust our whole life. Christ Jesus remains present today in history, in his body which is the Church; for this reason, our act of faith is at once both personal and ecclesial.” (Verbum Domini 25).

What did Jesus say? Let’s notice the verbs go, make, baptize, teach, observe. “Evangelization is the task of the Church. The Church, as the agent of evangelization, is more than an organic and hierarchical institution; she is first and foremost a people advancing on its pilgrim way towards God. She is certainly a mystery rooted in the Trinity, yet she exists concretely in history as a people of pilgrims and evangelizers, transcending any institutional expression, however necessary”. (Evangelii Gaudium 111). “The Lord’s missionary mandate includes a call to growth in faith: “Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). Hence it is clear that that the first proclamation also calls for ongoing formation and maturation. Evangelization aims at a process of growth which entails taking seriously each person and God’s plan for his or her life. All of us need to grow in Christ. Evangelization should stimulate a desire for this growth, so that each of us can say wholeheartedly: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).” (Evangelii Gaudium160)

“Above all the Gospel must be proclaimed by witness. Take a Christian or a handful of Christians who, in the midst of their own community, show their capacity for understanding and acceptance, their sharing of life and destiny with other people, their solidarity with the efforts of all for whatever is noble and good. Let us suppose that, in addition, they radiate in an altogether simple and unaffected way their faith in values that go beyond current values, and their hope in something that is not seen and that one would not dare to imagine. Through this wordless witness these Christians stir up irresistible questions in the hearts of those who see how they live: Why are they like this? Why do they live in this way? What or who is it that inspires them? Why are they in our midst? Such a witness is already a silent proclamation of the Good News and a very powerful and effective one. Here we have an initial act of evangelization” ( Evangelii Nuntiandi 21)

What does this command entail? The words of Jesus in Matthew’s the Gospel are a direct invitation to have faith but also because of that same faith a sparkle appears , one that demands us to move outside of our own self and give others the joy that originates from the News of Salvation. “Those who have opened their hearts to God’s love, heard his voice and received his light, cannot keep this gift to themselves. Since faith is hearing and seeing, it is also handed on as word and light” (Lumen Fidei 37). “Faith transforms the whole person precisely to the extent that he or she becomes open to love. Through this blending of faith and love we come to see the kind of knowledge which faith entails, its power to convince and its ability to illumine our steps. Faith knows because it is tied to love, because love itself brings enlightenment. Faith’s understanding is born when we receive the immense love of God which transforms us inwardly and enables us to see reality with new eyes” (Lumen Fidei 26) “Precisely because it is linked to love (cf. Gal 5:6), the light of faith is concretely placed at the service of justice, law and peace. Faith is born of an encounter with God’s primordial love, wherein the meaning and goodness of our life become evident; our life is illumined to the extent that it enters into the space opened by that love, to the extent that it becomes, in other words, a path and praxis leading to the fullness of love. The light of faith is capable of enhancing the richness of human relations, their ability to endure, to be trustworthy, to enrich our life together. Faith does not draw us away from the world or prove irrelevant to the concrete concerns of the men and women of our time”(Lumen Fidei 51)

“The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an undertaking that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity” (Deus Caritas Est 19) . It is under this light we are move by the words of St Paul “With such yearning love we chose to impart to you not only the gospel of God but our very selves, so dear had you become to us.” (1 Thess 2:8)

I have a mission it is the Mission of the Church!

Written by Alexandra De Carias

Alexandra is a catholic Psychologist and and representative of Betania XXI which is a spiritual movement originating in her home country of Venezula. If you would like to know more about Betania XXI email her at betania21UK@gmail.com. You can also read her previous article here which talks specifically on the special ministry of reconcilliation and conversion of the faithful.

In March just past, Bishops across the country assembled to talk about the current functioning of the Catholic Church in Scotland, and changes that can be made for its betterment.

Pictured: St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, Easter Sunday, 2026

The statement produced at the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland for 2026 addresses some stark pressures that the Church is currently facing, ranging from a lesser number of ordained priests; evolving practices; the eight dioceses across Scotland lacking in the essential requirements to function and more.

While these issues were addressed in the statement, it was also highlighted that the Holy See initiated this call for introspection among the Bishops in the country, and to determine whether it’s possible to maintain the upkeep of all these dioceses.

We spoke to Bishop John Keenan, of Paisley, to gather more information about the talks and the approach to future evangelisation:

“The process is not about rationalisation in an administrative sense. It is about how… we can be the best Catholic Church in terms of our mission of evangelisation and the involvement of the whole People of God in the life and mission of the Church.” (Bishop John Keenan, 2026)

This outlined the deep-rooted interest in evangelism in the Church, and that it is intrinsically connected to the heart of the Gospel and Jesus Christ being its drive during outreach. This echoes what is in the official Bishops’ Conference statement, which reads:

“Yet our mission remains unchanged: to proclaim the Gospel and to lead our people to Christ.” (Bishops Conference of Scotland, 2026)

While the importance is on evangelisation, there are two potential routes that have been proposed in order to ameliorate the problem of lowering resources among the dioceses of Scotland. These are drafted to ensure that the future of the Catholic Church in Scotland is a positive and fruitful one, and are important facets of the official March 2026 statement.

One of these options sees the maintenance of the current ecclesial framework of the eight dioceses of Scotland, maintaining their individual identities as separate to the other, but highlights that in order to achieve this vision, there must be shared resources. This creates space for more conversations to be held, as inter-diocesan communications are what will fuel this pathway.

The second route that was proposed sees the merging of dioceses across Scotland, as it acknowledges that resources are short, and ergo, the current ecclesial framework across Scotland will change in order to merge them.

Bishop John Keenan highlighted the importance of lay voices in these choices, and that they are valued by Bishops who are currently in the process of decision-making:

“The bishops will get together to discern among ourselves first of all, but we are keen to involve the clergy and the lay faithful of Scotland.” (Bishop John Keenan, 2026)

The symbiotic clerical/lay relationship in this process is emphasised by Bishop Keenan as he discusses the importance of the decision at hand. Either one will impact the future functioning of the Catholic Church in Scotland, and will come with its proponents and its naysayers.

Both clergy and laity are encouraged to pray during this time of discernment, and are asked to contribute in sharing their thoughts on the future of the Church body across the country.

By Dhylan Livani

Dhylan is current studying a Masters of Theology at New College in Edinburgh having previously completed a degree in Journalism at Napier. He is also a brand new Catholic having only just entered the Church in September 2025.

Image: St Mary’s Cathedral Edinburgh

A Radical Right

Stephen Watt playfully imagines what a radical Right in Scotland might look like. His piece produces a potential manifesto calling for a serious and intellectual radical Right that in challenging the dominant progressive analysis makes our overall political system better.

Jacques Maritain and the Cosmopolitan Knighthood of Democracy: on a politics of human flourishing beyond market forces and the ever engorging need of growth.

Dignity in the public discourse

Elizabeth Drummond Young, one of the founders of the Albertus Institute in Edinburgh, writes on a dignity combined with love and friendship. Dignity as Alasdair Macintyre warned us:

Voting for truth

writes on the importance of a truthful politics with politians and institutions not afraid to tell the electorate the truth so that we can better deal with the problems and issues affecting our country.

From the Archive

As a magazine we have been going a mere blink of an eye but in those 6 years we have amassed a signifcant archive. Below is one from February 2023:

In this months Coracle we look ahead to the Holyrood elections that are happening on May 7th. That they are happening in the back drop of war in the Middle East and shifting alliances spurred on by bellicose world leaders will not dispel the local and national needs of the people of Scotland. But beyond the manifestos, sound bites and leaflets with colourful bar charts, we should also take a step back and look at the overall picture. How should we as Catholics vote? How do we square the fact that as Christians we are in the world but not of it? We are sojourners (1Pet1:17-18) that live and act, work and pay taxes, yet, our focus is not on Edinburgh (or any other Capital for that matter) - but the heavenly city (Heb12:22). Our saviour is not a politician - but the Saviour, Christ. Regardless of local priorities and political creed, the question is of how the Lordship of Christ, His death and resurrection plays out in our politics.

As ever in St Moluag’s Coracle we want to go deeper, looking at the framework in which we can potentially assess our political parties claims and ideologies. To do that read on below.

James Bundy writes about a politics that is truthful - to see clearly and choose accordingly issues and solutions that are parties often find difficult to bring up with us, the electorate.

Elizabeth Drummond Young writes on the topic of dignity - a common word in political discourse, but, as she demonstrates, humans can easily denude one another of it when it is not combined with Love and Friendship.

Andrew Kuiper gives us an overview of the thought of French philosopher Jacques Maritain whose Christian humanism called for a modern Catholic politics that went beyond market forces, wars and extraction. Refuting the inhumanity and cynicism so prevalent in a society that has divorced economics and politics from human flourishing - regardless of the rhetoric of dignity and human rights.

Finally Stephen Watt playfully reimagines a Radical Right that thinks of the permanent things of society. Going after the Good, True and Beautiful but unlike the fear-driven politics of certain Right-wing groupings, this is a radical solidarity that is rooted in Catholic moral teaching that recognises the Other in all of us.

April Saints

The Saints in our calendar seem rather apt for the theme of this months edition. On the 1st April we had the brillant builder, administrator and dragon slayer - St Gilbert. We have good king Conval and another Saint of noble heritage - St Magnus. The life and death of St Magnus, a man who sought peace and paid for it in blood is surely a man Scots can invoke in our prayers for peace in our world. We also have the important early Irish evangelist - St Maelrubha whose base was on Applecross in the west.

Finally…

Happy Easter from all at the Coracle - I know this is supposed to come out on Fridays but frankly the wonders and the truth contained within the Holy Tridium was far more important and worthy of our attentions.

God Bless

Eric and the Team.

April Edition Contributors:

Stephen Watt is a permanent writer and co-member of the editorial team. He teaches Philosophy at Edinburgh University and the Open University. He is also involved in the Albertus Institute in Edinburgh.

Elizabeth Drummod Young is a teaching fellow in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a founder member of The Albertus Institute (albertus.scot)

Andrew Kuiper lives and writes in Michigan. Interests include Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, German Idealism and Romanticism, Russian Sophiology and Marxism. He has written for The Lamp, Church Life Journal, and Romanticon. Find his Substack Naucratic Expeditions here.

James Bundy is a Scottish Conservative Councillor for Falkirk north, a passionate campaigner for the Stroke campaign BE FAST and also co-hosts a wonderful Scottish History podcast with Murdo Fraser A Thistle with Thorns. He has written for the Times, The Scotsman and Scottish Legal News. You can find him on his own Substack @James Bundy or on X @jamesbundy.

Catholics participating in the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May should aim to restore a politics of truth in a culture that has drifted toward symbolism and performative division. This means more than rhetorical clarity: it requires honesty about trade-offs, a refusal to reduce complex moral questions to slogans, and a willingness to speak uncomfortable truths even at political cost. Yet truth alone is insufficient. In an age shaped by social media, where political incentives reward outrage and tribal affirmation, Catholics must resist the temptation to mirror these habits. The task is not to win attention, but to serve the common good. That demands a politics of charity, one that seeks to understand opponents, not caricature them, and that treats disagreement as a condition for dialogue rather than a reason for exclusion.

Over the past decade, Scottish political life has repeatedly failed to confront the serious, long-term structural problems facing the country: addiction to drugs and gambling, a health service struggling to keep pace with technological change, inadequate housing, and the erosion of community cohesion. These are not marginal concerns. They are the conditions under which people live.

Yet within that same period, the Scottish Parliament has found time to pardon those accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century and to legislate against greyhound racing - an activity that does not, in practice, take place in Scotland. These may be sincerely motivated measures. But sincerity is not the same as priority. At a time of real social strain, it is reasonable to ask whether this is the best use of legislative attention.

The contrast is not abstract. What does such legislation offer to a child growing up in a damp house, or to a family living with the daily reality of addiction? What problem, precisely, is being solved?

This points to a deeper pattern, not only in Scotland but across much of Western politics. Governments are often reluctant to confront difficult truths - whether about policy failure, institutional limits, or past mistakes. The instinct is to reassure, to present a manageable picture of progress, and to avoid the political cost of candour. Opposition parties, by contrast, are tempted in the opposite direction: to present every failure as total, every shortcoming as systemic, and every problem as the sole responsibility of those in power.

Neither approach serves the common good. Constant reassurance erodes credibility when reality intrudes. Constant denunciation dulls public sensitivity, until even serious failures struggle to command attention. In both cases, politics becomes reactive and performative, an endless cycle of signalling and rebuttal, rather than a serious attempt to grapple with underlying problems.

What is missing, in both modes, is a commitment to truth: a willingness to name problems in their full complexity, to admit limits, and to prioritise substance over gesture.

Even in the recent assisted dying debate, widely praised for its civility and lack of overt partisanship, the underlying problem persisted. Much of the contribution, on both sides, leaned heavily on personal experience and emotional appeal, rather than sustained engagement with the substance of the Bill itself. There is a place for such arguments. At Stage 1, where Parliament considers the principle of a proposal, they are not only appropriate but necessary. But at Stage 3, the task is different. Members are no longer weighing sentiment, but responsibility: the legal coherence of the Bill, the adequacy of its safeguards, and the real-world consequences of its provisions.

When that distinction is blurred, something important is lost. Lawmaking becomes an extension of personal testimony rather than an exercise in public judgment. Difficult questions, about implementation, risk, and unintended consequences, are left insufficiently examined, not because they are unimportant, but because they are politically and emotionally harder to address.

This is not a failure of sincerity. It is a failure of discipline. And it reflects a wider tendency within Scottish political life to substitute expression for scrutiny and signalling for substance, precisely where clarity and truth are most required.

Catholic social teaching begins with a clear and demanding claim: every human person possesses an inherent dignity, grounded in their creation in the image of God. But that dignity does not eliminate moral difficulty; it intensifies it. To uphold it in practice requires the disciplined use of reason, careful judgment about how best to act in circumstances that are often constrained, imperfect, and resistant to easy solutions.

Some moral questions admit of clear answers. Others do not. How to respond to the deep structural problems within Scottish society: addiction, failing services, social fragmentation, within the limits of a finite budget is not a question that can be settled by instinct or by appealing to a political base. It requires serious deliberation: an honest reckoning with trade-offs, consequences, and competing goods.

In such circumstances, there are no perfect outcomes. Every decision carries costs; every policy creates both benefits and burdens. Yet this is precisely what contemporary politics often obscures. The language of public life tends to promise resolution without sacrifice, progress without loss.

A politics grounded in truth must resist that temptation. It must be willing to name limits, to acknowledge difficulty, and to speak plainly about the real consequences of political choice, even when that honesty is electorally inconvenient.

As a Catholic still in my twenties, I can recognise the appeal of a more forceful model of faith: the image of St Michael defending the Church, or of martyrs such as St Thomas More and St John Ogilvie, who held firm in the face of persecution. There is courage here, and it should not be dismissed. But it is not the only model we are given, and, in political life, it is often the most easily misunderstood.

The temptation is to translate conviction into aggression, to assume that strength of belief must be expressed through force of rhetoric. Yet the Christian tradition offers a different pattern. Pope Benedict XVI, in Caritas in Veritate, insisted that truth must be accompanied by charity. St Joseph, though entrusted with immense responsibility, leads without recorded words, through fidelity rather than display.

The clearest example, however, is Christ himself. In the garden of Gethsemane, when Peter responds to Jesus’s arrest with violence, Christ rebukes him and heals the wounded man. The moment is decisive: the defence of truth is not advanced through instinctive force, but through disciplined love.

For those seeking to bring truth back into public life, the lesson is uncomfortable but necessary. Aggression is not a sign of seriousness; it is often a substitute for it. Boldness in politics does not consist in volume or confrontation, but in the patient work of judgment, restraint, and service to the common good.

So, what does this mean for Scottish Catholics preparing to cast their vote next month?

First, it means assessing candidates not through the lens of tribal loyalty, but through their capacity to serve the common good. The question is not who best reflects our identity, but who demonstrates the judgment required to govern well.

Second, it means engaging candidates directly. Writing to them, asking how they understand the most serious challenges facing Scotland today, and paying close attention to whether they respond in substantive terms or simply fall back on party lines. The latter should be a warning sign.

Third, it requires discernment when faith is invoked in political campaigning. Faith should illuminate judgment, not function as a tool of persuasion. In politics, actions, and consistency over time, speak more clearly than declarations.

Finally, it means resisting the temptation to vote on familiarity, personality, or surface-level appeal. The question is more demanding: who is best able to scrutinise, amend, and improve the laws that will shape the lives of others?

If these standards were more widely adopted, Scottish political life would not be transformed overnight. But it would begin to recover a measure of seriousness: less shaped by performance, more grounded in judgment; less driven by signalling, more attentive to consequences.

For Catholics, this is ultimately not a call to a different style of politics, but to a different discipline of attention. The question is not whether one is loud or quiet, familiar or contrarian, but whether one is willing to face political reality as it is, with all its limits, costs, and demands.

To vote, then, is not simply to express a preference. It is to participate in the slow work of ordering public life towards truth. And that work, in the end, requires something more demanding than conviction alone: the patience to see clearly, and the courage to choose accordingly.

By James Bundy

James is a Scottish Conservative Councillor for Falkirk north, a passionate campaigner for the Stroke campaign BE FAST and also co-hosts a wonderful Scottish History podcast with Murdo Fraser A Thistle with Thorns. He has written for the Times, The Scotsman and Scottish Legal News. You can find him on his own Substack @James Bundy or on X @jamesbundy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 made a direct connection between each of us having dignity in virtue of our humanity and our having associated rights. Dignity is often used as a justification in ethical arguments and a secure foundational principle for applied ethics more generally. It also has the benefit of appealing to everyone including those of no religious belief, although the origins of universal inviolable human dignity in the context of human rights can be traced to Christian, specifically Catholic thought. In addition to its widespread appeal, and perhaps because of it, dignity (unlike ‘free speech’ for example) has not yet become a toxic concept. But is this concept, so valuable because of its common currency in danger through misuse and misunderstanding?

Scottish/ American Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1929- 2025) thought there was a problem with the concept of dignity, going so far as to call it dangerous. The standard interpretation of human dignity was too closely related to individualism, he thought, and it left out the important connection between the individual and society. He suggests that rather than our dignity being inviolable, humans can lose their dignity when acting against their God given end or purpose. Our purpose is to know and love God and if we choose to pursue other goals which take us away from that, we can lose or diminish our dignity. Using inviolable dignity as a foundational principle results only in our observing negative duties thinks MacIntyre. Negative duties simply tell us what not to do and are necessarily limited, so MacIntyre prioritises justice which he considers promotes positive duties. Under the auspices of justice, we give people what is their due (a positive demand). ‘Dignity,’ he says, ‘is the sham culmination of western humanism because it carries within it a shocking indifference to others. It is an asocial concept, an ideological tool of liberal commercialism’. For MacIntyre, justice rather than dignity sites an individual within a society and can establish dignity and worth only from within that social web. On his view, you can lose your dignity and then no one has any reason to treat you with respect- a startling result of his argument.

Dignity is the sham culmination of western humanism because it carries a shocking indifference to others – Alasdair MacIntyre

To see what MacIntyre had in mind, consider how dignity as a justifying principle has been used to support both assisted dying and the decriminalisation of prostitution; issues which have been raised in Scottish politics recently. Arguments supporting assisted dying and decriminalised sex work associate dignity with the values of autonomy as expressed by an individual being free to make a choice – about when to die, or whether to offer their body for sale. And in the context of MacIntyre’s argument, that reasoning is indeed very focussed on the individual and ignores for example, the social impact of permissible assisted dying or decriminalised prostitution. We can see that the concept of dignity can be stretched in arguments to provide positions which might be acceptable to a secular audience, but which will be rejected by Catholics.

But we should not be too quick to dissociate autonomy from dignity. A recent intervention by Catholic ethicists concerning the use of AI in surveillance and warfare relies on a very similar association.The AI company Anthropic’s refusal to engage with the US Government in the use of AI in warfare and surveillance was supported by these ethicists who quoted the Catholic Catechism that we are not obliged to tell the truth to everyone unless they have a right to know it. In other words, our privacy should be protected, and state surveillance is suspect. Likewise in war, agency is critical. Who is ultimately responsible for selecting targets and carrying out attacks? It is not simply a case of being concerned that a streamlined AI based system for targeting may contain fatal errors, (humans make mistakes too). It is equally that responsibility for lethal attacks cannot be passed to a non-human actor such as an AI based program which does not possess dignity and is unable to recognise it in others.

In the declaration Dignitas Infinita (2024) which spells out some of the practical ethical situations in which Pope Francis saw dignity at threat, dignity is given a multi-faceted analysis. The ‘ontological’ aspect is that which can never be diminished or lost, but the ‘moral’ and ‘social’ aspects are related to our choices which move us away from our path to God and so impact ours and others dignity. Those aspects of dignity can be harmed or diminished either in ourselves or others. Perhaps this proposal of ‘dignity under different descriptions’ would lend support to MacIntyre when he ties loss of dignity to a deviation from God’s path.

In Dignitas Infinita, the Church reiterates the dominance of the principle of dignity in its ontological inviolable aspect over justice by asking that political life and legal systems be guided by dignity as its founding principle.

The Church…ardently urges that respect for the dignity of the human person beyond all circumstances be placed at the centre of the commitment to the common good and at the centre of every legal system – Dignitas Infinita

Whilst we may remain sceptical of shifting the emphasis from justice to dignity in the way that MacIntyre suggests, he is surely right to point out the link between dignity, freedom and our purpose in this life. Our use of dignity as a principle must be guided by our understanding of how our lives and those of others are properly shaped and the actions that we must take to achieve that. For Christians, this is related directly to God’s will and his love for his creation. To ensure that dignity stays at the heart of public ethical discussion across people of faith and none, we must pay attention to how we frame meaning and purpose in life. Can we find common ground?

Structured argument in applied ethics may not be the best way to do this. Using dignity as a blunt ethical tool – a searchlight almost - in narrative accounts to highlight good and evil can be more powerful. If someone through terrible treatment seems to have lost all dignity, then an observer who does see through to the human beneath appears saintly, as Raimond Gaita has demonstrated in his descriptions of terrible treatment of people in concentration camps and mental institutions. And according to Simone Weil, we see that someone who is severely afflicted and brought low by the actions of others is seen to lose all earthly dignity, highlighting the evil of the abuse. Both writers link the loss or perceived loss of dignity with the dehumanising process of turning another human being into an object. This has resonance with nearly everyone whether religious or not and has been a constant theme since early industrialisation and has received extra impetus from recent technological developments, such as robotics, social media and artificial intelligence.

For both writers, religiously inclined but not committed, the preventative cure and remedy to loss of dignity in dire circumstances is remarkably Christian – friendship and love.

Were it not for the many ways human beings genuinely love one another – I do not believe we would have a sense of the sacredness of individuals, or of their inalienable rights or dignity– Raimond Gaita

Demonstrating friendship to the apparently friendless can protect them from dehumanising treatment. Paying loving attention to the unlovable restores dignity to both parties. It seems that dignity and rights (and perhaps justice too) must have love and friendship as unconditional companions. Even if this doesn’t provide ready answers to difficult ethical questions, it is surely a conclusion which has universal appeal.

By Elizabeth Drummond Young

Elizabeth Drummod Young is a teaching fellow in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a founder member of The Albertus Institute (albertus.scot)

References

Find MacIntyre’s lecture on dignity on YouTube:

The Catholic ethicists in the Anthropic case:

https://www.ncronline.org/news/catholic-moral-theologians-ethicists-back-anthropic-government-ai-showdown

Dignitas Infinita

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20240402_dignitas-infinita_en.html

Gaita, R. (2000). A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. London & New York: Routledge.

Weil, S. (2002). Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1948).

The fall of the Soviet Union happened around the time of my birth. All of my experiences of politics and religion are marked by the post-Cold War search for new political narratives and global economic paradigms. My understanding of politics and religion have also been formed by the way my government, that of the United States, has chosen to exercise its hegemony over any part of the globe that it desires. From Panama to Venezuela to Iraq and now Iran, despite sporadic condemnations by the international community, the world’s undisputed superpower undertakes whatever operation it deems to be in its self-interest. In the years after World War II, Europe found itself economically and militarily dependent on the United States. Whatever moral resources it once possessed to push back against American interests (such as the French refusal to sign on to the 2003 Iraq War), now seem exhausted. The rules-based international order seems, at best, like a dead letter, and at worst, like an explicit instrument of European and Anglo-American hegemony over the Global South, the Third World, and possible rivals.

For Roman Catholics, it is easy to fall into reactionary right-wing diagnoses of these failures, especially when neo-imperialists like Vladimir Putin and ordoliberals like Viktor Orban make “Christian identity” part of their political project–religion as a buttress for social authoritarianism. There is a long Catholic history of monarchist and counter-revolutionary thought, opposed to egalitarianism and democracy; there is a reason why young, religiously sincere readers are turning to Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Carl Schmitt. Even less politically inclined Catholics are taken, through circuitous routes, from C.G. Jung to Perennialist and Traditionalist accounts of myth and the sacred, and then ushered directly into reactionary politics. These are precisely the circumstances and temptations that haunted Europe, especially Catholic Europe, in the 20’s and 30’s. And it is by rejecting these temptations, without losing the mystical core of Christian revelation, that Jacques Maritain developed his theological and metaphysical defense of cosmopolitan democracy.

The life of Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was one of constant activity, fueled by a seemingly boundless reserve of energy. The same unmistakable dynamism manifests itself in his writings, political commitments, and personal life. Like many of his generation, Maritain bore within himself the contradictions and tumults of a rapidly decaying social and economic order. This decay sometimes took the form of spiritual malaise and at other times took the form of violent and spasmodic catastrophes. He was alive during the close of the nineteenth century, studying the natural sciences as a young man during World War One and the Russian Revolution, at the heart of the Parisian intellectual and literary networks during the interwar period, active in the resistance movement during World War 2, an advocate for human rights and the United Nations in the postwar period, and personal friend and mentor of Pope Paul VI. His life measures a span that improbably contains the Dreyfus Affair and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Like the historical periods he lived through, his own biography is a series of catastrophes and new beginnings. While at the Sorbonne, he, along with the brilliant Raïssa Oumansoff (later to become his wife), took immense pleasure and intellectual satisfaction from their scientific studies, but were horrified by the reductive naturalism appended to it by some of their teachers. If, as was sometimes indicated to them, spiritual life and consciousness itself was nothing more than epiphenomenal scum upon the silent waters of Nature, how could life be worth living? They were so harrowed by this realization that they made a suicide pact with each other. If, after searching through all available options, they had not found some intellectual path out of this positivistic dilemma, they made a promise to end their own lives. As if in answer to their secret prayers, it was then that they discovered Henri Bergson.

It was through Bergson’s unique redeployment of German Romantic Idealism (Schelling and Hegel) as well as French Spiritual Realism (Maine de Biran, Felix Ravaisson) that Jacques and Raïssa were given a second life and new intellectual horizons. All of their later work rejuvenating the tradition of Aristotelian Thomism should be seen in light of these same sources–sources that also inspired thinkers as diverse as Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas. The immediate influences on his conversion to Roman Catholicism were also eclectic, including both the literary giant Leon Bloy and the grand old duke of Neothomism, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. Maritain is (rightly) associated with Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Josef Ratzinger, Hans Urs Von Balthazar, and the rest of the Ressourcement, but his philosophical and theological milieu was astoundingly diverse. He drew on every source available to him.

These biographical details of his Parisian social context are important because, speaking as an American Catholic, the popular Maritain most often presented in conservative circles is that of Michael Novak and George Weigel. The tremendously complex and dynamic Maritain is cribbed and cramped until he fits the mold of the North American neoconservative: champion of capitalism against communism and ready resource for every Republican association that wishes to clothe itself in Catholic intellectual respectability, from the American Enterprise Institute to the Federalist Society. The truth is that Maritain ran the gamut of political options, including an early dalliance with more reactionary currents of French counter-revolutionary thought. This path from reactionary anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian politics to emancipatory politics was not uncommon in interwar France (see for example the life and thought of Maurice Blanchot). When his thought matured, Maritain became one of the fiercest critics of fascism, Nazism, anti-semitism, and racism in the entire Catholic world–including during the crucial years leading up to World War 2 and the fight against the grotesque evil of Hitler and Mussolini. He did not refrain from condemning Catholic statesmen either, publicly opposing Francisco Franco and his regime. His opposition was so public that it prompted one of Franco’s ministers, Ramón Serrano Suñer, to declare Maritain’s thought to “have accents that recall the thinking of the Elders of Zion and he has the false style of Jewish democrats.” It is probable that his own temptations toward a reactionary Catholic political theology was precisely what primed him to become a uniquely valuable Left Catholic critic of religious fascism, empire, and capitalism.

In 1943, during the maelstrom of the largest global conflict known to human history, Maritain wrote a slim volume called Christianity and Democracy. In it he makes a concise case that the Catholic Church should reevaluate the false binary that has explicitly and implicitly governed ecclesial statements on political theology from the trauma of the French Revolution in 1789 through the Syllabus of Errors. In no uncertain terms, the Church had consistently and repeatedly rejected or heavily restricted the rights of man as proposed by revolutionary liberalism. Most famously, the Church at its highest levels continued to condemn the right of religious freedom as a grave moral error. Even Leo XIII, (who was quite the moderate on social issues compared to Pius IX) framed the political and economic struggles of his time as suffering from too much consideration of the “rights of man” and not enough of the “rights of God.” But instead of imagining God as a very large Subject with the Biggest Rights of All, Maritain argues for a non-competitive framing and proposes an alternative reading of modern history and its convulsions.

Maritain does not hesitate to affirm the ideals of the French Revolution as truly Christian ideals and rejects any position which would try to reverse its genuine political and social gains. “Ever since the French Revolution and the effusion of secularized Christian idealism which it provoked in history, the sense of freedom and the sense of social justice have convulsed and vitalized our civilization; and one would need to have the soul of a slave to wish from the destruction of this very sense of freedom and justice on account of the suffering and disorder it may have occasioned. In short, at the same time that there fructified in the modern world the evils whose seed this world bore within itself, the natural growth of civilization and the inner work due to the evangelical ferment continued within it.” Maritain, of course, always rejected any utilitarian calculus of sacrificing human beings for some supposed future goal and he condemned Soviet Communism in no uncertain terms. However, like Marx and the Frankfurt School, he saw the gains and losses of modernity as a deeply dialectical progression, non-linear yet real.

Unlike Marx and the Frankfurt School, he perceived that the ultimate source of this liberation and advance of human dignity must come from and implicitly already does come from the Trinitarian mystery revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The choice of a democratic regime may not be Catholic dogma or a direct aspect of the preaching of the apostles but it is the indirect and inexorable result of the temporal leavening of the world through the Gospel. The horrors of modern industrialized war, faceless totalitarian states, and technology distended and divorced from human flourishing causes many to yearn for a pre-modern age and falsely assume that humane life only comes through authoritarian, aristocratic, monarchical, or paternalistic forms of life. Maritain calls this temptation “a regression to a perverted aping of the Ancien Regime or the Middle Ages” and exhorts all of us to seek a “a new and truly creative age, where man, in suffering and hope, will resume his journey toward the conquest of freedom.”

Yet, unlike anti-clerical and atheistic forms of politics, Maritain refuses to surrender the heritage of the Christian medieval or even pre-Christian classical worlds. There are other ways of reverencing history and tradition than mere repetition. Maritain sees the victory over the Axis as only the beginning of the task of a truly Christian politics–one which will demand an integral humanism and seek thick substantive goods for communities, not simply atomized existences enslaved to consumer choice and abstracted from any real self-governance or pursuit of material and intellectual excellence and flourishing. It is in this spirit that he calls for “a resurrection of spiritual forces, a new knighthood emanating from the peoples.”

Maritain is clear in his rejection of positivism; he consistently points out the catastrophe of an age that rejects metaphysics. But what does he see as the immediate causes of political and economic deformation in the modern world? He does not leave his analyses in the clouds: instead, he names the social forces that compromised modern democracy. His decline narrative directly points to “the advent of the bourgeois class, the capitalist profit system, the imperialistic conflicts and unbridled absolutism of the national States.” Even more precisely, he blames the tragic failure of modern democracy on the coalition that was formed “between the interests of the ruling classes, corrupted by money, desperately clinging to their privileges and crazed by a blind fear of Communism (the spread of which could have been prevented only by a clear-sighted policy of social reform)...” as well as “sadistic racists, drunk with the joy of using the spirit to betray the spirit.”

While in exile from France, Maritain started an experimental university in New York. Jacob Saliba, working at the University of Notre Dame’s Jacques Maritain Center has uncovered archival records that shed light on the truly global scope of his Christian humanism. “Even before his reflections on American racism during the Civil Rights Movement and ahead of Edward Said’s celebrated work on anti-imperialism, Maritain played an active role in decentering a white European politics of the colonial world. Just after the liberation of North Africa from German hands in late 1942, Maritain delivered a presidential address in which he used the recent military success as a backdrop for arguing for a new Christian model of peace and justice. Keen to realize his words in action, Maritain soon after organized the “Projet de réponse aux questions d’Alger” (“Project in Response to the Question of Algeria”), a solidarity effort between the university, Free France, the University of Algeria, and European diplomats to promote Algeria as the next hub of global politics.” His anti-colonialism also led him to include the study of Latin America in his experimental university–even funding the now famous work of Claude Levi Strauss in Brazil which led to the formation of structural anthropology. His vision of emancipation cannot be separated from his search for a global humanities set against the barbarisms of racism, anti-semitism, empire, fascism, and money.

In many ways, Maritain’s dialectical approach to politics rooted in theological mystery is structurally similar to the thought of Russian Sophiology and the conviction of Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov that history has a Chalcedonian structure. And, like Gustavo Gutierrez and the tradition of Liberation Theology, Maritain is convinced that in order to recover herself, Europe and America must be divorced from their past imperialist legacies and current financial neo-imperialist structures. Political Catholicism must seek to mirror more perfectly the global Catholic Church and seek an integral cosmopolitanism beyond market forces and the imperial threats of war and extraction.

He is justly remembered as an inspiration for the UN Declaration on Human Rights, a keystone of the postwar order. We should not forget the role natural law and Christian tradition played in its formulation. Yet for Maritain, global human rights were a procedural minimum, not a replacement for substantive relations of social and economic justice. The final years of Maritain were particularly focused on theorizing some kind of escape from the imperialism of money and countering the titanic threat global capitalism poses to nature and the human spirit. In the American attempt to align Maritain with the Scottish Enlightenment and neoliberal economists like Friedrich Hayek, the radically democratic Maritain has been obscured. Few know, for instance, that Maritain was a friendly correspondent with the infamous democratic activist Saul Alinsky. Another instance of Maritain’s intellectual fearlessness came in 1972, when Maritain met with two members of the Institutum Parvulorum Fratrum Iesu who had spent seven years in Castro’s Cuba. His late essay “A Society Without Money” is the fruit of wrestling with Castro’s own anti-capitalist policies and an attempt to imagine a transition into a post-capitalist society without the authoritarian violence of Castro’s regime. For many, this may seem like a laughable eccentricity and a false start from an otherwise respectable man. Yet consider that each phase of Maritain’s life was punctuated by these “impossible” tasks: Vatican II and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are two indirect fruits of this utopian and herculean intellectual and spiritual effort. And as Maritain says at the end of this bold essay, perhaps applying these humanistic ideals to political economy could “be nothing more than the pipe dreams of an old fool. But after all, I’m not moving in very bad company; there was neither gold nor money in Plato’s Republic.”

In the 18th and 19th century, the papacy was largely opposed to democracy and egalitarianism. In that way, we can see the politics of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the Neothomist whose works are gaining popularity in some circles, as a very traditional Catholic figure. He considered the Nazi-collaborator Marshall Petain a providential figure and sternly warned that resistance against the Vichy regime was a mortal sin for a Catholic. He even tried to get the writings of Maritain, his erstwhile friend, placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. The chasm between Garrigou-Langrange and Maritain is also the chasm between the political theology before and after Vatican II. The reform was real and it was hard won.

The eschaton will not be the aggregate result of human effort but the life of faith and the practice of theology is always political: we only have the choice of what kind of politics it will be. Politics, in turn, can never break out of the orbit of theological mysteries into an autonomous realm–even if it thinks it can. It is now the case that the papacy is one of the last institutions with global reach that still exhorts nations and people to follow international law, respect universal human dignity, and ensure solidarity with the poor and the physical earth, our common home. Catholics young and old have a choice: reignite the war against equality, democracy, and liberation or join Jacques Maritain in working for a critical Catholic modernity–a Catholic modernity that prophetically refuses the inhumanity of money over persons, the cynicism of empire and state-enforced religion, and the pseudo-mysticism of ethnonationalism. We pray instead for the kingdom of many nations to come, with our co-laboring, to establish itself on earth as it is in heaven as Our Lord taught us. For as St. Paul tells us, it is for freedom that we have been set free.

By Andrew Kuiper

Andrew Kuiper lives and writes in Michigan. Interests include Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, German Idealism and Romanticism, Russian Sophiology and Marxism. He has written for The Lamp, Church Life Journal, and Romanticon. Find his Substack Naucratic Expeditions here.

1. Quotation from Thomas D. Howes review of Jason L.A. West’s The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain

2. p.12 Christianity and Democracy and the Rights of Man and Natural Law, tr. Doris C.Anson, Ignatius Press.

3. p.13, Ibid

4. p18, Ibid

5. p.12, Ibid

6. p.14 Ibid

7. Jacob Saliba

8. See the Philosopher and the Provocateur: The Corrospondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky ed. Bernard E Doering.

This is going to be an odd and rather speculative piece. It will represent no party that I am aware of in Holyrood, and no political force that has any likelihood of power in Scotland within the foreseeable future. It does not even reflect my own views where, politically, I would only regard myself as bound by the principles of Catholic morality and social teaching, with very little sense of how that might be put into effect beyond Dante’s culminating observation in Paradiso:

But my desire and will were moved already,

like a wheel revolving uniformly, by

the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

That said, it represents something that might emerge from a perspective on politics whipped up from Alexander Dugin, Alain de Benoist and Steve Bannon. Behind that lies an influence they all explicitly share: that of René Guénon and Traditionalism. None of these are influences much discussed publicly even in right-wing circles within the UK where the main explicit preoccupations are with immigration and the economy. But even assuming the leaders of such UK movements don’t secretly share these intellectual preoccupations, others in the world do, which at least raises the question as to why we don’t. Beyond that, it is a viewpoint that has sufficient echoes in Catholic teaching that it might provoke a fruitful conversation.

So I’m going to cut the Gordian Knot of definitions here and create an imaginary Scottish Radical Right. My immediate sources for this invention are Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina’s A Theory of Europe, Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier’s Manifesto for a European Renaissance and Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Popular Right. But I’m happy to admit that this is all going to be a bit imaginative and even playful.

All that said, what’s going to be in our manifesto? Here’s a few suggestions.

Metapolitics:

UK politics and Scottish politics in particular are terribly shortsighted. In part, this is due to democracy: most people are immersed in the material world, and any attempt to appeal to them will inevitably appeal to their material desires. But politics is not just about the day to day or even the five-year election cycle. It also consists in addressing longer term issues about the workings of society of the sort discussed by classical political philosophers such as Plato. In current Scottish society, these issues are meaningless to the electorate and ignored by a governing class which is itself increasingly unable to appreciate anything beyond the world of business and economics. To the extent that anything like such a metapolitical concern does exist in Scotland, it is dominated by progressive thinkers rather than those animated by a respect for Tradition.

Of all our manifesto, this is probably the most important aspect. The absence of an intellectual right wing cultural sphere in Scotland is damaging, both to the development of a practical Radical Right politics in the future, but also to the wider cultural and political space in the country: unless a dominant progressivism is constantly challenged, it will become complacent and fantastical.

The Sacred and Kingship:

No other Scottish manifesto is going to contain these elements, certainly viewed as positives. We, on the other hand, as inheritors of Tradition, think that the Sacred should be at the heart of our society. Much of the decline of Scotland results from an abandonment of the Sacred and a concentration on the material. Given the practicalities of any foreseeable future in a formerly Protestant, largely secularised Scotland, we look for a coalition of various religious communities and the spiritual but not religious, gathered under the umbrella of the Good, Beautiful and True.

The King is the most potent political symbol of the centrality of the Sacred in national life. We can grumble about the actual members of the Royal Family, their constitutional Protestantism, the lack of a clearly Scottish King, but these are quibbles given the republican alternative. Far too many countries have thrown away their inheritance in this area. We should not follow them.

Scotland, nation and geopolitics:

The past certainties of nations and political alliances are dissolving. Whatever the future of Scotland as an independent state (and we welcome all cultural nationalists whether supporters of independence or of the Union) the Scottish Parliament in the current devolution settlement lacks responsibility for foreign affairs and defence. But that doesn’t mean that Scots thinking about metapolitics and national identity can afford to ignore these existential issues. Much of the Continental New Right is hostile to America and, more broadly, to the Anglo-Saxon, pinning the responsibility for the problems of globalisation and deracination on its mercantile culture. Given Trump’s hostile attitude towards Europe, a hostility that is likely to be increasingly reciprocated, Europe and the Anglo-Saxons are drifting apart.

Where does all this leave Scotland? An independent Scotland might sit more happily with the Continent. But a Scotland which, for the foreseeable future, is part of Britain, is liable to find it difficult to maintain such links and yet we will be uneasy allies for an Anglo-Saxon, but isolationist America.

This is an area where it is difficult to see a way out. Certainly, for the immediate future, it seems essential to ensure that Scotland -and that on any reasonable scenario involves the UK- is better prepared for military defence. But beyond that, Britain is in danger of finding itself suspended between great power blocs such as Continental Europe and the USA, with Scotland in the position of being powerless to negotiate its own place both within the UK and the wider world.

Immigration and popular unrest:

If radical right-wing politics are starting to achieve a greater prominence within the UK, it is in large part due to immigration. Quite apart from the genuine social harms caused by large scale immigration, it is also a convenient means to generate popular unrest for political purposes. Racism as fear and hatred of the other is a powerful psychological force, and the pretence that it is easily removed or is confined only to a few pathological characters is an easy lie.

Discussion of immigration control goes on, and no party seems able to handle the practicalities satisfactorily. But two elements of traditional thought seem underplayed. First, there should be a genuine horror at civil unrest. Public demonstrations and riots embody disorder in the State and reflect disorder in the psychology of those engaged in that public disorder. Disagreements about politics need individuals to exercise iron self-control, and if they cannot control themselves, the State must control them. Second, from a Christian perspective, all of us bear the image of God, and racism’s denial of that reality is blasphemous. This means that there are moral limits on what decisions are available and how they can be implemented. Tradition favours self-control and wisdom, modernity favours self-expression and lack of emotional restraint.

Solidarity:

If immigration is one of the main drivers of right-wing politics, the other is a sense that we are governed by globalised elites whose loyalty is to themselves. In traditional Western societies, elites felt themselves answerable to God and responsible for those in their charge. In the absence of this sacred hierarchy, self interest becomes culturally unchallenged, and other people merely things to be used. It is entirely possible that Scotland faces a grim economic and political future: civilisations flourish and wane, and there is no reason to suppose that we are immune to this pattern. But all of us have value and a place in society. The modern demand for equality is a pale shadow of the truth of solidarity: each of us, in different ways and according to our different abilities, has a role to play and no one should be abandoned.

Conclusion

Well, there’s some of the headings. More to be said and particularly short on practical solutions of course, but essentially that’s the point. Unless Scotland can wean itself off the drug of believing only a certain sort of progressive analysis of society has value, and unless we can start thinking about the permanent things of living in a community with deep traditions, we will drift and ultimately capsize. As MacDiarmid put it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle:

I wad ha’e Scotland to my eye

Until I saw a timeless flame

Tak’ Auchtermuchty for a name,

And kent that Ecclefechan stood

As pairt o’ an eternal mood.

By Dr Stephen Watt

Stephen is a permanent writer and co-member of the editorial team. He teaches Philosophy at Edinburgh University and the Open University and is also involved in the Albertus Institute in Edinburgh.

Welcome to March, Spring is coming for some and although the news is dreadful in many ways it is always better to rest on the Lord first and not the commentators or the governments - as God said through Isaiah:

[…] do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. (41:10)

March Saints

Have a look back at the Saints that have already passed including St Marnock (of Kilmarnock), St Monan and St Baldred of the Bass.

The 8th see’s the important and once popular St Duthac, as well St Kessog of Luss whose relics Robert the Bruce reputedly marched into battle with, and Scotland’s last canonised Saint and martyr, - St John Ogilvie. March also contains St Patrick and St Cuthbert, both important for Ireland and the north of England respectively but each have strong links with Scotland. Just so you know where we stand on the St Patrick origins debate - we’re firmly in the south-west Scotland camp!

Are you an aspiring Catholic writer based in Scotland? Or maybe you would like to help run Scotland’s only independent Catholic magazine? If so please get in touch at: editor_stmoluagscoracle@proton.me.