As a little holiday treat for our more senior readers, let’s look back to, say, about 1954, well within living memory. Let’s look back at Glasgow’s St Maeve’s. St Maeve’s: an elderly inner-city church, Puginesque of course, with Gothic diamond-leaded windows,granite pillars with incised maltese crosses celebrating its consecration, and a logistically effective 3 aisle configuration of brown rows of benches,quite slippery with the polish of wear, especially at the back of the church,worn kneelers, and tiled floors, often with the odd loose rattling tile, twin cubicle confessionals up each side aisle,three on each side,with saloon doors and velvet curtains, inside sliding shutters and grilles,above, powerful paintings of the Stations of the Cross,ahead statues of St Joseph and St Anthony, waxen stalagmites and stalactites around winking little candles or nightlights, holy water stoups recessed into the rear walls beside the pamphlet stall, all in silence and just a hint of incense from from a previous Benediction service.

Dominating all was the Main Altar, of white marble supported by toffee-coloured pillars, behind it and before Coia a complex tapestry of white and black Connemara marble, with saint recesses, always one for St Patrick, the latest probably St Teresa, the Little Flower, above them the stained glass windows, with other saints. And high above the Main Altar, on chains from the roof, was the figure of Christ on the Cross.

Beneath, for 20,000 or so parishioners, topped up with perhaps 500 baptisms a year, were 6 a.m. Masses on Holidays of Obligation for workers- no evening Masses then- 8.a.m. Masses, always available given a six curate parish staff, but particularly useful in Lent for schoolchildren, half-frozen but coming to as the heating pipes warmed up, 10.o’clock Mass for the elderly or marriages with Nuptial Mass and Papal Blessing and last on Sunday the often overcrowded- especially at the back- 12o’clock Mass often with 25 minute sermon and a sung Mass if your luck was out, and, before “Coronation Street” , of course, Holy Hour and Bnediction on a Sunday night.For all, after a fast from midnight, there was the Eucharist. The lambs and sheep were fed, as Our Lord asked.My great-grand parents, parishioners of St Patrick’s Anderston, Glasgow, could have immediately identified with a real St Maeve’s.My grandparents could, parents could, and I can. Most Catholics in their forties and upwards will be able to identify with it as a description of any senior parish church in the Archdiocese of Glasgow.

In 1954, in an ever-expanding Archdiocese, St Maeve’s and its associate churches were the engine rooms.

A little experiment, and you might need one of those packets of paper in 500 sheet loads that the supermarkets now sell.You may also require parents or even grandparents for this. Try to imagine a walk home from that 12 Mass ,then compare it with a walk home from Mass next Sunday,keeping in mind the social, cultural and spiritual differences in the life of the city. I told you lots of paper might be needed if you write them down. But it is 2014, and I doubt if anyone really imagines that we can go back to the interface that St Maeve’s had with Catholic life in 1954. But there are signs- you’ll find them on previous posts- that they’re beginning to get the message in Rome.

Can anyone tell us why the Scottish Bishops show no signs of joining them ?

It’s not just “To Feed The Flock” that’s on about extended ordination!
Bishop Helmut Kratzl of Vienna has called on his fellow Bishops to take up
the Pope’s request “to make courageous suggestions” to stop the Eucharist
from drying up. We take the liberty of quoting him from last week’s “Tablet”:
“We are silently accepting a scarcity of the Eucharist, which is already to a
certain extent perilous,because we are not prepared to change admission to the
priesthood. We must open new doors,including that of priestly celibacy.”
In this,of course,he joins a growing number of Bishops, some in England
recently, as well as the many in South America and Asia who have been
making the point for years.
Of special significance for Scotland this year was also his point that
“The Eucharist should be available where people lived”, a point which is
worth remembering as a policy of closing churches is enthusiastically under way.
To Feed The Flock’s belief is simple. The secular priesthood is the
traditional method of providing the Eucharist. It no longer works.
So we must try another method. Can we hear from the secular priesthood as
to why this is not acceptable?
And we’ve got to face the fact that some lay people don’t like the extension
of ordination either. Do tell us why! Do they really deny the validity of
ordination and the acceptance therefore of the Apostolic Succession ?
It’s as simple as that.
But the Scottish Bishops are not just sitting about. The seminary in Spain is
going to be re-opened.
What can one say?