The Catholic Church in Scotland, overseen by the Scottish Bishops' Conference, is part of the worldwide Catholic Church headed by the Pope. Christianity first arrived in Roman Britain and was strengthened by the conversion of the Picts through both the Hiberno-Scottish mission and Iona Abbey. After being firmly established in Scotland for nearly a millennium, the Catholic Church was outlawed by the Scottish Reformation Parliament in 1560. Multiple uprisings in the interim failed to reestablish Catholicism or to legalise its existence. William Forbes Leith (1909), Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. Volume II From Commonwealth to Emancipation, Longman, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London. p. 332. Even today, the Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560, while no longer enforced, still remains on the books.
Throughout the nearly three centuries of religious persecution and disenfranchisement between 1560 and 1829, William Forbes Leith (1909), Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. Volume I The Reign of King Charles I, Longman, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London. pp. 361-381. William Forbes Leith (1909), Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. Volume II From Commonwealth to Emancipation, Longman, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London. pp. 393-406. many students for the priesthood went abroad to study while others remained in Scotland. In what is now termed underground education, many attended illegal seminaries. An early seminary upon Eilean Bàn in Loch Morar was moved during the Jacobite rising of 1715 and reopened as Scalan seminary in Glenlivet. After multiple arson attacks by government troops, Scalan was rebuilt in the 1760s by Bishop John Geddes, who later became Vicar Apostolic of the Lowland District, a close friend of national poet Robert Burns, and a well-known figure in the Edinburgh intelligentsia during the Scottish Enlightenment.
The successful campaign that resulted in Catholic emancipation in 1829 helped Catholics regain both freedom of religion and civil rights. In 1878, the Catholic hierarchy was formally restored.Archdiocese of Edinburgh www.archdiocese-edinburgh.com. Retrieved 21 February 2009 As the Church was slowly rebuilding its presence in the Gàidhealtachd, the bishop and priests of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, inspired by the Irish Land War, became the ringleaders of a direct action resistance campaign by their parishioners to the Highland Clearances, rackrenting, religious discrimination, and other acts widely seen as abuses of power by Anglo-Scottish landlords and their estate factors.
Many Scottish Roman Catholics in the heavily populated Lowlands are the descendants of Irish immigrants and of Scottish Gaelic-speaking migrants from the Highlands and Islands who both moved into Scotland's cities and industrial towns during the nineteenth century, especially during the Highland Clearances, the Highland Potato Famine, and the similar famine in Ireland. However, there are also significant numbers of Scottish Catholics of Italian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Polish descent, with more recent immigration to Scotland from European Union member states again boosting the numbers. Owing to immigration (overwhelmingly White European), it is estimated that in 2009, there were about 850,000 Catholics in the country of 5.1 million.Andrew Collier "Scotland's confident Catholics" Tablet 10 January 2009, pg. 16
The Gàidhealtachd has been both Catholic and Protestant in modern times. A number of Scottish Gaelic-speaking areas, including Barra, Benbecula, South Uist, Eriskay, and Moidart, are predominantly Catholic.
In the 2011 UK Census, 16% of the population of Scotland described themselves as being Roman Catholic, compared with 32% affiliated with the Church of Scotland. Between 1994 and 2002, Catholic church attendance in Scotland declined 19% to just over 200,000. By 2008, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Scotland estimated that 184,283 attended Mass regularly. Mass attendance has not recovered to the numbers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, though there was a dramatic rise between 2022 and 2023. Big increase in Mass attendance recorded in Britain, by Bess Twiston Davies, The Tablet, 28 January 2025.
History
Establishment
Christianity may have been introduced to what is now Scotland by soldiers of the Roman Legions stationed in the far north of the province of Britannia.B. Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts (Oxford, 1997), , p. 184. Even after the 383 withdrawal of the Roman garrisons by Magnus Maximus, it is well documented in sources about Saint Mungo, St Ninian, and in locally composed works of early Welsh-language literature, like Y Gododdin, the Book of Taliesin, and the Book of Aneirin, that Christianity survived among the Proto-Welsh-speaking kingdoms in Scotland, which are still referred to in Modern Welsh as the Hen Ogledd (lit. "the Old North"). Like it's faithful, however, Christianity was slowly driven westward with refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.O. Davies, Celtic Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1999), , p. 21. The Picts, Anglo-Saxons, and Gaels of modern Scotland, who were traditionally tribal peoples, were mainly evangelized and converted between the fifth and seventh centuries by Irish missionaries such as Sts Columba and Baithéne, the founders and first two abbots of Iona Abbey, St Donnán of Eigg, and St Máel Ruba, a monk from Bangor Abbey who became the founder of Applecross Abbey in Wester Ross. These missionaries tended to found monastic institutions, which expanded to include schools, libraries, and collegiate churches whose priests both evangelized and served large areas.O. Clancy, "The Scottish provenance of the 'Nennian' recension of Historia Brittonum and the Lebor Bretnach " in: S. Taylor (ed.), Picts, Kings, Saints and Chronicles: A Festschrift for Marjorie O. Anderson (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), pp. 95–6 and A. P. Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland AD 80–1000 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), , pp. 82–3. Partly as a result of these factors, some scholars have identified a distinctive Celtic Church, to which Catholics, Protestants, Miaphysite Orthodox, and Eastern Orthodox, have all claimed in historical debates to be the only legitimate heirs. In the Celtic Church, attitudes towards clerical celibacy were more relaxed, a differing form of monastic tonsure was used, the use of prayer beads known as the Pater Noster cord as a means of "prayer without ceasing" preceded the invention of the rosary by St Dominic, and the lunar method was used for calculating the date of Easter. During the 1960s, Frank O'Connor explained that the reason why, on both sides of the Irish Sea, abbots were often more significant than bishops is because a Church governed by an Episcopal polity, "in a tribal society was a contradiction in terms. No tribe, however small or weak, would accept the authority of a bishop from another tribe; but with a monastic organisation, each tribe could have its own monastery, and the larger ones could have as many as they wished."Frank O'Connor (1968), A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look, page 20.
Also, despite a shared belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and shared use of the Ecclesiastical Latin liturgical language, as is documented by primary sources such as the Stowe Missal, there were often significant differences between the Celtic Rite and the mainstream Roman RiteC. Evans, "The Celtic Church in Anglo-Saxon times", in J. D. Woods, D. A. E. Pelteret, The Anglo-Saxons, synthesis and achievement (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1985), , pp. 77–89.C. Corning, The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church (Macmillan, 2006), . and evidence of a distinctive form of Celtic chant in Latin, which is most closely related to Gallican chant, also survives in liturgical music manuscripts dating from the period.D. O Croinin, ed., Prehistoric and Early Ireland: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, vol I (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 798. The Culdees, an eremitical order from Gaelic Ireland, also spread to Scotland, where their presence continued at least into the 11th-century. In his life of Saint Margaret of Scotland, Turgot of Durham, Bishop of St Andrews, wrote of the Culdees, "At that time in the Kingdom of the Scots there were many living, shut up in cells in places set apart, by a life of great strictness, in the flesh but not according to the flesh, communing, indeed, with angels upon earth." Nick Aitchison (1999), Macbeth: Man and Myth, Sutton Publishing. p. 26.
At the same time, the erenagh system in Gaelic Ireland of hereditary lay administration of Church lands by family branches deliberately appointed from within the derbhfine of local Irish clan chiefs led to notorious abuses; like monasteries warring against each other and the infamous Irish "royal-abbot" of Cork and Clonfert Abbeys, Fedelmid mac Crimthainn, who personally led armies into battle against other Irish clans and abbeys and routinely sacked and burned other monasteries. Carmel McCaffrey and Leo Eaton (2002), In Search of Ancient Ireland, New Amsterdam. pp. 175-176,179-183. Due to the close ties between the Church in both countries, the erenagh system also spread to Gaelic Scotland, with at least some similar results. For example, during the 11th-century reign of the Scottish High King Macbeth, which was later fictionalized by William Shakespeare, the High King's greatest domestic foe by far proved to be his own uncle, Crínán of Dunkeld, the warrior-abbot of Dunkeld Abbey, Mormaer of Atholl, the legitimately married father of the late High King Duncan I, the grandfather of King Malcolm III of Scotland, and progenitor of the Scottish Royal House of Dunkeld. John Matthews & Bob Stewart (1993), Celtic Warrior Chiefs, Firebird Books. pp. 143-187. Peter Beresford Ellis (1993), Macbeth: High King of Scotland, Barnes & Noble Books. pp. 16, 17, 61, 63, 64, 91. Nick Aitchison (1999), Macbeth: Man and Myth, Sutton Publishing. pp. 25-29.
Despite the ongoing religious persecution and expulsion from their monasteries and convents of "Romanists" like St Mo Chota, who opposed how much the Celtic Church had been, "absorbed by the tribal system" and lost its independence from control by local secular rulers,Frank O'Connor (1968), A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look, page 22. at least some of these issues had been resolved on both sides of the Irish Sea by the mid-seventh century.C. Evans, "The Celtic Church in Anglo-Saxon times", in J. D. Woods, D. A. E. Pelteret, The Anglo-Saxons, synthesis and achievement (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1985), , pp. 77–89.C. Corning, The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church (Macmillan, 2006), . After the conversion, successful war for political independence from Norway, and increasing Gaelicisation of Scandinavian Scotland and the Isle of Man under Somerled and his heirs, the Roman Rite Diocese of the Isles under bishops appointed by the Holy See became the dominant religion.A. Macquarrie, Medieval Scotland: Kinship and Nation (Thrupp: Sutton, 2004), , pp. 67–8.
Medieval era and Renaissance