12 February 2014, Starts: 17:15

 The Centre for History is pleased to announce its next public lecture. Darren Tierney (UHI) will deliver a talk on February 12th 2014 at 5.15 pm in the Dornoch Room, Burghfield House, Dornoch. The lecture is entitled: "I was in prison and you came to see me": the Catholic Church and the Scottish prison system, 1845-c. 1890'

Organised by UHI Centre for History. Further details from Kirsty Reid (kirsty.reid@uhi.ac.uk)

Description:

Between 1800 and 1880, owing primarily to Irish migration, the number of Catholics in Scotland increased from 30,000 to some 330,000. As the Catholic population increased so too did the number of Catholics in Scottish prisons, often disproportionately so. The Church, for its part, was conscious of the need to serve its ‘fallen’ sons and daughters, believing as it did that religion had the power to rehabilitate. It is against this backdrop that this paper will chart the development of the Scottish Catholic prison mission between 1845 and c. 1890. In the early years this mission was nothing more than occasional clerical visits to prisons at the request of Catholic inmates, but by 1890 salaried chaplains had been appointed to all the major Scottish prisons, women religious were making regular visits to females inmates and assistance was being provided to prisoners on the ‘outside’

The prison mission represents an important but overlooked aspect of the nineteenth-century Scottish Catholic Church. It did not develop in isolation or independently from wider developments in either the Church itself or Scottish society and, as such, the value of this paper lies not only in the telling of an as of yet untold story, but also in bringing to light important interactions between the Church, state and broader society.