Act of reparation at Carfin Grotto

On Sunday 6 September 1936 thousands of members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians arrived at the Carfin Catholic Grotto near Motherwell, the heart of Scotland’s steel industry. The Carfin shrine had been created in the early 1920s by Father Thomas Taylor (inspired by a visit to Lourdes) as a centre for Catholic devotion and pilgrimage. The construction had been carried out by unemployed local coal miners. The Hibernians (a fraternal order for Irish Catholics) made annual processions to Carfin but this occasion was somewhat different: in the words of the Provincial Secretary it was a special act of reparation “to our Lord for the anti-Christian atrocities heaped upon Him in Spain by the atheistic mobs”.  

The day began with communion at parish churches, after which nine special trains and a fleet of omnibuses carried members of the order and their supporters from across Glasgow and central Scotland to Carfin. The procession, ten-deep behind a stark black and white banner carried by senior members in full regalia, took an hour and a half to pass the gates to the Grotto. Newspaper reports claimed that as many as 50-60,000 (members and supporters) attended the event. Although the numbers cannot be verified, contemporaries were aware that something unprecedented had occurred. According to one it was one of the largest Hibernian demonstrations held outside of Ireland, while according to another it was the greatest procession “ever known” at Carfin.  

Within the Grotto there was an address by Fr Daniels of Bearsden, who had trained for the priesthood in Spain, and a telegram was sent to the Pope. Daniels was keen to make the point that they had come not as a “political party” but to pray for their co-religionists in Spain who were subjected to a “diabolical” assault on religion, akin to that in the Soviet Union. Other comments showed how the attacks on churches and priests struck a particular chord with this audience. For instance, Fr Daniels recalled the debt that Catholics in Ireland, Scotland and England owed to Spain for educating priests across three centuries: now the roles were reversed and Ireland was “on the crest of the wave…in the light or truth and freedom” while Spain languished “in the trough…in the dungeon of darkness”. 

This act of reparation was an impressive mobilisation of mainly working-class Catholic sentiment and reminds us that the impact of the Spanish Civil War was by no means limited to the supporters of the Republic. The attacks on the Catholic church, which were extensively – often luridly – reported in the Catholic press were not only shocking in their own right but also evoked memories of the persecution of Catholics in Britain and Ireland in earlier centuries. However, it is also striking that a mobilisation of this scale was not repeated during the Civil War, while the support for the Republic grew and intensified. Ultimately it was pro-Republican activism that came to be remembered while these Catholic manifestations were largely forgotten.