Notes from the North 5 2025

 Every church in Edinburgh has a story to tell. I have already written about St Mary’s Cathedral on Palmerston Place, Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal church on Jeffrey Street and Saint Giles on the Royal Mile but until last month I had never looked inside Saint Patrick’s Church on the Cowgate although I pass it every time I walk back home across the park. 

 It stands about halfway down the High Street, an imposing façade complete with a triumphal arch and steeple. Built initially as an Episcopalian chapel, it was sold in the early 19^th century to the Presbyterian Relief Church which was founded during what is known as the Second Secession (from the Church of Scotland). The history of the various Secessions in Presbyterian Scotland – and there were lots - is a complicated topic but in the case of the Presbyterian Relief Church it was triggered by a recurring dispute about patronage and who had the power to appoint ministers. The dissenters stood for the rights of local parishioners to choose their minister rather than the gentry and powerful landowners. Or, to use the words of Ebenezer Erskine an earlier secessionist minister, talking about the disputed Patronage Act, 

 

There is no warrant from the word of God to confer the spiritual privileges of His house upon the rich beyond the poor; whereas by this Act the man with the gold ring and gay clothing is preferred unto the man with the vile raiment and poor attire

 

Needless to say, in this case as in all the others, it was only ever a dispute about which men should be in charge.

 

Some forty years after that turbulent period the church was bought by Bishop James Gillis and renamed Saint Patrick’s to serve as a local parish for the growing Irish community in the Cowgate. It is still a Catholic parish although the evidence of Irish worshippers is now mostly confined to the shamrocks in the plasterwork over the apse. 

 

Besides these changes of owners, Saint Patrick’s has other claims to fame. It is where the mortal remains of the Venerable Margaret Sinclair are now kept and where each September pilgrims gather to celebrate her life and pray for her beatification.

 She was born in 1900, one of nine children raised in poverty in the Cowgate and she died of tuberculosis in London 1925.  By that date she had become a nun, having entered a convent and taken the name of Mary of the Five Wounds. As her website explains, ‘Margaret belongs to the modern world... Her youthful face is captured on camera, not with Renaissance oils or Byzantine iconography. She is one of us, a very ordinary girl.’ 

 

The emphasis on her ordinariness fits neatly with the second interesting aspect of this church, namely that it is the home of the Edinburgh Oratory in Formation, currently a group of three priests who serve the parish and are actively pursuing the formation of the Edinburgh Oratory. This will require the formal approval of the Confederation of the Oratory in Rome at which point Edinburgh will finally have a fully instituted Oratorian Congregation. 

 

The original Oratory was founded by Saint Philip Neri, whose motto ‘amare nesciri’ – ‘love to be unknown’ – remains a key guiding principle of the Oratory. Oratorians live humbly and never seek or take high office within the Church. 

Philip Neri was born in 1515 in Florence but is best known for his work in Rome with the poor and homeless. The defining features of the Oratory he first set up in San Girolamo church have changed very little over the centuries. An Oratory remains a community of secular priests living together in charity without binding themselves by vows. Each member, known as a Father, retains ownership of his personal property and each Congregation is totally independent so that there is no option for a Father to move from one community to another as may happen in other religious orders. Getting on together is central to the life of the community so the newcomer must prove over time that he can do it. Within each house the Fathers make their own decisions by a majority vote in a community meeting, headed by a community-elected Provost who holds the office for a period of 3 years. The simplicity of the basic concepts of independence, stability (remaining permanently in the same community) and the absence of vows hark back to the early Christian period when groupings of that type were widespread in northern Europe. All in all it stands in uplifting contrast with the muscular exclusive Christianity we hear so much about these days. 

 

It is good to see that Mosab Abu Toha, one of whose poems I quoted in my March post, has been awarded this year’s Pulitzer prize for Commentary for, as the judges said, ‘his essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.’ As Toha himself says, there’s precious little celebrate while starvation worsens and settlers continue their brutalities on the West Bank. The Venerable Margaret, the only woman to feature in this post, would probably disagree.  ‘Dinna gie in!’ was her motto, short and to the point.