The Role of Male Religious Orders in Education in Scotland in the Decades Leading up to the Education (Scotland) Act, 1918

Abstract

This chapter opens by sketching out the broad historical background to the educational project of the Catholic Church internationally during the nineteenth century, a time when it was rapidly losing its temporal power. The project was central in the Church’s task of seeking to re-assert its authority and to expand it in new lands. The specific nature and extent of the role played by the male religious orders in education in Scotland within this context is then dealt with under three main headings: the general background, schooling and involvement in education beyond schooling.

Introduction

There is a long tradition of investigation and writing on the history of Catholic education which focuses, in the usual words of the researchers involved, on ‘the contribution’ of religious orders and congregations (the religious) to education in various countries. As the word ‘contribution’ indicates, the approach taken in many of the works produced in this tradition is often highly sympathetic to the activity of the religious. Furthermore, it often adopts a Catholic in-house type of language which is meaningful for those who grew up in an era when the presence of nuns, brothers and priests was central in the teaching force in Catholic schools. However, non-Catholics and Catholics of a younger generation can struggle to make meaning of what is written.

This chapter takes a different approach in providing an exposition on the role of male religious orders in Scotland in the decades leading up to the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. While eschewing a sympathetic approach, neither does it adopt an unsympathetic one. Rather, the chapter seeks to promote a dispassionate understanding of the situation in time and place. To this end, it first sketches out the broad historical background to the spiritual, missionary and educational project of the Catholic Church (the Church) during the nineteenth century, and particularly in relation to how this coincided with a time when it was rapidly losing its temporal power. The project in question was central in the Church’s task of seeking to re-assert its authority wherever possible and to expand it in new lands.

In the implementation of its project, the Church was able to draw upon some of the older religious orders as well as on a host of new ones. An exposition on the broad international context to this development is provided in the first section of the chapter, thus setting the scene for a consideration of the nature and extent of the role played by the male religious orders in education in Scotland. This consideration is dealt with under three main headings: the general background, schooling and involvement in education beyond schooling.

The Broad International Context

The religious way of life commenced with the ascetics of the desert during the period 250 A.D to 500 A.D.¹ The monastic movement followed between 500 A.D and 1200 A.D., with the Benedictines and the Cistercians being especially prominent. Over the next three centuries, from 1200 A.D to 1500 A.D, the mendicant orders, most notably the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, the Carmelites and the Servites, emerged and grew. The next group to flourish, from 1500 A.D to 1800 A.D, consisted of the apostolic orders, which included the Jesuits. The final group to emerge, primarily from the middle of the 1700s, comprised those orders deemed to be especially involved in institutional ministries. The orders of religious teaching brothers (brothers), alongside the orders of teaching priests, belong to this last era in the age of religious life within the Church. Brothers differed from priests in that their members, then as now, were not ordained clergy.² Another distinguishing feature for long has been that, like those belonging to religious orders of priests, but unlike diocesan priests, they live in community.

All groups of religious are considered within this chapter under the term ‘religious orders’. This follows the practice in ‘ordinary’ discourse. In saying this, it is recognised that Canon Law distinguishes between religious institutions, religious orders and religious congregations. However, it was considered that engaging here in outlining in detail the intricacies of what is involved would detract from focusing on the principal aims of the chapter.

What is necessary to make clear at this point is that within many religious orders (in the ‘ordinary’ sense of the term) of priests, brothers and nuns, there were two classes of members until after the Second Vatican Council. The great majority of female religious involved in education were ‘sisters’, a group distinguished in Canon Law from nuns. The popular practice, however, became one of using nuns as a generic term. Within most female religious orders also a distinction was made between ‘choir’ nuns and ‘lay nuns’.³ The general pattern was that lay nuns, who could be identified by the more humble clerical garb they wore, carried out the domestic work in the convents so that the choir nuns could be free to pray the Divine Office, engage in intellectual pursuits and do the apostolic work of the order. Priests who were teachers were either diocesan priests and thus belonged to a group which had no equivalent of lay nuns, or were members of religious orders of priests, which did; those in the lesser ranks of religious-order priests were termed brothers. The work of these non-ordained personnel consisted of domestic duties, heavy maintenance work and farm labouring.

Religious brothers who were members of religious orders of priests must not be confused with those belonging to religious orders of brothers like the De La Salle Brothers, the Marist Brothers and the Irish Christian Brothers. Like the religious orders of nuns and priests, they lived in community and took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.⁴ As with nuns, they differed from priests in that they were not ordained. Occasionally a community of religious orders of brothers had a small number of ‘domestic brothers’. Their principal duties were to keep the house or monastery clean and to do general maintenance work.

Historically, the most central characteristic of the way of life of priests and brothers of all kinds, as with nuns, for most of the period under consideration in this chapter is that while they worked in the world they also had to divorce themselves from the world as much as possible. In other words, they were religious first and foremost, and teaching, while deemed to be a very important role, was always in accord with and, where necessary, took second place to their spiritual life.⁵ Indeed, the expectation in this regard was made crystal clear to all aspiring to be priests and brothers even before they took one step over the threshold and entered the cloister. Once inside, the message continued to be reinforced among recruits of the orders and with great regularity and increasing intensity from year to year, as they proceeded through the various stages of the priesthood and brotherhood. In this way, they became more and more socialised into what Goffman has termed a ‘total institution’.⁶

Goffman defined a ‘total institution’ as ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed formally administered round of life’. Members of religious orders of brothers and priests certainly lived a life that conformed to this definition. This was a life distinguished from the basic social arrangements in modern Western society whereby the individual ‘tends to sleep, play and work in different places with different co-participants, under different authorities and without an overall rational plan’. For priests and brothers, the barriers separating these various spheres of activity were broken down, so that, as with members of other total institutions, their life conformed to the following characteristics identified by Goffman:

First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried out in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same things together. Third, all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled with one activity leading at a pre-arranged time into the next, the whole sequence of events being imposed from above by a series of explicit, formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfil the official aims of the institutions.⁷

Certain deviations from these characteristics can be pointed out in the case of the life of teaching priests and brothers, but these were minor rather than major. Regarding the first characteristic, for example, namely that all aspects of life are conducted in the same place, it is certainly the case in some locations that brothers and priests who were members of religious orders had to venture away from the monastery if the school, or church building, were not also located on one site, but their rules were designed to ensure that they remained as oblivious as possible to ‘the outside world’ as they moved through it daily.

In their more than 16 centuries of existence, religious orders have experienced cycles of expansion, stagnation and even collapse due to various upheavals. One great period of upheaval in the modern era was caused by the French Revolution of 1789; yet by 1850, the decline that had set in was reversed.⁸ Indeed, over the nineteenth century as a whole, more than 600 new religious orders were founded within the Church worldwide. A distinguishing feature of these new orders, along with some of the older ones that were reconstituted, was that they were oriented around specific areas of work. Teaching was one of the most prominent of such works, so much so that, as Wittberg has pointed out, the century has been designated by some authorities as ‘the age of the teaching orders within the history of the Church’.⁹

The domination of Catholic schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by members of religious orders was partly a consequence of the Church being embattled since the Reformation. Of particular significance was its loss of temporal power throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Papal States being reduced to no more than 108.7 acres in 1870.¹⁰ The response throughout most of the century was to engage in an all-out war on Liberalism, viewing it as a doctrine fuelling a desire to strip it of its worldly influence. The threat, as the Church saw it, was coming from an increasingly pluralist and rationalistic society, and it responded by a vigorous assertion of its exclusive claims to truth and authority. The ideology underpinning its approach was distinguished, as Connolly suggests, ‘by its political conservatism, its exaltation of papal authority, and its acceptance of a dogmatic, combative theology’.¹¹ A highly organised system of ecclesiastical administration which was clerically dominated and hierarchical, as well as being very strongly centralised, was also promoted.

Because the educational work of the teaching religious was constructed by the Church as being a vocation rather than a career, they were able to ensure that Catholic schooling was shaped in a manner that served the Church’s interests. Overriding all else was the interest in making sure that religious instruction was provided in the schools.¹² The outcome was the provision of special lessons in which Catholic prayers and doctrines were taught. In addition, great stress was placed on using every opportunity to promote Catholic principles and ideals when teaching the various subjects on the secular curriculum, while religious pictures, statues and extracurricular activities were harnessed to great effect to create an all-pervasive religious atmosphere in the schools.¹³ Furthermore, the importance of providing a basic elementary education in reading, writing and arithmetic for the majority of Catholic children was stressed.

Viewed in the widest sense, the great expansion in Catholic education internationally at the primary school level in the nineteenth century can be seen as having been part of a major effort driven by the middle classes in various European countries which cut across religious denominations and was aimed at pacifying and regulating the lower classes.¹⁴ The Church, however, had its own additional motivation, driven by its mood of intransigent defiance as it responded internationally, as has already been pointed out, to what it saw as a hostile world. Schools came to be seen by the Church as one of its instruments for holding on to, and re-establishing its control over, the faithful at a time when it was rapidly losing its temporal influence. Intimately related to this was the view of the Catholic Hierarchy in countries where Catholicism was not the religion of the majority that education was important in elevating the status of Catholics so that, in turn, the status of the Church itself would be elevated. For this reason also, the Church expanded its efforts in secondary schooling (albeit at a much slower rate than with primary schooling) with the advent across many Western countries of mass state secondary school education.¹⁵

The General Background

Given the overall thrust of this book, all that is required here is the presentation of a very general overview of the development of Catholic education in Scotland up until 1918.¹⁶ McDermid¹⁷ has pointed out that until the late eighteenth century, the majority of the 30,000 Scottish Catholics lived in the Highlands and Hebridean Islands and their marginal position remained essentially unchanged until the second decade of the nineteenth century when the country experienced substantial Irish Catholic immigration.¹⁸ Conroy has made the same observation when indicating that by the time of the passing of the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act the provision of education in the country compared favourably with that in other European countries in terms of access to, and attendance at, primary and secondary schools.¹⁹ Referring to this context, McDermid has also pointed out that most of the newly arrived Irish Catholics were much too poor to consider education for it to have any significance for them.²⁰

By the middle of the 1800s, the majority of Catholics lived in Glasgow and the West of Scotland.²¹ This was due initially to population movement to these districts, first with the coincidence of Highland clearances and the city’s industrial expansion, and later because of Irish migration. An outcome, as Conroy tells us, is that the Church began to provide education, beginning in Glasgow, where a number of schools were created from 1817 onwards.²² Gradually, O’Hagan, points out, ‘the Catholic community through its Bishops and their representatives became more organised with the establishment of the Catholic Schools Society, the Catholic Institute, and the Catholic Poor Schools Committee, established by the Bishops of England and Wales and subsequently joined by the Scottish Hierarchy’.²³ These bodies, he states, ‘became the conduit for the small and generally unsystematic sums of grant-aid available’.²⁴

There were few Catholic schools in the Highlands and Islands. On this, McDermid has noted that before the 1872 Act the only schools in the Catholic and Gaelic-speaking heartland of South Uist, Barra and Eriskay were provided by Protestant organisations, of which the Church was very suspicious.²⁵ Referring to the country as a whole, Conroy has concluded that the quality of education on offer in Catholic schools remained woefully inadequate.²⁶ In a similar vein, McDermid states that ‘the Hierarchy relied particularly on female religious to socialise and civilise the children of the immigrant poor’.²⁷ She also argues that because teacher training remained under the control of Protestant denominations with no Catholic college existing in Scotland until the mid-1890s, ‘Catholic teachers, themselves poorly educated and uncertified had to rely on learning by rote and the tawse’.²⁸

The 1872 Education (Scotland) Act ‘offered the possibility for Catholics to maintain schools of a reasonable standard and gradually to create a small but significant middle class through the much more focused and systematic financial support’.²⁹ It provided for any ecclesiastical body to be able to transfer its schools to local school boards which would then assume financial responsibility for their maintenance. However, both the Episcopalian Church and the Catholic Bishops of Scotland decided to continue, where possible, to provide their own schools, primarily to safeguard religious education from both the Church of Scotland and secularisation. At the same time, Catholic schools did continue to receive grant funding; between 1872 and 1918, the number of Catholic schools in receipt of grant aid rose sharply from 65 to 224.³⁰ Nevertheless, they continued to be characterised by teacher shortages, poor wages, high teacher—pupil ratios and cramped accommodation. The situation was exacerbated by the large number of unskilled, low-waged Catholic workers having to withdraw their children from school as soon as they were capable of earning a salary. McDermid also points out that before 1872, ‘contrary to the situation in the parochial school system, it appears that Catholic girls in Glasgow had a better (relatively speaking) education than Catholic boys because of the earlier arrival of female religious orders’.³¹ This began to change when the Marists arrived in Glasgow (1858) and took charge of boys’ education, followed by the Jesuits (1859) who concentrated on middle-class boys. In saying this one must not lose sight of the fact that the overall under-development of Catholic elementary education meant that only 3 per cent of pupils in Glasgow were undertaking post-primary study until the passing of the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act.

Male Religious Orders and Schooling

Before 1560, the religious in Scotland, members of the ‘old orders’, were monks, canons regular and friars in the case of men, while the women were few in number and were strictly enclosed. Some of the old orders returned in the nineteenth century, but they were a very small minority. The great majority of the orders that arrived were termed ‘active’ orders and were unenclosed. These orders of sisters and brothers came at the request of the clergy in order to provide elementary Catholic education for the poor children in the Lowland towns and to care for the sick and destitute in the urban ghettoes.³² This situation arose largely because of the 400,000 or more Irish men and women who migrated to Great Britain between 1841 and 1851. The bulk of the teaching work was taken up by the teaching orders of nuns who, with Catholic lay women teachers, taught primarily in primary schools, and especially in parish schools, while also providing Catholic secondary education for a relatively small number of girls. No convent school, however, was established amongst the Catholic population in the Highlands and Islands.

The same general geographical pattern of provision, with one or two exceptions, prevailed with regard to Catholic boys’ schools run by male religious orders. In line with the Church’s commitment to building up a Catholic middle class as well as providing basic elementary education for the great majority, two Glasgow boys’ schools, St Mungo’s Marist Brothers school and St Aloysius’ Jesuit school, were established amongst the heavy Clydeside concentration of Catholics. The Marist Brothers established St. Mungo’s in 1858³³ and followed up with schools in Dundee (1860), Dumfries (1873), Edinburgh (1877–1888), St Kentigern’s, Glasgow (1907) and St. Joseph’s, Glasgow (1919). St Aloysius’ College was established by the Jesuits in 1859, followed by Sacred Heart Edinburgh (1860), Dalkeith, Midlothian (1861), Galashiels (1863–1902), Airdrie (1916–1917) and Bothwell (1917). The Benedictine monks opened a school in their monastery at Fort Augustus in 1880. Early in the next century, the De La Salle Brothers commenced the provision of education; they opened schools in Tranent, East Lothian (1914), in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow (1915), in Edinburgh (1918) and in Slatefield, Glasgow (1919).

The first male order to establish schools during the period under consideration, as has already been noted, was the Marists.³⁴ This order is more correctly known as the Marist Brothers of the Schools. It was founded in France, at La Valla, in 1817, by Marcellin Champagnat, a young French priest of the Society of Mary, otherwise known as the Marist Fathers (SM), or The Society of Mary. The origin of the Marist Fathers was the Catholic revival that took place in the Archdiocese of Lyons after the French Revolution. A small group of young men preparing for ordination to be priests for the archdiocese decided to form a new religious order. They were influenced by the work of the Jesuits. They were also cognisant of the need ‘to do good quietly’; prior to the Revolution, the Jesuits in Western Europe had been suppressed because they had been deemed to have become too powerful within the Church. The outcome was the establishment of the Marist Fathers, with the objective of facilitating the Catholic revival through conducting parish missions in France and doing missionary work overseas.

Champagnat was one of the early members of the Marist Fathers and he established the order of the Marist Brothers when he commenced training a group of young men as catechists. He then went on to prepare them as teachers to educate poor boys according to the methods of the De La Salle Brothers. Eventually he formed them into a religious order based very much on the De La Salle ‘rules’. Soon members were spreading across France in response to requests from parish priests to staff schools in their parishes. By 1840, when Champagnat died, there were 280 brothers working in education in various parts of the world.

In 1847, at the invitation of Bishop (later Cardinal) Wiseman, the Marist Fathers arrived in London to take charge of St Anne’s parish in Spitalfields. Then, on 23 August 1858, St Mungo’s Academy in Glasgow was opened by the Marist Brothers. FitzPatrick points out that in the 1880s the roll here approached 150, and in 1882 a start was made on turning the school into a more extensive establishment.³⁵ Much of the development was overseen by a Frenchman, Brother Ezechiel, who arrived as director of the school in 1892 and continued in that role for the next 17 years, by which time the other schools of the order already noted had been opened. However, as FitzPatrick has pointed out, not only was there no major demand for secondary school education but even at the primary school level there was pressure on children to enter the workforce at a young age, with a unique system developing in Dundee called the ‘half-time’ system, which facilitated those beyond third standard and at least 11 years of age, being able to spend, in alternate weeks, 3 days and 2 days at school and the rest of the week tending the machinery in the mills.³⁶

The second male order to open schools, it will be recalled, was the Jesuits, more correctly known as the Society of Jesus. Established in 1534 by St Ignatius of Loyola, the order became famous for founding schools, colleges, universities and seminaries around the world, and for engagement in intellectual research. The opening of schools in Scotland during the period under consideration in this chapter meant a return of the order to the country; it had had a significant presence there up to its suppression by Rome in 1773.

When St. Aloysius College was opened, boarders were received from all parts of Scotland. McCabe has also noted that it established a grammar school-like tradition, stating:

Three levels of instruction took care of an elementary school for boys aged seven to nine; an intermediate division, for boys aged ten to thirteen, who studied the ordinary branches and some rudiments of algebra and geometry; and advanced classes for boys older than thirteen, who read Greek, including Homer and Xenophon, Euripides and Thucydides; Latin, including Virgil, Horace, and Livy; elementary French, Italian and German; algebra and geometry.³⁷

The opening of a school by the Benedictines also gave a new profile to this particular monastic order which, like the Jesuits, had been prominent in Scotland in pre-Reformation days.

Correctly known as the Order of St. Benedict, the Benedictines owe their origin to St. Benedict of Nursia who opened a monastery at Subiaco in Italy around 529 A.D. The Benedictine monks commenced construction of their monastery building at Fort Augustus in 1876 and completed it in 1880. In one wing of the monastery a school for boys of the upper classes opened with 8–10 pupils. The following years there were 15 boys in attendance being taught by five Benedictine priests, a junior and three lay brothers. The land for the monastery and school was given to the English Benedictines by Lord Lovat, a leading local Catholic aristocrat and landowner,³⁸ and the salaries of the teachers were paid by Lord Bute, a convert to Catholicism. In 1882 the monastery was raised to the status of an abbey and pupil numbers grew to about 60. The school closed after 16 years, but re-opened, again as a boarding school, in 1920.

The final male religious order to open schools in Scotland during the period under consideration was, as already noted, that of the De La Salle Brothers.³⁹ This is the popular title for the religious order of brothers more correctly known as the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. The order was established by a French priest, Jean Baptiste De La Salle, at Reims, in France, in 1680, and has been prominent in educational work of all kinds throughout the world since the eighteenth century. It was established in particular for the education of the children of artisans and the poor.

Initially, the order was active, not so much in the establishment of schools, but in the provision of trained teachers for the existing Catholic schools in France. When the Catholic Encyclopaedia was published in 1913, it picked out two pedagogical innovations of the De La Salle Order for particular note.⁴⁰ The first of these was the employment of the vernacular language in teaching reading. This approach, so common at the present time that considerations of the possibility that other approaches might be undertaken rarely arise, was innovative when introduced by the De La Salle Order, since the practice in schools in France at the time was largely to teach reading by using Latin texts. The second innovation was the use of ‘the simultaneous method’. This contrasted with ‘the common approach’, which was that of one-on-one instruction within the groups of students allocated to individual teachers. It has been concluded that ‘a consequence of this new method of teaching was the dividing up of the children into distinct classes according to their attainments’, and that later on there was ‘formation of sections into classes in which the children were too numerous or too unequal in mental development’.⁴¹

During the French Revolution, the De La Salle Order was suppressed, but it was restored in 1802, and over the next 10 years regrouping took place. Soon there were houses in Italy, Corsica, Belgium, the Island of Bourbon and Cayenne. Within another 50 years, the order had a presence in Canada, the United States, Egypt, Germany, Singapore, Algiers, England, Ireland, Australia, Mauritius, India, the West Indies, the Cape Colony and Australia. Battersby notes that a sudden increase in the number of De La Salle Brothers in some of these countries took place in the early 1900s ‘due principally to an influx of brothers from France following the application in that country of the Waldeck-Rousseau laws of 1901, and of the Combes laws of 1904’.⁴²

Prior to coming to Scotland, the De La Salle Brothers opened their first foundation in England. This was in Clapham in 1855. Ten years later, they extended their presence north to Liverpool in 1866 and to Manchester in 1884. However, as has already been indicated, it was to be another 30 years before they opened a school in Scotland. This opening represented the first presence of the order in the country at any time in history.

Notwithstanding the large Irish proportion of the Catholic population in Scotland, the Irish Christian Brothers did not open a school in the country until as late as 1951.⁴³ This order was established in the city of Waterford, Ireland, in 1802, by a wealthy merchant, Edmund Ignatius Rice, for the education of poor boys.⁴⁴ In taking this direction, he was influenced by the work of the Presentation Sisters for the education of poor girls. Soon the order spread throughout Ireland, opening schools in various major centres of population. The work extended to include not only primary but also secondary and technical education, along with running orphanages and a school for the deaf. From Ireland, the order spread to Liverpool and other parts of England, and by the second half of the nineteenth century communities had been opened in Australia, Newfoundland, Gibraltar, New Zealand and India. Early in the twentieth century, a presence was established in Rome and the United States. Dr Gillis, Bishop of Edinburgh, requested that the order open a school at Leith in 1838, but this did not eventuate. There was a similar outcome following an attempt in 1932 by Archbishop McDonald of St Andrews and Edinburgh to persuade the order to open an industrial school in Edinburgh.⁴⁵

Male Religious Orders’ Involvement in Education Beyond Schooling

Clearly the quality of education on offer in Catholic schools in Scotland in the early part of the period under consideration in this chapter was woefully inadequate. This can be attributed to such matters as irregular attendance and lack of punctuality by boys and girls, the inability of the Catholic community to afford to be able to pay the same level of wages as could the Board schools, a heavier reliance on pupil-teachers than in Board schools and the high level of failure of Catholic pupil teachers at scholarship examinations. The pupil-teacher system had been introduced in 1845 in Scotland, as in England, to provide teachers for the elementary schools. It involved intelligent pupils being selected at 13 years of age to be apprenticed to teaching. They underwent an annual examination for graded personal payment, and after 5 years they were eligible to obtain a scholarship to proceed to a teacher training college.

A few female pupil-teachers were sent to Mount Pleasant College in Liverpool after it was opened by the Sisters of Notre Dame, in 1856, and to Digby Stuart College in Hammersmith, after it was opened by the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1870. The situation did not really start to improve, however, until after the Sisters of Notre Dame opened their teacher training college for females at Dowanhill, in 1895.⁴⁶ Indeed, Cruickshank has noted that within 20 years after the 1872 Act, while the number of Catholic schools inspected had increased from 22 to 176, more than two-thirds of their female teachers and half of their male teachers were untrained.⁴⁷ Also, the matter of poor teaching for both boys and girls was often compounded for Catholic students in the Highlands and Islands throughout all of the period, with teachers often being unable to speak Gaelic and having to rely on pupil-teachers to translate instructions to pupils.

In 1918, only 4 per cent of Scotland’s Catholic schoolteachers were members of religious orders and they were concentrated in Lowland secondary schools. Keeping this context in mind, the proportion of this percentage that related to male teachers would have been smaller if the Marist Brothers had not sought to increase the supply of pupil-teachers amongst their own recruits.⁴⁸ This development was initiated by Br. Alphonsus, who had gained a teacher’s certificate in 1861, having attended St Mary’s Teacher Training College for males in Hammersmith, outside London, which was founded in 1850 by the Catholic Poor School Committee on the initiative of Cardinal Wiseman. The novitiate was then in Beaucamps, and as the number of English-speaking aspirants increased, Br. Alphonsus was transferred there to take charge.

In 1873 a General Chapter decided to combine Marist houses in Great Britain and its colonies into one Province overseen by an assistant general. Under this new structure, Brother Alphonsus brought the novices under his guidance from Beaucamps to Dumfries. It was also decided to replicate at Dumfries the boarding school at Beaucamps at which English-speaking pupils had been accommodated from time to time. The syllabus of the South Kensington Science and Art Department was taught and students were prepared for university entrance examinations. In 1877, the novices were re-located to another site. Attention to their training both as teachers and religious was maintained.

A small number of males, both religious and lay, also attended St. Mary’s Teacher Training College in Hammersmith. It was established on similar lines to that of the De La Salle Brothers at Ploermel, Brittany, where English students were sent between 1848 and 1851. In its first year St Mary’s was run by a French brother. An English principal was appointed the following year. The original idea was that the college would be solely for the training of De La Salle brothers. In 1854, however, in response to a shortage of suitably qualified candidates, the decision was taken to admit lay students, and by 1860 only lay students were attending.

In 1899 St. Mary’s became associated with the Congregation of the Mission (usually known as the Vincentians), who oversaw its transference further away from London, to Strawberry Hill, Twickenham.⁴⁹ The Vincentian order was established in France by Saint Vincent de Paul and five other priests in the early 1600s. Its rules were framed on those of the Jesuits and it was decided that its particular objectives would be the religious instruction of the poor, the training of the clergy and foreign missions. Very soon establishments were set up not only in France but also in Italy (1638), Tunis (1643), Algiers (1646), Ireland (1646 ), Madagascar (1648), Poland (1651) and Turkey (1783). The order contributed to teacher education in Britain until they left St. Mary’s in 1992.

The notion of mission mentioned above did not relate only to ministering to those in far-off lands. Indeed, the concept of mission, as O’Hagan points out, was central to the work of all the religious orders working in Scotland.⁵⁰ From the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland, as with Australia and New Zealand, was considered mission territory, with the work of the orders being defined as concerned with the spiritual, educational and social needs of Catholics as members of a minority community. This prompted some of the teaching orders to engage in social and community work in addition to teaching in schools. Those male orders which contributed in this wider sense to the education of the community, along with those considered as being specifically concerned with schooling, were the Vincentians (in Lanark from 1859), the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (in Leith from 1859), the Passionists (in Glasgow from 1859), the Redemptorists (in Perth from 1867), the Franciscans (in Glasgow from 1868) and the Premonstratensians (in Wigtown from 1889 to 1896, and in Whithorn, Wigtownshire, from 1891 to 1895). FitzPatrick notes that shortly after the Marist brother, John O’Hara, arrived in Glasgow in 1830, he joined the St Vincent de Paul Society and, through it, with others, he set up four evening schools.⁵¹ In a similar vein, O’Hagan notes that when the order opened schools in Glasgow in the 1860s, they also conducted night classes to give secular and religious instruction to working males.⁵² Concurrently, they harnessed the Parish Young Men’s Society to establish lending libraries, brass band groups and drama societies. The orders of priests working in Scotland also had a distinct involvement in Catholic education through conducting religious retreats for pupils in Catholic schools.⁵³

Internationally, the best-known example of the involvement of the male religious in assisting working-class Catholics in Glasgow is that of the establishment of Glasgow Celtic soccer team. This was not run as a school-based team. Rather, it was set up by the Marist Brothers to promote community building among the working-class Catholics of the city, with the intention that it would also generate income towards the provision of free meals for poor school children.⁵⁴ More generally, this was part of the project of the orders aimed at raising the Catholic community out of the ghetto.⁵⁵ The Church also worked in a similar way through the promotion of the Irish Gaelic games of hurling and Gaelic football, thus supporting the work of Ireland’s Gaelic Athletic Association with Irish immigrants in Scotland.⁵⁶

Conclusion

Historically, while a variety of Catholic male religious orders have been involved in work of different types, including nursing, they have been primarily involved in teaching. The most central characteristic of their way of life for most of the period under consideration was that, while they worked in the world, they also had to divorce themselves from the world as much as possible. In other words, those who taught, as with those engaged in providing other services for the faithful, were religious first and foremost, and teaching, while deemed to be a very important role, was always in accord with and, where necessary, took second place to that life.

Against this background, as has been pointed out, male religious were primarily involved at the primary school level in helping Scottish Catholics to maintain their commitment to their religion, and to acquire the fundamentals of Catholic religious doctrine and of an elementary education. To a much lesser though no less important extent, they also helped to elevate the status of Catholics in Scottish society through the provision of Catholic secondary school education for a minority. Much of this activity at both primary and secondary school level was focused on the children and grandchildren of Irish Catholic immigrants. However, amongst the student population were also those of Italian, Lithuanian and Polish Catholic migrants.

In making the points outlined above, it is important not to overemphasise the influence of the teaching religious relative to that of lay teachers since there were not enough nuns, brothers and priests to fill the places of teachers in the Catholic schools of Scotland at the time. Indeed, by 1918 only 4 per cent of the country’s Catholic schoolteachers were members of religious orders. Also, while nearly all Catholic secondary schools were in their hands, the low numbers involved were such that they were not able to provide opportunities for Catholic secondary school education for all who desired to have it. Furthermore, the concentration of teaching religious was in Glasgow and, to a lesser extent, in Paisley, Dundee and Greenock. As a result, the primary schools in rural towns and rural districts throughout the country were staffed primarily by lay women. Related to this, McDermid has pointed to the claim that the Church’s educational efforts largely disregarded the Highlands and Islands, and failed to consider the Catholic population there as ‘a distinct, organic, cultural and linguistic entity’.⁵⁷ In a similar vein, when the Notre Dame training college was established in Glasgow in 1895, Gaelic was not part of the curriculum.

The Catholic male religious orders, like most other Catholics interested in the education of their co-religionists, welcomed the full state funding made available for Catholic schools under the provisions of the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. The role of the orders in education over subsequent decades is one that needs to be taken up in another essay. Here it would be important to deal with the sorts of issues that have been dealt with in the present work. However, it is necessary to highlight that any projects related to it should also focus on a range of issues for which currently we only have silences for that era, as well as for the one that has been considered here. These include those issues which would necessitate investigating the memories of male teaching religious in their role as teachers, the memories of former pupils of ‘regular’ primary and secondary schools and those who attended orphanages and ‘special schools’, as well as the memories of those teaching religious who left the priesthood or the brotherhood. The realities of life in particular teaching orders and in individual houses and monasteries, including the drawing up of, and contestations on, educational policy, also need to be examined. There is also a need to try to capture the experience of the overall life of being a member of a religious teaching order and how communal living was negotiated, including the nature of any tensions that may have existed and how they were dealt with. Special attention in this regard needs to be paid to how lay brothers within teaching orders were seen by their congregation, how they were perceived within individual communities and how they perceived themselves. In a similar vein, there is also a need to investigate how members of different religious teaching orders perceived each other, in particular in relation to those orders that specialised in educating different classes. Addressing such matters would present very challenging issues to do with methodology and sources. However, it is a challenge that would be well worth taking up in order to further our knowledge on the role of male religious in education in Scotland.