Catholic Glasgow and St Andrew’s Cathedral

Glasgow was a Catholic city for most of its history. Its cathedral was built by Catholic bishops, its university was founded by a papal bull, and its patron saint, Saint Mungo, was venerated for centuries. Then, after the Reformation of 1560, Catholic worship was banned, and by the eighteenth century only a handful of Catholics remained in the town. The story of how the Catholic community was reborn, largely through immigration from Ireland and the Highlands, and grew to become one of the defining forces in the life of modern Glasgow, is one of the most important in the city’s history.

After the Reformation

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 abolished the authority of the Pope and made the celebration of Mass illegal. The last Catholic archbishop of Glasgow, James Beaton, fled to France. The cathedral became a Protestant church, as described on our Reformation in Glasgow page, and those who remained loyal to the old faith had to worship in secret.

Glasgow’s most famous Catholic martyr belongs to this period. John Ogilvie, a Scottish-born Jesuit priest, returned to Scotland in disguise to minister to Catholics, and was arrested in Glasgow in 1614. After refusing to acknowledge the king’s authority in spiritual matters, he was hanged at Glasgow Cross on 10 March 1615. He was canonised in 1976, the only post-Reformation Scottish saint.

A community reborn

For much of the eighteenth century there were very few Catholics in Glasgow, and anti-Catholic feeling ran high. Change came with the industrial revolution. Highlanders, many of them Catholics from the western Highlands and islands, and immigrants from Ireland came to the city to work in its mills and workshops. Relief Acts passed in the early 1790s allowed Catholics to worship openly, under restrictions, and in 1792 a priest was appointed for Glasgow. About two hundred people attended the first Mass in a rented hall in Mitchell Street. A few years later a chapel in the Calton could hold six hundred.

Numbers grew quickly. In 1805 there were around 450 Catholics in the city; by 1814 there were about 3,000. In that year the parish priest, Father Andrew Scott, decided to build a proper church.

St Andrew’s on Clyde Street

The new church was built on Clyde Street, facing the river, on land bought from a merchant firm. It was designed by the architect James Gillespie Graham in the Gothic style and begun in 1814. Its construction met open hostility. Work done during the day was pulled down by saboteurs at night, and guards had to be posted on the site. Yet members of other churches in the city also gave money to help complete it. The church of St Andrew was opened with its first Mass on 22 December 1816.

Under the restrictions still in force, it was built without a steeple or bell tower. Full Catholic emancipation came only in 1829. When the Catholic hierarchy was restored in Scotland in 1878, Glasgow once again became an archdiocese, and in 1884 St Andrew’s became its pro-cathedral and was renovated. In 1947 it became a metropolitan cathedral. A major restoration completed in 2011 added new bronze doors and a painting by Peter Howson of the martyrdom of John Ogilvie.

Irish immigration

The greatest growth came with immigration from Ireland, especially after the famine of the 1840s, when tens of thousands of Irish people, most of them Catholic, arrived in Glasgow. They settled in districts such as the Gorbals, the Calton, Bridgeton and Anderston, and later in Govan, Partick and the new industrial towns around the city. Their story is told on our Irish migration page. New parishes and churches were built across the city, often paid for with the pennies of poor congregations.

The Catholic community built its own institutions: schools, charities, hospitals and clubs. The most famous is Celtic Football Club, founded in 1887 by the Marist Brother Walfrid to raise money for the poor of the East End, as described on our founding of Celtic page. Catholic schools were brought into the state system by the Education (Scotland) Act of 1918, which allowed them to keep their religious character while being publicly funded.

Tension and change

The growth of the Catholic community was accompanied by hostility and discrimination, in employment and in public life, and by the sectarian rivalry described on our religious conflict page. For much of the twentieth century Catholics in Glasgow faced barriers in some workplaces and professions. Over time those barriers have largely fallen, and Glasgow’s Catholics have become prominent in every area of the city’s life.

Two great occasions marked the community’s place in modern Scotland. On 1 June 1982 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass before an enormous crowd in Bellahouston Park, and in September 2010 Pope Benedict XVI also celebrated Mass there. St Andrew’s Cathedral, once built under guard, today stands openly on the riverside as the seat of the Archbishop of Glasgow, a short walk from the old cathedral that Catholic bishops built eight centuries ago.

Timeline