A Scottish Silver Jubilee

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 15, 9 April 1903, Page 1

A Scottish Silver Jubilee

Papal and other associated jubilees are pressing close on each other's heels in the year of grace 1903. The \enerable old Pontiff celebrates within the twelve months the silver jubilee of his election and of his coronation as Popo and his golden jubilee as Cardinal of Holy Church. Hard on the footsteps of his three silver jubilees comes another with which he was intimately associated : the silver jubilee of the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland. This was one of the very first acts performed by Pope Leo XITI, after his coronation, March IJ, 1878. The Bull replacing the Vicars-Apostolic in Bonnie Scotland by Bishops was signed by him on March ■i, 1878.

In Scotland, as in England, the Catholic episcopate went down in bitter persecution during the great religious revolution of the sixteenth, century. The Popes, however, never ceased to watch over and consolidate the brave and patient remnant of devout worshippers that were left in the once faithful kingdom of St. Margaret after the old religion had been proscribed, its altars overthrown, and its ancient shrines despoiled and handed o\er to the worship of a new and strange creed. During the nineteenth century the number of Scotland's faithful had so grown, and its priests, churches, and religious institutions so multiplied, that the times were deemed ripe for restoring to Scotland the normal method of ecclesiastical government. The agitation for a restored hierarchy began in a tentative way in 1864. It went on for a brief space in a spasmodic way. Then the question dropped for a time beneath the surface of things. It was renewed, and on a wider scale, in 1877, and formed the subiect of a Scottish Catholic address to Pope Pins IX. at the celebration of his episcopal golden jubilee in that year. ' The Pope of the heart ' — as the Italians loved to call him — favored the project. But the

line-spun thread of his life was snipped before the negotiations on the subject were completed. The work was thus left to ' the Pope of the head and heart ' to accomplish. He made it his first and earliest care. Two archbishoprics were established : the one in Glasgow, the other in St. Andrews and Edinburgh ; and four bishoprics — Aberdeen, Dunkeld, Whithorn (or Galloway), and Argyle an d the Isles. And Leo, of the many years, closed the solemn act by the hope that the work would be crowned with joyful fruits, and that Scotland's mountains might be ' clothed with peace, and her hills with righteousness for her people.'

When the Catholic hierarchy was re-established by Pius IX. in England, in 1850, the good Pontiff was charged with assailing the British Constitution 'by means, not of an armada, but of a single sheet of paper.' Lord John Russell wrote a delirious letter of protest against the 'papal aggression,' and followed it up by the foolish Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851. People ' tore around pretty considerable ' (as our American cousins say), and there was a veritable tornado of no-Popery agitation, which shook every rib and timber in the whole framework of English society. Sleep is a useful and popular remedy for paroxysms of anger. Rage, according to Lotze, is quieted by muscular repose, ' and it is,' he adds, ' a dictate of prudence to get an angry man to sit down in an easy chair.' Mr. John Bull soared Into remarkably high temperatures over the innocent act of ' papal agression ' involved in the re-appointment of a Catholic hierarchy for England. But the little volcano soon burnt itself out. Mr. Bull slept his anger off. And he felt so much honest shame for the foolish and precipitate ' Ecclesiastical Titles Act,' that he wiped it off his statute-book before its provisions weie ever put to the test. Scottish Protestants sensibly agreed to look upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in their country with friendly indifference. There was a labored but inoperative protest by the prelates of the Scottish Episcopalian Church. Here and there a lone skirmisher raised his voice and cried to a wilderness of unattentive ears. But there came back no echoing response. The newspapers gently chided the few voices raised in protest, and the peace of Nirvana settled down upon the land.