The Hungry Forties were a long time ago. From the Highlands and Ireland many thousands came to Glasgow. There was certainly a slightly later visitor to my family who, pointed at the Anderston tenement, assumed we owned all of it and not just the room and kitchen. I’ve heard this was a common mistake, especially by those straight from black houses and mud cabins.
But some of us have done quite well. I’ve heard rumours there has been a Catholic doctor in Glasgow since then. And maybe even a Catholic lawyer ! It’s obviously a Loch Ness monster kind of thing but there’s a silly rumour going about that Highland and Irish Catholics have reached every academic height that can be reached, here and elsewhere , not to mention their commercial ability. No, really. People have said that !
If we can accept universal literacy and the rest of it for the poor Paddies and Cheuchters, why do we have to accept without saying something about the nonsense which has appeared in the Catholic Press re the numbers of Catholics attending Mass ?
It’s apparently a wonderful thing that there are or will be more Catholics than other denominations attending church. At a time when Islam is on the march, that’s irrelevant. The Incarnation, on which Christianity is based , is just an international sporting entity, and at the minute the Catholic Church is winning in terms of points, or goals, or strokes or cups or whatever the hell athletes are competing for nowadays.
To be logical , and I’m in alien territory here, when there’s only one Tridentine priest left and no ministers left, we’ve won?
I tried again this year to watch in its fullness ‘The Passion of the Christ’ by Mel Gibson, but could not do so. This brilliant film, I suggest, is probably as near as we will ever get to a spectator’s view of what the Passion and Death of Our Lord looked like. It is in its way a tribute to the Incarnation, and a very powerful one.
But in Catholic Glasgow, the blazing reality of the Incarnation is being reduced to whatever sporting gibberish’s adherents use to signify win or loss.
The Incarnation, in other words , is reduced to backcourt peever, or kickabout, or, God help us, the confrontations of professional sport
So there are more Catholics than Protestants now in church on Sundays . As we used to say in the James Dean era- waow!