In this week's blog Marian Pallister reflects on the suffering church past and present.
There have, of course, been complaints about the closing of our churches, the online Masses, Stations of the Cross, and prayers. ‘There’s nowhere like your own parish church,’ has been the cry from some as priests and bishops try their level best to master technologies and reach out to the faithful.
And if you don’t have access to a laptop, a mobile phone or a tablet, the exclusion from even ‘remote’ celebration of our faith must be particularly hard.
But this is temporary, and benign. Let’s remember that not so long ago, we could have been worshipping on a hillside out of human view.
After the Reformation in the mid 1500s, the Catholic faith went underground – or perhaps more accurately, hid itself in the hills.
Living in the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, we are aware of remote outdoor meeting places where people bravely came together for Masses celebrated by Irish priests who incognito, made their way up through the Kintyre peninsula and beyond.
In the far north, aided by the Dukes of Gordon, Scalan seminary helped preserve the faith between 1717 and 1799. In the 1720s – after first Uprising in 1715 – pupils and staff went into hiding because of the threat of government troops in the area. Worse was to come in 1746 after the Battle of Culloden, when the Duke of Cumberland himself – ‘the Butcher’ – led troops to torch the seminary.
Even so, by 1767, a farmhouse was converted to replace the original cottage and seminarians were taught in this remote setting until the end of the century.
Another hidden seminary was established on the Isle of Loch Morar by Bishop Gordon and run from 1714 by Fr George Innes. It was situated ‘in the heart of our best and surest friends’, Bishop Hugh MacDonald wrote to Rome in 1733 seeking help. But when Bonnie Prince Charles landed in the area in 1745, it rather gave the game away that this was a place where the Catholic faith continued to be practiced.
In the wake of the Young Pretender’s defeat, naval ships landed 300 men, and boats were carried overland to the loch. According to reports of the time, ‘The people on the island outstripped both the boats and the soldiers who pursued them along the lochside, hoping to cut off any landing.’
Once on the island, however, the seminary was uncovered and the ‘Popish Bishop's house and chapel…[was] quickly gutted and demolished’. The Bishop escaped on a French ship but returned to Scotland in August 1749.
Today our churches are safe. We can freely worship, albeit online. As Pope Francis said: “To the pandemic of the virus we want to respond with the universality of prayer, of compassion, of tenderness. Let us unite. Let us make our closeness felt to the people who are most alone and most deprived.”
We can do that best through the technologies at our disposal. Let’s not dismiss the efforts made on our behalf. It’s our faith that matters, not where or how we worship.