Church Building As It Was
The following article, by Father Patrick (Paddy) Tierney, a priest of the Archdiocese of Glasgow with a great interest and knowledge of our history, was published in Claves Regni, (St. Peter's College Magazine) Volume 25 no. 97, December 1961. While the story is not about St Mary's, it is intimately linked with our history and shows how the Catholic Community in the West of Scotland was linked in common aspirations and willingness to assist.
In an article in CLAVES REGNI last December, Father John Wilson explained the mechanics of church building in the West of Scotland in modern times. This present story, the story of the building of St. Kieran s, Campbeltown, in 1850, illustrates some of the changes in Catholic life and church administration during the last century.
Why Campbeltown, rather than any of the other church building projects of a century ago? Simply that the story of this particular project has survived. The priest who built St. Kieran s, Rev. Michael Condon, was an inveterate diarist, a sort of clerical Pepys, and his diaries and other papers are still extant. Further, his literary collections have a baroque disregard for the distinction between the significant and the insignificant, and so his memoirs tell us of many of the little things which shed so much light on other papers dealing with the early history of the Church in these parts.
The Rev. Michael Condon, in his later life, became one of the leading churchmen in Glasgow, a founder member of the Finance Board, one of the first canons of the restored Chapter of the Archdiocese, and died in Anderston at the ripe old age of eighty-four, respected by all as a great priest and a great patriot.
But when our story opens Father Condon was a raw recruit of two years standing. He had come from Ireland, from the recently established All Hallows College, to which the Western District owed so much in the middle of the nineteenth century.
His two years on the Mission had been very rich in experience. As an assistant at St. Mary s he had met all the great pioneers of the church in Glasgow and district. Bishop Murdoch made a great impression on him : " He shared everything with his priests, board, confessional, sermons, sick calls. He took his single glass of toddy and joined in whist or spoil-five like another. Christian ‘liberty, fraternity and equality were the order of the day at St. Andrew s. The bishop seemed a simple priest, and every priest spoke and acted as if he were a bishop." (Webmaster's note: Bishop Murdoch is buried in the crypt of Saint Mary's)
His parish priest was probably the most zealous priest Glasgow has ever known, Father Peter Forbes of St. Mary's. Father Forbes was very kind to him and, recognizing the literary aspirations and poetic soul under the rather gauche exterior of his new curate, introduced him to a committee of much older priests who were trying to launch a Catholic Magazine. Father William Gordon, the senior priest at St. Andrew s, he found rather aloof and forbidding, but he envied his erudition and eloquence which had made the sermons at St. Andrew s the rave of the city. (Webmaster's note: Father Forbes, first Parish Priest of Saint Mary's is buried in the crypt of Saint Mary's)
Father Condon had weathered the typhoid epidemic of 1846 and during the terrible cholera epidemic of 1847 he and Bishop Murdoch were the only healthy priests left in Glasgow to hold the fort. On one particular day he and Bishop Murdoch between them had attended to forty-seven sick calls, excluding those in the City Hospital and the Poorhouse. However, at length, he too caught the fever, and our story opens at Balloch where he had gone for a short convalescence.
It was here that the summons came, in the shape of a message from Bishop Murdoch, to proceed immediately to Campbeltown; his belongings would be sent after him from St. Mary's. The thoughts that come to an assistant priest on receiving his first independent charge, only those who have experienced it can tell. But in Father Condon's case such thoughts must have been intensified a hundredfold; for he lived in stirring times.
A decade earlier, when Bishop Murdoch had taken over the reins of the Western District, the prospects of the church in Glasgow had seemed hopeless. From the beginning of the century there had been a steady flow of Catholic immigrants; within the territory of St. Andrew s there must have been thirty to fifty thousand of them— no one was quite sure. To serve these, there was St. Andrew's, the chapel-school in Portugal Street and a staff of about half a dozen priests. What was worse, there seemed no hope of improvement. There was no source from which the bishop could get more priests and the grand church in Clyde Street, which Bishop Cameron had insisted on, seemed to have proved, as Andrew Scott had said it would, a costly blunder. The income was barely sufficient to meet the interest and support the clergy, and the debt, after twenty years, was almost as great as the day the church was opened.
By Father Condon's time the nightmare had passed and hope was dawning. The new Vincentian foundation at Drumcondra had already begun to supply the priests and Bishop Murdoch's weekly Penny Collection had cleared the debt on St. Andrew's and left the way clear for expansion.
To state baldly that the Penny Collection was introduced in 1834 to pay off the debt on St. Andrew's gives no idea of the revolution in the whole mechanics of church administration heralded by that step. A church historian could do worse than use that event to date the beginning of the modern era of the Church, and not merely in this
country.All these things may seem far removed from young Father Condon's appointment to his first parish. But the fact remains, they were heroic times.
Young priests, after a few months apprenticeship in Glasgow, were being sent, not to green fields, but to spots on the map. There they must build, literally from nothing, a parish - or perish. They could expect no help from the bishop. What were euphemistically termed the "Public Funds" of the district were, in fact, a series of bad debts. Any little help to be got from the "Lyonese" money (we were at the receiving end of the A.P.F. in those days) was only to be expected by the successful and could not be squandered in prolonging the work of a failure. Nor would the people necessarily receive a new priest with open arms. Many, particularly among earlier immigrants, had ceased to practise; many more, without priests for many years, had become dispirited and indifferent in the horrible moral squalor of the industrial revolution; and even the fervent were inclined to look askance at this new idea of continuous collection. That most of the older parishes of the Province of Glasgow were built up under these conditions gives us the measure of these pioneer priests.
Of course, there were failures. Some, finding themselves ill-fitted to pioneering work, went elsewhere. After all, they had no canonical tie with the district, and other parts of the world, particularly America and the colonies, were equally in need of priests. Other priests, good in every way, simply lacked the character of the true pioneer. History will never remember them, though they stuck to their posts, year after year, often with little beyond their £8 annually from the Quota Fund living in the cheapest lodgings in the most abject poverty - until the inevitable happened and they got into debt. The bishop could not help them and the law showed no mercy to debtors. Though their little debts might have been contracted in renting a place to say Mass, their few personal effects were sold off at a public auction and they left the district in disgrace, to try and rebuild their lives elsewhere.
However, it was with no thought of possible failure that Father Condon arrived at Campbeltown. The post was no plum, even for a curate of two years standing, but at least he had an established mission founded by one of the oldest priests of the Western District, Father James Cattenach. After the latter's death in 1836, Bishop Murdoch who certainly had to be a realist, had managed to keep it supplied using it as a haven for priests unsuited to more normal mission work until such time as they found another place outside the District.
The story of how Father Condon's predecessor had qualified for the appointment is worth telling, as an illustration of the kind of situation which Bishop Murdoch had to deal with. A young priest he had preached a patriotic sermon in St. Mary's denouncing government. Unfortunately, many in the congregation were soldiers from the neighbouring infantry barracks and the officers threatened to forbid the Catholic soldiers to attend Mass in future, unless they received a guarantee from Bishop Murdoch that they would not be exposed to seditious talk from the pulpit.
The chapel house, a mere cottage, had been made into two stories each with ceilings a bare seven feet high. Half the ground floor let to one tenant and two others occupied the top floor. All three were supposed to pay rent to the priest but seldom did. The front garden had been converted into a byre, housing a cow and several pigs. The little barn adjoining used as a chapel, was in perfect keeping with the chapel house.
Father Condon's first decision was to build a new and fitting church. Everyone else semed to be doing so and, besides, there actually was a building fund, inaugurated about fifteen years before by old Father Cattenach, consisting of £50 in the hands of the chapel committee. Father Cattenach had also made a collecting tour in Ireland but had made the mistake of putting his money for safe-keeping into the care of a respectable Catholic bookseller who unfortunately went bankrupt. Father Cattenach, arriving at the end of a long queue of creditors, had to be content with a large quantity of devotional books in French in place of the collection money.
The £50 in the hands of the chapel committee was a thorn in the side of Bishop Murdoch. For many years they had refused to hand it over to his care. But Father Condon's first public meeting with the chapel committee, in spite of causing an unfortunate division in the committee or possibly because of that, secured that the £50 was sent to the bishop, together with a resolution that a new church should be built.
Bishop Murdoch, arriving for confirmation a few months later, had an opportunity to see things at first hand. It is easy to divine what must have been his thoughts on that occasion. He had obviously intended Father Condon's appointment as a mere stop-gap until he got the usual sort of man for the post. In his eyes, this zealous young man was too valuable to be tied to a small established mission when there were so many places where just such a man was needed. However, Campbeltown certainly needed a new church, so Bishop Murdoch gave formal approval to the resolution, with the warning that they could expect no money from him.
The ordinary method of financing such a project in those days was the subscription list, so Father Condon immediately started collecting in his own mission and the neighbouring one at Greenock. During the next three months, the subscriptions came in until the collection closed with £45 realized. If the amount seems small for four hundred parishioners, we must remember their desperate poverty; in actual fact more than half the amount came from two individuals.
Counting the original £50, he now had £95, and he realized that he would need at least £600. The next step then, according to the methods of the times, was to take the subscription list further afield, and to do so required a letter from the bishop attesting the authenticity of the collection; bogus collections were the scourge of the day. Father Condon accordingly paid an official visit to Bishop Murdoch at Glasgow. Here he received a pleasant surprise for the bishop promised him £300: £250 from the A.P.F. and £50 from a donation of £500 received by him from Mr. Monteith of Carstairs.
So, with a much lighter heart, Father Condon made his plans to collect in every mission in Scotland from Dundee in the north to Stranraer in the south. In all, he made fourteen collecting tours in Scotland in the first year, Glasgow being left for a special campaign in the following year. He would normally leave his parish on the Monday and arrive back on the Saturday, though in the more distant tours, where rail fares were a consideration, his absence might last for two or three weeks.
The routine was quite well established. The first call was on the priest of the place. In those days they did not subscribe to the adage "clericus clericum non decimat" and the first name on the list would be the local priest, 10/- or £1. If the priest was a personal friend he might get free board, but usually he put up at a cheap hotel. The local priest might also suggest a suitable "guide"; without such a person, the collection would be doomed to failure. Accompanied and advised by the "guide," he would visit the one or two Catholics of substance: 1/- or 2 /6d. Then a call on all the Catholics of the local factory and, perhaps, promises of 1d. to 6d. on pay-day. He had to depend on the "guide" to be at the factory on pay-day to redeem these promises. A good "guide" could get about two-thirds of the promises fulfilled.
His fourteen tours of the first year brought in about £125 which, with the Campbeltown subscriptions and the bishop's promised help, brought the total to £520, so he felt justified in contacting an architect and inviting tenders. The price, £738 plus professional fees, was more than he had expected. However, he still had Glasgow in which to collect so, on his promise that every penny of the debt would be paid, the bishop's sanction for the building was obtained.
Meanwhile, he started on Glasgow, where he had every advantage. He knew his own way about and he had the wonderful help of Father Forbes. The most important help the latter gave him was the information that Fathers Kenna and Galletti were also planning collecting campaigns for the new churches at Maryhill and Pollokshaws. So he was able to get his oar in first. The four missions in the city gave him their pulpits to inaugurate his campaign and allowed his subscription list at the church doors as the congregations were leaving. Then there was the follow-up, entailing visits to shops, canvassing workers in factories, etc. The whole work spread over about three months.In Campbeltown, too, he had much to occupy his energies. The die had been cast and the old church demolished. This, of course, meant that the ordinary income of the mission, derived mainly from seat rents, ceased. The work on the new church proceeded quite quickly. The mason work was straightforward, but the wright work required constant supervision by the priest to ensure a good building. Father Condon knew the time-honoured formula; indeed the priests of that generation seemed to learn it by rote : " (insist that) the ‘dooks go into the solid stone and not between the courses, that the straps are strong and the laths not overlong, that the plaster has its quantum of hair, that the yellow pine is sound, the sarking close, and the slates ‘Ballachulish'."
Of course, at times, he was bested. A clerk of works appeared on the scene, sent, as he said, by Bishop Murdoch. Though he seldom even visited the site, Father Condon had already meekly paid him £25 in fees when a chance conversation with the bishop revealed that he knew nothing about him.
But as the work proceeded, the day of reckoning drew nearer. his Glasgow campaign had netted another £125, but he would still need another £200, so the subscription list would have to be taken further afield. He approached Bishop Murdoch again with a request for leave of absence to collect in Ireland. It was a usual request. At that time as many as a quarter of the priests might be on leave of absence collecting. Luckily, Bishop Murdoch had someone on hand to act as substitute. The bishop also told him, privately, that if his substitute settled down happily he would continue as his successor, so he was to "work hard at his collection, pay off all his debt and return quickly to the Mission." It seems strange to our modern ideas, but in those days there was not a hard and fast division between personal and mission debts, just as there was no harsh distinction between personal and mission income.
In all, Father Condon was away over six months, collecting throughout the north of Ireland and the area around Dublin. About ten years earlier, Father Forbes of St. Mary s had raised £3,000 in such a tour; but he was Father Forbes, and the poor had been much fished by the time Father Condon arrived at the scene.
The first two months were very hard and the amount of the collection was barely sufficient to meet his expenses, board and fares being chargeable against the collection. The people were poor. He knew nobody. And the local priests would seldom give any help. Naturally enough, they resented Glasgow priests collecting there, as much as the priests at home objected to Irish priests collecting in Glasgow.
He was not the only one who was finding things difficult. He met two of his confreres from the Western District who had been similarly engaged, one for six months and the other for nearly a year. The little they had collected had gone on their keep and both were simply postponing the shame of returning home and admitting defeat.
However, gradually he began to learn and his incomings outstripped his outgoings. He thought he would try Liverpool, but a letter from Bishop Murdoch warned him that it was even worse there. So, reluctantly, he set off for Dublin, the mecca of collectors. It could be a gold mine for one who "knew people," but poor Father Condon had no illusions about his chances.
He found the Dubliners most hospitable. He could get any amount of invitations to supper but, unfortunately, no subscriptions. Then his luck broke and he met a natural "guide" who "knew people," a Mr. Murphy. Murphy had a passion for playing cards and at times Father Condon had to humour him by playing to the small hours and losing cheerfully. He suffered agonies of conscience as to whether the several small sums which he had lost at cards could be reckoned a legitimate expense of the collection.
In Campbeltown, things had not stood still. The new building was completed and a date fixed for the opening: 24th February, 1850. Bishop Murdoch had written telling him of the proposed opening:
"Poor Campbeltown cannot afford a High Mass" (shades of the days of hired choirs and full orchestras) "so we will just have a Low Mass and I will try to give a good sermon." This letter had not been forwarded to him, and the first news Father Condon received of the opening was a letter, post factum, from Bishop Smith, the coadjutor, with the laconic comment: "Bishop Murdoch gave a large sermon, with small results." This news would increase Father Condon's anxiety, since the collection at the opening formed part of the building fund.With the church opened, Father Condon in Dublin was on tenterhooks to know the final price of the building, particularly the professional fees, and how much interest the building fund had earned while in the bishop s keeping. Two months later he received the final figure and realized that his exile would soon be at an end. Another fortnight's intensive collecting, in which Mr. Murphy excelled himself, and the subscription list was finally closed, with exactly the £218 required to pay the remainder of the bill for the church and his boat fare to Glasgow.
Whatever patriotic thoughts were in his mind as he left his native land (he wrote a poem for the occasion), they were soon driven out by more material cares for, when he re-checked his accounts, he found he was still £3 15/- short. So when he landed at the Broomielaw, before going to see Bishop Murdoch at St. Andrew's, he slipped into a pawnshop, popped in his prized gold watch and appendages, given to him by the St. Mary's parishioners for his devotion during the cholera epidemic, and added his own name to the end of the subscription list.
The following day he went to Campbeltown to collect his belongings, in order to bring them to his new mission at Hamilton.
In the morning, he had the joy of saying Mass in the new church at Campbeltown. " Aedificavi ecclesiam meam."
As a postscript, to show that Father Condon was not a lone pioneer: when he left Glasgow to start collecting in Ireland, there were four parishes in the city; when he returned six months later, there were eight.
PATRICK TIERNEY.