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.

St Athanasius

God became man, so that man might become God.

This is the famous line stated by the Church Father St. Athanasius in response to Arius and his heretical claims (Arianism) that Jesus was not a Divine being, nor was he co-eternal. Arius believed Jesus was caused to exist by the Father. The first part of Athanasius’ statement might not raise a considerable number of eyebrows, but the second part “…so that man might become God” would make the reader pause and ask “how could that be?” It sounds almost like a polytheistic or pantheistic statement from Athanasius.

Fellow Church Father Augustine provides indirectly clarifies this statement in his exposition on Psalm 50:

“It is evident then, that He has called men gods, that are deified of His Grace, not born of His Substance. For He does justify, who is just through His own self, and not of another; and He does deify who is God through Himself, not by the partaking of another. But He that justifies does Himself deify, in that by justifying He does make sons of God. For He has given them power to become the sons of God.”

Augustine writes this in reaction to the heresy of Pelagianism, which asserted humans did not need grace to reach perfection. In this passage, the word “deify” appears a few times. Augustine identifies this deifying presence as God’s grace. Nowadays, like with Athanasius’ quote, this may come across as polytheistic. However, deification (theosis in the Eastern tradition) is very different from that of the likes of Roman Emperors – the context in which deification is largely understood today.

To understand the concept of deification in the Christian tradition, anthropological context must be provided. Aristotle noted that creation was made up of forms and accidents. Forms being continuous, unchanging and enduring, while accidents are changeable and made up of composites. Thomas Aquinas applies this Aristotelian viewpoint to the human person. He defines the soul as immaterial and incorruptible (a form). Once it is created, it immediately unites to a human body, which is material and corruptible (an accident). This leads Aquinas to the definition that the soul is the form of the body and the fundamental source of life for a man. This is appropriate, because God is unchangeable and immutable, and he primarily co-operates with us by acting within our unchanging souls to affect the changeable body. When we die, the soul endures for all eternity. While we live, we are a body-soul composite. Aquinas – and many other theologians – also assert that what comes along with the soul are the interior faculties of the intellect and will. These are the higher faculties. The intellect grants the ability for a rational judgement of what is right and wrong, which affects the will to act accordingly to that judgement.

However, the human soul is tied to original sin at the beginning of its existence. Adam and Eve forfeited the perfection of the image of God (Imago Dei) by falling into temptation and pride. Since the fall of man, the intellect and will have become finite and limited in their judgement of right and wrong. This finitude – inherited by all humans ever since – can only be erased through baptism. In baptism, we are not only formally baptised into the church, but we in turn are granted sanctifying grace. Paragraph 1266 of the Catechism affirms this, in that our souls are illuminated with the sanctifying grace of God for the first time. After this initial bestowal, it is up to the individual person to maintain this “state of grace” within the soul through the sacraments of Communion and Confession. When a soul commits mortal sin, it loses the state of grace which God granted. In contrast to venial sin - which harms charity but does not remove grace - mortal sin does removes grace and jeopardises the soul’s salvation. The soul must confess the mortal sin to a priest confession to have grace replenished.
Now that we have anthropological context, we can turn to the matter of how grace deifies us, by looking at John 1:12-14:

But as many as received him, he [the Word] gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name. Who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

I read this at a Christmas Carol service last December and remember being struck at the Johannine terminology. It perfectly explains the function of sanctifying grace – which is necessary for a soul’s salvation. First, it is what makes a soul pleasing to God. I would like to highlight John’s assertion that when the Word, Jesus gives us power to become Sons of God, he says we are not born through blood, flesh or the will of man. It is important to highlight that “Sons of God” does not mean man can become a Son of God through direct divine filiation – that is only reserved to the Son. Instead, we are made adoptive Sons of God (Rom 8:15-17). When a soul has sanctifying grace from God, God adopts us. Like a family who adopts a child agrees to share the inheritance with the adoptee, so too does the grace of God grant us the right to inherit what God possesses: eternal life, intimacy with him through the Church. A family’s adopted child becomes the heir to the inheritance of eternal life, so too we become heirs of God, and subsequently, coheirs with Christ. St. Augustine puts it beautifully. If we – like Christ – call the Father of Christ “Father”, then what shall we say to Christ other than brother? Like Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, was born and sent from the Father through divine filiation, we can in turn be born of the Father through adoptive filiation which grace provides. This grace communicates to us a participation in the life of Christ, to be one with him, as he is with the Father.

However, the specific reason why I chose this verse is the final part. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” To understand the verse from a perspective of grace, we have to go back to Exodus 33:11 where Moses speaks to the Lord face to face, as one speaks to a friend. The Lord pitched his Tent of Meeting and dwelt among the Israelites in the tabernacle (a Greek word meaning “to dwell” or “dwelling place.”) The same occurs in our souls via grace. We become friends of God. When we receive Jesus Christ in Holy Communion, we do not just consume Christ, the properties of the Eucharist also contain sanctifying grace. Like a warm house is pleasing to its owner who dwells within, God sees a dwelling place, filled with the warmth of sanctifying grace. He pitches his Tent in our souls. Therefore, the flesh of the Word physically dwells among us, but his spirit also dwells among us too. Aquinas says that sanctifying grace manifest the “invisible missions” of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Christ is sent into our soul by the Father, and both send the Holy Spirit into our souls, prompting our intellect and will to understand, and obey the will of God.

So, when man “becomes God” It does not mean that our whole bodies are deified. Nor does it pertain to the polytheist or pantheist assertions of different Gods or that our nature is God. Instead, our souls are deified. The body is changeable – an accident. The soul is immaterial – a form. Because God by his nature is unchangeable and immutable, he acts within the immaterial soul, and dwells within it. He bestows upon us the grace required for us to unify our soul and our will with his. To paraphrase the Council of Trent, grace does not just remit sins but sanctifies man from an enemy to a friend.

By Cormac O’Hara

Cormac is 25 and from the west of Scotland. He is studying an MA in Theology at St Mary’s University. He also received a Diploma in Spiritual Theology at the Pontifical Univeristy of St Thomas Aquinas.

Redwall Abbey by Christopher Denise

I spend a lot of time in and around Pluscarden Abbey here in Moray, I have interviewed two of the monks there as well as the Bishop who was previously abbot. Recently, I had been reading Redwall by Brian Jacques to my son who has had a hearty diet of Robin Hood, King Arthur and The Chronicles of Narnia and probably doesn’t realise that Benedictine monks don’t necessarily have a big role in most people’s lives (regrettably) – I realised that there is this mythical quality to the monks and the abbey, perhaps as a ‘wise man’ archetype within classic literature and fairy story but I want to explore the idea some more.

When looking for monks and priests in fairytales, I found a few examples in Irish anthologies, one about a monk who followed a bird out of the monastery gardens lured by it’s beautiful song, only to return to the monastery to see it drastically changed, since 200 years had passed; and some where fairies were enquiring with a priest as to whether they were saved or not. Similar themes show up in the stories of the early Saints, such as St Columba defeating the Loch Ness monster and St Brendan performing Mass on the back of a sea monster. These tales seem to highlight the submission of the wilds to the order of the Gospel and the conversion of pagan people. Many early missionaries are said to have lived in caves, such as St Kevin in Ireland and St Govan in Wales, over time monasteries and abbeys sprung up and became centres of learning; many of the early annals and chronicles were written by monks, such as ‘An Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ by Venerable Bede and the legendary Book of Kells which seemed to have a life of its own.

St Brendan performing Mass on the back of a sea monster

On my search I also found ‘Tales of the Magic Monastery’ by Theophane the Monk published in the 1980’s, which is a book of short whimsical and wise tales. The two stories that stood out to me as in keeping with this idea of the monk’s malleable interplay with time are about monks who had witnessed the Birth of Christ as well as the Transfiguration, both almost casually recall the scenes and mention the music they heard, which is something that I also associate with the abbey as the monks seem to be in perpetual song.

In the stories of King Arthur and the Holy Grail we find many mentions of hermits and monasteries, the hermit is usually a spiritual guide chanced upon by a character on a quest, they often seem to be guardians of either knowledge or a mystical object and also may assist in healing and the redemption of a character, both Lancelot and Guinevere end their days within the monastic setting. As with the allusion to the omnipresent monk in the ‘Tales of the Magic Monastery’, we see this unity with the very fabric of nature, even time itself. Abbeys and Hermit’s caves are often set outside of the city, nestled in the wild spaces. What really illustrates this is the continuity of the monastic orders into the modern era, they represent this bridge between myth and history whereby monks and priests were often vehicles for the story; King Arthur himself being part historical, part myth.

From ‘Tales of The Magic Monastery’

In JRR Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ he discusses how ‘fundamental things’ are made ‘luminous’ through the fairytale, in other words looking at the mundane sideways, such as how in Lord of the Rings, the very familiar forest wakes up to help in the battle against Sauron. With the fairy monastery or the monk who goes to fairyland then, we have a familiar setting, since as we have discussed, the ‘wise man’ archetype of the monk and his abbey has been consistent in Western literature, yet that is now seen from a different dimension, the strangeness of reality itself is arrested and becomes a looking glass into ‘Faerie’, the grounded becomes mystical, because it always has been. Fantasy is not really an escape from reality but invigorates reality. Tolkien also says that the desire to speak with animals and not feel separated from them (and by extension nature itself) is the result of a guilt that has stayed with us since the Fall.

Tolkien begrudged the analysis of fairy stories as contradictory to their essence (it’s like cutting open the Mexican jumping bean), but I think what we can re-learn from them is firstly, that they aren’t a closed project and also that we are sorely missing the spiritual guide and keeper of wisdom in the stories we read, and perhaps also in our own lives. The Classic children’s literature that I mentioned at the start, are classics for their timeless structures, the hero’s quest with it’s departure/initiation/return order as reflections of the ultimate story, the Gospel. However, the hero cannot complete his task without the full cast.

Fairy stories and folk tales are different in that they’re like smaller parts of a larger plot. As is the tradition with fairy stories, they had often been told and re-told many times before they were finally recorded on paper, altering slightly upon each remembrance. So, picking up different elements of a fairy tales, Saint’s stories and my own experience, I have written a fairy story in the jejune way in which they’re often relayed.

--

The Fairy Monastery

There was a young man named Adrian who travelled North to find peace at a monastery in the forests of Moray in Scotland, he was unwell and had never felt like he was on the right path in life. He spent several weeks with the monks there discerning whether he should join the brothers, he would pray and eat with them, tend to the bees and study Latin. On a Sunday they would have some time to themselves, so the young novice went out walking after Mass in the forest of pine, he walked through the graveyard where many monks before him were laid to rest, through the old gate at the edge of the field and along the paths eating bilberries as he went. He came to a black burn that looked the colour of whisky, he sat at the edge of the stream for a long time when suddenly he heard his brothers singing prayers at None, jumping up believing he had been gone far too long, he realised that he couldn’t possibly hear his brothers singing as he was at least 2 miles from the abbey. He followed the sound until he hopped across a narrow part of the stream to a small island and found himself at the door of a hidden monastery, believing he must have lost his wits and had actually found his way back to the abbey in a daze, he ran into the chapel to join the end of prayers, only the monks looked ever so slightly odd, and they didn’t seem to recognise him despite his robes matching their own. As he joined their ranks, he could see that their features were slightly pointed, their eyes narrow and their skin a bluish hue. When prayers had ended, the brothers greeted Adrian as a guest and invited him to dinner.

The strange brothers at once understood why Adrian had come and he was introduced to the last human monk who had burst through their doors late for prayers, Father Magnus was an exceedingly aged monk but seemed full of life. He explained that the other brothers are faeries and had been here since St Brendan converted them many years ago. Adrian and Fr Magnus spent years they lost track of with the faerie brothers, they did their chores and prayers in much the same way as before.
One day at the beginning of Advent, Adrian and Fr Magnus knew they had outstayed their welcome, they asked the brothers if they could return to their own abbey. The faerie brothers were sad to see them leave, but helped them return to the other side of the Burn. The brothers walked slowly back through the forest together, it was much colder and darker than when they last walked this way. They reached the abbey just in time for Vespers. They pushed the heavy door open, crossed themselves at the holy water stoop and approached the alter to kneel. As they turned, they met the gaze of several of the brothers before scattering like incense.

Monastery cemetery in Snow by Caspar David Friedrich

This article first appeared in Lucy Fraser’s Substack who writes on art, culture and faith from her home in Morayshire in the north of Scotland.

Lucy Fraser

Catholic convert and home educator in the Scottish Highlands.

Alexander the Great - Khakhuli Monastery in Georgia - main church is now a Mosque. Please see the postscript below for a little extra. )

By some measures, one of the most consequential figures of human history, both despised and revered, is Alexander of Macedon. The son of Philip II of Macedon, his military conquests, and impact on subsequent history, earned him renown as Alexander the Great.

Alexander stands at the junction between the ancient world – the world of Egypt, of Babylon, of ancient Israel – and the world of Imperial Rome. The latter came to define most subsequent Western history. The Caesars considered Alexander with some awe, and his imprint on Scottish history is found in the names of three of our kings – Alexander the Fierce, Alexander II, and the ill-fated Alexander III.

Holy Scripture has little to say of Alexander, but the 1^st Book of Maccabees acknowledges his rise to power, and the gravitas that this power entailed:

“He advanced to the ends of the earth, and plundered many nations. When the earth became quiet before him, he was exalted, and his heart was lifted up.” (1 Maccabees 1:4)

His reception isn’t necessarily a positive one, and the text is hostile towards the successors he appointed in his stead, dividing up his empire:

“They all put on crowns after his death, and so did their descendants after them for many years; and they caused many evils on the earth.” (1 Maccabees 1:9)

It is true that Alexander’s conquests allowed for the spread of Greek culture throughout the world of the Mediterranean. The entire branch of Hellenistic Judaism, with proponents like Philo of Alexandria, and even the translation of the Scriptures into the Septuagint, are indebted to his career. This latter point, the translation of the Tanakh into Greek, was considered a prophetic act, and the Septuagint remains normative for most of the Apostolic Churches.

In the centuries after his death, Alexander’s life became the subject of legendary narrations, most of them collectively known as the Alexander Romance. This work exists in varied recensions. The material of the Alexander Romance appears to have influenced the later Arthurian cycles of British legend. It also influenced popular religious belief.

The Talmud presents Alexander as visiting Paradise, in unison with these legends, and in this Jewish tradition he succeeds in reaching its fountain of immortality. The import of this tradition isn’t immediately clear, fascinating as it is. For rabbinical Judaism, it would appear that Alexander’s career isn’t quite over, and that he has at least some of God’s favour.

Islamic theology develops his religious role to a further extent and has long regarded Alexander as a figure associated with the eschatological battle with Gog and Magog. While this isn’t unanimous in Islamic teaching, he is often identified as the Dhu al-Qarnayn, the “Two-Horned One”. In this sense, his place is decisive, and he is considered one of God’s chosen, even as one of his Prophets.

In his Christian reception, we find traces of an Icon depicting Alexander, suggesting that he was Canonised a Saint, at least in the Churches occupying early medieval Georgia. The 10^th century carving shows him ascending into the heavens, and with a halo around his head. It seems entirely plausible that Alexander was venerated for his historical significance, but only within the framework of the Resurrection and Glorification of Christ. This is a transformation of Alexander’s mortal image into something timeless.

Having said all of this, we must also mention the Zoroastrian traditions, which are the most reminiscent of the violence that Alexander brought to Persia. They are relatively unambiguous on his legacy. For Zoroastrianism, Alexander was an instrument of the Evil Spirit, fully opposed to the Divine will. It is worth taking pause here. Before we might conclude with a positive view of Alexander, we ought to take stock of violence worked in his name. The massacres and pillaging, which formed such an essential part of his military campaign, make it very difficult to have personal sympathy for the man.

Later Christian traditions portray him in a less glorified manner, as we see in the famous Icon showing St. Sisoes the Great visiting his fabled tomb. Alexander’s tomb, known to Antony and Cleopatra, has been lost for around 1500 years. The question of whether St. Sisoes (one of the Desert Fathers) ever found the tomb is open to interpretation.

The thrust of the Icon is simply a demonstration of the futility of all worldly power. St. Sisoes regards the open sarcophagus with sadness, and perhaps with some horror. Alexander has come to the same end as all men, despite the incredible influence his career exerted on the world. His salvation seems far from assured. Of course, we may also wonder whether St. Sisoes prayed for Alexander’s soul, as he contemplated his desiccated remains, and the image is suggestive.

If his tomb was found, by St. Sisoes, or otherwise, some scholars have suggested that it now hides in plain sight. In fact, it has been thought that the mummy of St. Mark the Evangelist, taken from Alexandria to Venice, may actually constitute the remains of Alexander. If true, the irony is clear – for centuries, faithful Catholics have been venerating the Relics of the Macedonian conqueror. This only adds to the ambiguity of his place in the religious imagination.

So, is Alexander of Macedon a Saint? We have seen that his character is one of the most ambiguous in traditional religious narratives, and that three of the four monotheisms are cautiously positive about his fate. Perhaps we may see the parallel with King Solomon – the Alexander Romance is highly suggestive of this – who was recognised as a Saint only for his exclusive role in the unfolding of Divine Providence, and for his purported authorship of the Book of Wisdom. Alexander’s key historical role, which seems to earn him a place in the eschatological scenario, seems to give him some hope of redemption. Of course, any sanctity which we might attribute to Alexander must ultimately come from the Divine Mercy alone. At best, we might say that he was saved by miraculous grace, and that if he is a Saint, he would be so to remind us of that grace.

By Anthony MacIsaac

Anthony would like to thank Samra Azarnouche and Muriel Debié for the excellent seminar on Alexander the Great.

Postscript

On the image at the top of the page: It’s a legendary motif of an “Aerial Flight”, which we find in stories about Ahiqar, and also in the traditions surrounding Nimrod. Ahiqar inspired the Book of Tobit, while Nimrod is the protological conqueror, a “Mighty man on the Earth”. The Tower of Babel is a variation on the same theme, building higher and higher until an aerial invasion of Heaven becomes possible.

Solomon is placed in similar scenarios, and Jewish and Islamic legends recount that he was able to fly to the ends of the earth, and to control an army of demons, who helped him build the First Temple at Jerusalem. This tradition specifically mentions a“Ring of Power” (might this have influenced Tolkien) which were used to bind the demons to the Divine service. Hence, the tradition of Solomon as exorcist par excellence. This tradition is implicit in the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ - “There is one greater than Solomon here” - after He exorcises a demon.

So, the Alexander Romance portrays Alexander in precisely the same way as Solomon the exorcist - he enlists an army of demons by force, to fight for him, at certain junctures in his extra-historical career. This probably refers also to the eschatological scenario, in which the devil’s house is divided unto itself.

Language is fascinating - all of us tend to take this remarkable skill—speaking a language—for granted. We go about our day without ever really thinking twice about it, yet it fundamentally enables us to achieve what would otherwise be impossible. Whether saying thank you to the bus driver, using sign language to ask a deaf colleague a question, or reading the latest news story, language allows us to convey information and share ideas.

Language is also inherently intertwined with identity. This is true with cultures across space and time, and many researchers argue that language and identity are actually inseparable. As Professor John Joseph at the University of Edinburgh succinctly states,

“Identity… is grounded in beliefs about the past: about heritage and ancestry, and about belonging to a people, a place, a set of beliefs, and a way of life. Of the many ways in which such belonging is signified, what language a person speaks and how he or she speaks it, rank among the most powerful, because it is through language that people and places are named, heritage and ancestry recorded and passed on, and beliefs developed and ritualized” (Joseph, 2016, p.19).

Language is, of course, absolutely key to our beliefs as Christians, and the Bible holds the roots of our collective spiritual wisdom. So, what can we learn about the language of the Bible itself?

This year in St. Moluag’s Coracle, we’re going on a deep dive into the language of the Bible. On this linguistic tour, we’ll cover the significance of certain words like ‘trees’ (most mentioned living thing in the Bible other than God and people) as well as seek out how ancient languages (like Greek and Latin) shape the way we think about God today.

The first part in this series is about translations. Specifically, we’re going to investigate whether the modern Bible is an accurate translation, or if it has been changed and corrupted along the way.

The Questions Around Translation Accuracy

It shouldn’t be surprising that this question is as common as it is. After all, the Bible in full has been translated into nearly 800 languages, with the New Testament being translated into 1,815 languages. Including partial translations (books or chapters), the Bible has been translated into over 4,000 languages. Mind you, this is also across nearly 2,000 years of human history.

There’s no point in being subtle—whether the Bible is an accurate translation is a BIG question with massive repercussions. Scripture and tradition are the foundation of our faith, and we rely on its accuracy to justify our beliefs. You certainly cannot blame someone, whether they are simply curious or a skeptic, for wondering how the Bible could possibly have stayed accurate over that time. You might even wonder this yourself! The journey from Greek manuscript, to Latin Vulgate, to Old English manuscripts, and its modernization through Middle and Present Day English is a long one. For English alone, our Bible has passed from one scribe to another and resulted, over nearly two thousand years, into the New Revised Standard Version, the King James Version, the New International Version, and the English Standard version.

 The argument has been made that the development of the Bible may resemble a game of telephone, where the initial message gets slowly changed as it progresses through a chain of people. What might start with one word being accidentally misinterpreted could lead to whole sentences being altered—on and on until the original meaning has been lost or critically changed. So, with two thousand years going by, passing from one writer to the other, we might wonder if the Bible’s original message has been lost in translation. Can we really trust what it says?

 Fortunately, by understanding the source material of the Bible and recognizing how academics evaluate the authenticity of ancient documents, we can actually be confident that modern translations are highly faithful and reliable. Here’s how.

The Source Material

The first step is to know what the original source material of the Bible is, and to do this we need to separate the Old and New Testament.

The Old Testament

Scholars rely on five Hebrew manuscripts (portions of the Masoretic texts) to translate and transcribe the Old Testament, each of these dating around AD800-1000. While these five are not representative of the entirety of the Masoretic texts, they are often the focus of textual criticism considering their nearly complete states. They include the Aleppo Codex (AD930), Leningrad Codex (AD1008/9), Codex Sassoon (10^th cent. AD), Cairo Codex of the Prophets (AD895), and British Library MS Or 4445 (10^th cent. AD). At first glance, one might reasonably be skeptical that these manuscripts are over 1000 years after the originals were written. However, the reason why there seems to be a dearth of older manuscripts is because the Hebrews would destroy older, worn-out copies once a new copy was transcribed and available due to their confidence in the transcribing process. Indeed, the accuracy of these later manuscripts was confirmed with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls—a total of approximately 200 manuscripts of the Old Testament dating from BC250-AD100—which were by and large identical to the later manuscripts from the 9-11^th centuries. Furthermore, the Septuagint—the oldest Koine Greek translation of the Old Testament completed by the first century BC—also corresponds with the later Masoretic texts, though the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered more important for validation purposes considering they are older and in Hebrew.

The New Testament

The earliest surviving sources of the New Testament are Greek manuscripts, with the oldest dating to approximately AD117-135. These were hand-copied writings on a paper-like material called papyrus. Because papyrus is organic, it decays easily, meaning that the vast majority of the early material survived only in the arid regions of Egypt. Now, the oldest fragment of the New Testament (the P52 John Rylands Fragment, a portion of the Gospel of John) was itself found in Egypt, far from where the Gospel of John was written. This shows how at the turn of the first century, the gospel was already being written at scale, circulated, and copied within a few decades of its original composition.

In all, there are over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The sheer number of these manuscripts is critical, as it allows scholars to compare and reconstruct the original text with high confidence.

The “Triple-Test” Framework

Now comes the test—how can we use those early manuscripts to verify that the copies we use today are accurate? And can we use those manuscripts to confirm that they are accurate transcriptions of the original compositions? The answer is yes, and it is done through the Triple Test Framework.

The triple-test framework is a standard method used by historians and literary critics to determine the historical reliability and transmissional accuracy of ancient documents. It evaluates a text through three distinct lenses: Bibliographical, Internal, and External.

Bibliographical Test: Examines the transmissional accuracy of the text. Since original “autographs” are almost never found, this test evaluates the quantity of available manuscript copies and the time gap between the original writing and the earliest surviving copy.

Internal Evidence Test: Investigates the credibility of the content within the document. It asks if the authors were eyewitnesses, whether the text is self-consistent or contains blatant contradictions, and if the writers’ character suggests they were honest and competent.

External Evidence Test: Looks for corroboration outside the document itself. This includes comparing the text with archaeological findings and other historical writings from contemporary non-Christian or pagan sources.

Is the Bible an Accurate Translation?

Using the Triple-Test Framework, specifically the bibliographical test, we can indeed confirm the accuracy of the Bible translations we use today. First and foremost, the survival of 5,800 Greek manuscripts (and more than 24,000 total early manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and more) gives very high levels of confidence. This is paired with the time gap of only 25-50 years from the earliest surviving manuscript to the original composition.

Importantly, by using those thousands of early manuscripts, scholars and linguists are able to reconstruct the original composition with 99.5%-99.9% confidence. This means that out of the thousands of copies, we can know the original wording of the source material with near-perfect certainty. The variations in those early texts (preventing a 100% confidence interval) are overwhelmingly due to spelling and grammatical variations—none of those variations compromise any core Christian doctrine.

As a result, scholars often cite the New Testament as the best-attested document in all of antiquity; it is the “Gold Standard” of accurate translations of ancient documents. In contrast, the Iliad by Homer has only 1,750 surviving copies with a time gap of at least 500 years from the earliest surviving manuscript to the original composition, writings by Sophocles have only 193 manuscripts with a time gap of around 1,400 years, and Tacitus’ Annals have only 33 manuscripts with a time gap of 1,000 years. For those texts, scholars are relying on smaller numbers of manuscripts with hundreds of years (if not a thousand) separating them from the original—if one copy has an error, there may be no others to correct it. But for the New Testament, the sheer volume of copies acts as an automatic “spell-check”, and the comparative time gap of a couple of decades is absolutely minimal compared to other ancient documents.

While the bibliographical test affirms translation accuracy, the internal and external evidence tests of the Triple-Test Framework provide a layer of historical accuracy analysis to the Bible. The results are fascinating, giving high credence to the Bible being historically reliable documents, but that is perhaps a topic for another article.

To conclude: yes, the modern Bible as we know it is indeed accurate to how it was originally composed. As the paleographer and textual critic, Frederic Kenyon, stated, “The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.”—quoted by Philip W. Comfort, The Complete Guide to Bible Versions, (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.) 1991.

By Jack Heitman

Scotland’s February Saints:

Including Saint Ronan (made famous by the Waverley Novels), St Modan, St Boisil and St Cummine the Fair. Click here to find out more

Joseph Wilson, affectionately known as Joe, was a young man whose life of quiet faith and kindness continues to inspire people across Scotland and far beyond. Born on 12 December 1994 in Bellshill and raised in Newarthill, Joe lived an outwardly ordinary teenage life. What set him apart was how deeply and consistently he lived his faith.

Joe was a gifted student and a natural servant of others. While attending Taylor High School, he achieved A grades in five Highers and received the Head Teacher’s Award in 2011 for both achievement and character. Despite this, he remained humble. Teachers and peers recall how he sought out those standing alone and gave his time freely to help others, often at the expense of his own lunch or free time.

Raised in the Catholic faith, Joe developed a strong relationship with God from an early age. As a teenager, he regularly read at Mass, volunteered at Children’s Liturgy, and made prayer part of his daily routine. His personal diary reveals a faith lived with joy rather than obligation. After attending the Papal visit to Bellahouston Park in 2010, he wrote,

“Our gentle and humble Pope Benedict is a model of Jesus. My faith is growing and I have experienced so much joy today.”

Joe died suddenly at the age of 17 due to an undiagnosed heart condition. In the years following his death, his diary reflections were compiled into a booklet titled Joe’s Words. These simple prayers and reflections have since reached thousands of people across the world.

Over the past decade, devotion to Joe has grown steadily. Many people now pray through his intercession, with numerous testimonies emerging from those who believe their prayers have been answered. This growing movement has drawn international attention and has recently reached a significant milestone, with the Scottish bishops approving his Cause for Sainthood to proceed to the next stage, awaiting consideration by the Vatican.

Joe Wilson’s life continues to point others towards faith lived through humility, prayer, and everyday kindness. His story reminds us that holiness is possible in ordinary life, rooted in love of God and love of others.

To learn more about Joe’s life, read his writings, and explore how devotion to him continues to grow, visit

https://joesfaith.com

By Louise Lawlor Devaney

Joes Words

Joes Prayer:

God our Father

in the life of Joe Wilson

You showed us that you call the young

to persevere in prayer and virtue.

He desired to make himself a ‘nobody’,

to put himself and his own desires last,

in order that he could serve you

by helping those around him;

and through Your gift of faith

he radiated hope and joy

in the midst of an imperfect world.

Now that he has returned home to You,

we ask that You will grant the prayers we make

through his intercession.

May he inspire us all,

but especially the young,

to be joyful and humble

followers of Your way.

We ask this through Christ, our Lord.

Amen

Often compared to Neil Gunn for his novels set in the Highlands and to George Mackay Brown for his conversion to Catholicism, Fionn Mac Colla is now an almost entirely forgotten writer. None of his books are reprinted, and when his work is discussed, the focus is usually exclusively on his Gaelic and Scottish nationalism or his polemics against the Reformation, which he considered a national disaster. The poet David Morrison edits the only noteworthy monograph on him, Essays on Fionn Mac Colla (1973); otherwise, one can find only a few articles, a handful of university theses, and, at most, brief references in volumes on Scottish literature.

Yet in the 1930s, Mac Colla was a young author who seemed destined for success. Among his most famous supporters was Hugh MacDiarmid, who even called him “a radical genius,” and Edwin Muir, Compton Mackenzie, and others also praised him. In addition to his novels, his journalistic work also contributes significantly to understanding Scottish nationalism and early twentieth-century politics.

Mac Colla’s current neglect is likely due to his aggressive, controversial style and his repeated accusations of provincialism, linked to his passion for Gaelic. Nor should it be forgotten that his output was rather limited: during his lifetime, he published only two novels, The Albannach (1932) and And the Cock Crew (1945), a short story, Scottish Noël (1958), and a polemical essay with a political and cultural slant entitled At the Sign of the Clenched Fist (1967). After his death, his autobiography, Too Long in This Condition (1975), was published—more a history of the evolution of his thought than a chronicle of his life—and the novels The Ministers (1979) and Move Up, John (1994), extensively revised and edited by John Herdman, his wife, and editor Ruth McQuillan. More oriented toward religious debate, these latter works contain autobiographical insights that testify to the intellectual’s struggle to be heard, resulting in misunderstanding, ostracization, and isolation.

Fionn Mac Colla, the pen name of Thomas Douglas MacDonald, was born in Montrose on March 4, 1906. The surname Douglas was that of his mother’s family, originally from the northeast, while that of his father, a shoemaker and adherent to the evangelical Plymouth Brethren movement, came from Easter Ross, a part of the Highlands where Gaelic was still spoken. Mac Colla was proud to be Scottish—”my roots in the soil of Alba,” proclaims the protagonist of The Albannach—and, as he recounts in his autobiography, he firmly believed that all the good he had achieved as a writer and polemicist was due to the families from which he descended.

During his years at Montrose Academy, where he clearly perceived how the entire school system was designed to indoctrinate students, transforming them into loyal subjects of the empire, his nationalism and his passion for the Gaelic language and culture developed. It was no coincidence that, after graduating with honours from the Teacher Training College in Aberdeen, in 1926 he decided on a position as headmaster in the northwest, more precisely in Laide, in the Gairloch district. However, the bitter realization that the school was systematically Anglicizing students soon dampened his enthusiasm. He then moved to Palestine for three years as a teacher-cum-missionary at the United Free Church of Scotland’s College in Safed. Upon returning home, he joined the newly formed National Party of Scotland, annoyed by the hypocrisy of the Independent Labour Party, which paid lip service to social justice and Scottish self-government but in reality revealed itself to be a gang of careerists and profiteers.

Meanwhile, he had begun writing, adopting a nom de plume that left no doubt about the identitarian and pugnacious direction his prose would take: Fionn Mac Colla is, in fact, the Scottish Gaelic translation of Fionn MacCool, the Celtic hero of the Fenian cycle, but is also a reference to the legendary 17th-century Catholic Highland warrior Alasdair Mac Colla Chiotaich Mac Dhòmhnaill.

Between 1932 and 1933, he contributed to the nationalist periodical The Free Man, edited by Robin Black and MacDiarmid. His articles, some of which were signed with the pseudonym Ludovic Grant, focused primarily on the benefits of independence, but also explored history, society, and language, often comparing Scotland with other European nations. Mac Colla’s contributions, like those of the other Free Man authors, were instrumental in providing a solid political and cultural ground for the Scottish National Party, founded in 1934.

The following year, in Dundee, he was received into the Catholic Church and in 1936 married Mary Doyle, originally from Islay, whom he had met during his brief stint at the New University Society. For twenty years, from 1941 to 1961, Mac Colla and his wife lived in the Western Isles, where he served as headmaster in Benbecula and then Barra. He spent the last years of his life in Edinburgh, where he died on July 20, 1975. His remains rest at Mount Vernon Cemetery.

Despite his vigorous defence of Gaelic, almost all of Mac Colla’s writing is in English. In all likelihood, although he knew the language, he did not feel proficient enough to use it to write a novel or, in general, long, complex texts. Yet Gaelic, central to his nationalist discourse, embodied for him a vision of Scotland’s political and cultural independence that went far beyond the purely linguistic phenomenon: “Gaelic gave the nation its unity, despite later incursions of Northern English, it continued to be the national language in almost every part of the country,” he wrote in At the Sign of the Clenched Fist. Over time, Mac Colla came to equate the Gaelic question with the religious one, arguing that the decline of Gaelic was largely attributable to the penetration of Calvinism in Scotland. In his view, the Presbyterian Church had betrayed the people’s culture by removing the vital link between Catholicism and the nation-state that still existed in Ireland. Like other authors of the so-called “Scottish Renaissance,” he also launched a fierce polemic against Knox and the other reformers, advocates of an anti-communitarian individualism that England had easily exploited for its own gain, going so far as to declare that “Reformation Protestantism was not Christianity, or even a form of Christianity, but its almost complete antithesis.”

Similar ideas find their way into Mac Colla’s articles and essays, but also into his novels, the best of which, many consider, are the two he published during his lifetime.

The protagonist of The Albannach is Murdo Anderson, in some ways a predecessor of the many “angry young men” of later literature. Forced to abandon his studies in the city due to the death of his parents, he returns to his Highland community but struggles to reintegrate. He then becomes trapped in a loveless marriage and begins drinking, a vice that causes the death of his son. Alone, desperate, and determined to kill himself, Murdo is ultimately saved spiritually and socially by the rediscovery of his Gaelic heritage. The novel, at times stark in its realism, establishes a fascinating connection between places, people, and identities that embodies an invitation to hold fast to one’s roots, the only certainty in a hypocritical and constantly changing world.

Also And the Cock Crew addresses the theme of Gaelic culture and the deadly interference of Calvinism, but the tone is darker, and the characters acquire a more complex psychology. Furthermore, the story, influenced by Maritain’s philosophy, gradually distances itself from its historical significance to take on a universal meaning. The book explores the conflict between Highland traditions and nascent capitalism during the Highland Clearances – the evictions of a significant number of tenants in the Highlands and Islands – while Minister Sachairi experiences a wrenching struggle between his religious devotion and social injustice. The assimilation of the Gaelic world into the empire, the defeat of Jacobitism, and the forced expulsion of families from their homes are the chronicle of a tragedy marked by injustice, of a Scotland forced into silence.

In 1932, the artist Edward Baird, also a native of Montrose, completed his famous portrait of Mac Colla entitled Portrait of a Young Scotsman. The painting, lost for over seventy years, was fortuitously rediscovered in 2010 and is currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Mac Colla, dressed in a uniform similar to that of the Irish Republican Army emblazoned with a rampant red lion, in his sharp profile and gaze reveal the courage of a man who never bowed to any compromise, relentlessly pursuing his identity-based battle for freedom. Duncan Glen wrote of him as a “literary nationalist,” and perhaps there is no better definition for an author who truly deserves to be rediscovered and appreciated for his impetuous prose, but also for the love of his fellow men and of God that pervades every one of his books.

By Luca Fumagalli

Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael

Some of what we have said in the first instalment of Angelology is reflected in an excellent Patristic text, entitled The Noetic Paradise. The original Greek text may have been written in the 8th century, in one of the Palestinian Monasteries. The only surviving copy is a translation into Arabic. The document speaks of two Paradises, two Gardens of Eden. One is the traditional Garden, with all its physicality. The other is a Garden of the mind, or the Nous, and which formed a constitutive part of the original human condition. In this Noetic space, Adam and Eve were able to participate in the angelic communion, possibly to experience their angelic life to some degree. With the Fall, both the body and the mind were affected, and the Noetic Paradise was likewise closed off by a Cherub. Henceforth, the human mind struggles with the passions, with intrusive thoughts, and temptations on all sides. However, with contemplation, the Christian might purify their mind, so that eventually the angelic communion isn’t such a strange idea. In contemporary discourse, we often hear of mindfulness, of the connection between mental health and physical health. The Noetic Paradise is on the same theme, in that the purification of our mind goes in tandem with the purification of our body. As one Paradise opens up for us, at the end of our earthly life, so too does the other.

We come here to a truth of eschatology, one which often seems to go unnoticed. When all is said and done, when all who have died rise from their graves, and when the world is made anew as Christ comes in Glory at the Parousia, nothing can quite be the same as before. The very physics of creation will probably be reconfigured, and the hidden realities of metaphysics become visible. The angelic choirs, in all their splendour, will come into new communion with the ranks of Saints. Each person will finally be able to meet, if not to touch, their Guardian Angel. Since all things configure to Christ, we might look to Him to better understand some of the implications of these ideas.

In ancient Christianity, the Lord was often referred to by the title Christos Angelos, that is Christ the Angel. St. Paul hints at this in Galatians 4:14. Of course, the Church clearly defines the two natures of Christ as human and Divine. Perhaps the fact that the angelic nature isn’t explicitly mentioned suggests the relative inferiority of the angelic beings to the human. It nevertheless seems plausible that Christ incorporates all angelic reality into Himself. Indeed, He created the Angels in the first place. His Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, is dignified as Queen of the Angels. We might wonder how His Resurrection affected the angelic order, and how the eschatological accomplishment will be enjoyed by the Angels, what will it mean for their own experience? All we know is that there will be a communion with them, in the Body of Christ.

Much more could be said about all of this, and these are just some reflections on possible areas of theological study relating to angelology. We haven’t yet spoken much about the second and third spheres of the angelic choirs. One of the greatest Patristic authorities on the subject is Pseudo-Dionysius, who wrote The Celestial Hierarchy, and a companion piece entitled The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy - the two reflecting each other, in some ideal sense. The author was thought to be St. Dionysius the Areopagite, but we now know that the attribution is pseudepigraphal. Since the Church nevertheless received his writings under the appellation of St. Dionysius, there does seem to be a sense of authentic tradition. As with the authorship of Moses, regarding the Pentateuch, or the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews attributed to St. Paul, we have the idea of a living tradition somehow imbued with the spirit of these figures. In this sense, Moses is indeed the author of the Pentateuch, but not in a literal way. Likewise, the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius may well carry some of the spiritual inspiration of St. Dionysius, an Athenian disciple of St. Paul, and a Martyr. What we do know, in any case, is that the developed Angelology expressed in this work has roots in ancient Jewish Theology, and is inspired by the categories of Neoplatonist philosophy.

In The Celestial Hierarchy, all three spheres of angelic beings are described in some detail. The second Order comprises the Dominations, the Virtues and the Powers. The third Order includes the Principalities, Archangels and the Angels. Pseudo-Dionysius does admit that there may be other ranks of Heavenly Spirits beyond the nine choirs, and that the subject can’t be exhausted. Jewish theology often includes a tenth species of Angel, and it is difficult to fully draw equivalences between the second and third spheres of angelic beings in Christian theology, and the classes presented in Jewish tradition. Sometimes the Angels are referred to as Elohim, as “Godlike beings”, and contemporary theology might wonder whether some of the divinities in non-Christian religions are ultimately angelic in nature? In any case, the Dominions and Virtues are presented as those Angels most involved with the natural world – they are concerned with the Divine ordering of Creation, even on the level of planets and stars, and with the operation of miracles. The Powers are primarily charged with the restraining of evil, notably of demonic forces, and were invoked regularly by St. Teresa of Avila, to take one example. The final sphere of the angelic hierarchy is the most immanent, the closest to human concern. Principalities are thought to govern kingdoms, nations and institutions, with a view to inspiring greater reverence and love for God. The Archangels are involved in missions of special significance, and in communicating the Good News. Angels are messengers in a more general sense, and mediators of prayer and Grace, they are the most intimately associated with human beings.

Different authors after Pseudo-Dionysius have written about all of this. Within the French School of Spirituality, one of the most prolific was Ven. Henri Marie Boudon (1624-1702), Archdeacon of the Diocese of Evreux. His interest was primarily devotional, and his sources referred back to the Patristic writers. He notes, throughout his work entitled Devotion to the Nine Choirs of Holy Angels, that we are obliged in charity to express some devotion to the angelic spirits since they are continually concerned with our Salvation and are continually engaged in helping us. If we show lack of interest in their help, and if we fail to invoke their intercession before Christ, and before Our Blessed Mother as Queen of the Angels, we lose so many graces that might otherwise have come to us. Among the most obvious of these graces is protection from the evil spirits, the demons and their temptations. Whatever power God might allow the demons to exercise, the Angels always have more, and are powerful warriors against the onslaught of evil. It isn’t therefore surprising that the Angels are also highly significant at the hour of death, when they help assure the Christian of the grace of final perseverance.

St. Michael the Archangel has often been represented as the Angel of Death, charged with the weighing of souls at the Judgement. This is a motif which goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, in which we find the tradition of Anubis weighing the human heart against a feather. Regarding St. Michael, there is a sense that he might influence the balance in the soul’s favour, just as the demons attempt to influence it in the opposite direction. Hence why devotion to his care is recommended. Boudon suggests that sincere devotion to the Angels’ intercession is a “Mark of High Predestination”. Various prayers already exist, and perhaps the most famous today is the prayer composed by Pope Leo XIII, invoking the protection of St. Michael. Boudon offers us other possibilities too, the most interesting of which might be a Novena of Masses. The Mass intention for each day of the Novena would correspond to each of the angelic choirs: the first day in honour of the Holy Seraphim, through to the ninth day in honour of the Holy Angels. Such a Novena was offered in Scotland, in 2017, but in a private capacity. It suffices simply to register the Mass intentions with one or more Priests, and to attend the Masses for each choir.

Image from f. 40v of Breviari d'Amor (Catalan prose version)

Alongside St. Michael, there are six other Archangels who occupy a special position in the Heavenly Order. These are the “Seven Angels who stand before the Throne”, and Boudon refers us to the idea that they participate in distributing the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and in protecting us against the seven deadly sins. In some sense, they stand outside of the Nine Choirs, in a special relationship with God, although all appear to be Archangels. It is interesting to note that despite being of the second-lowest Choir, they were selected for a mission of the utmost significance. The singularity of these seven Angels is also reflected in other religious traditions, perhaps most notably in the Amesha Spenta of Zoroastrianism, who stand apart from the much more numerous class of Yazatas, and who seem to participate in a deeper way with the reality of God (Ahura Mazda), distributing His Grace.

St. Gabriel the Archangel is perhaps the other Angel best known to the Christian tradition, who we mentioned briefly at the outset of this article. He is principally found as a messenger, bringing good news to Daniel, and latterly to Our Blessed Mother. The Annunciation is forever associated with the ministry of St. Gabriel the Archangel - it is he who poses the question of the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary, precipitating her Fiat, and we continue to pray in the words of St. Gabriel as we say the Ave Maria. We are in communion with him each and every time we pray the Holy Rosary, or the Angelus. St. Raphael the Archangel is lesser known, but is likewise invoked in mainstream Catholic devotion. He appears in the Book of Tobit, appearing in the form of a man, aiding Tobit on his adventure, and curing his father Tobias of blindness. Along the way, he acts as matchmaker for Tobit, finding him his wife Sarah. In devotion he is therefore a patron of good meetings, and of healing.

The other four of these seven special Archangels aren’t well known, and appear only in apocryphal texts, if at all. Their names are venerated within Eastern Christianity, including the Eastern Catholic Churches. Theologically speaking, this means that they can be venerated, even if their names may not be completely accurate. While differing names can be found in different apocrypha, the rule of Lex Orandi, Lex Credenti helps us discern what names should be used in veneration. Perhaps the best known of these four is St. Uriel the Archangel. Paradoxically, he is identified with the Cherub guarding Eden, in some sources. He is also identified as the Archangel who helps the Holy Family in their flight to Egypt. He is a patron of the arts and the sciences. The remaining three Archangels include St. Barachiel, St. Jehudiel and St. Selatiel. The first is a patron of family life, of Mercy, of Blessings. The second is a patron over leadership, royalty, and spiritual endeavour. He is associated with reward and punishment. Finally, St. Selatiel is a patron of prayer, and is recounted as one of the Angels who helped redeem Adam and Eve, after their deaths. Sometimes, an Archangel associated with the name St. Jeremiel is also venerated, and he is associated with the “lifting up to God”. St. Raguel is likewise recognised in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Beyond these seven Angels, the only other Angel with a specific cultus appears to be the Angel of Portugal, associated with the events surrounding Fatima. In tradition, he is one of the Principalities, watching over the country of Portugal, although his name is unknown.

The Angel of Portugal

We might conclude our survey with a cursory glance at the Guardian Angels. Generally speaking, authors such as Boudon argue that almost all of the Guardian Angels are from the lowest Heavenly Choir. They are those Angels who assist us in the greatest way, and to whom we owe the greatest gratitude. They know us perhaps better than we know ourselves, and are consistently watching over us, even when we sin. Some traditions, such as one promoted in Opus Dei, suggest that we should silently salute the Guardian Angels of our friends, family and enemies. They are powerful intercessors.

By Anthony MacIsaac

In 2016, he became a devotional Knight of St. Michael the Archangel. Part of the spiritual responsibility associated with this devotion is to pray the Chaplet of St. Michael the Archangel daily, and to encourage greater devotion to the Angels.