St Michael's Roman Catholic Church, Linlithgow

St Michael's Roman Catholic Church in Linlithgow, West Lothian, stands at the east end of the historic royal burgh near the Low Port, beside the banks of Linlithgow Loch and within sight of Linlithgow Palace, the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots. It is a church with a double inheritance: a Gothic Revival building of the 1880s designed by Peter Paul Pugin, and a Catholic story in Linlithgow that reaches back to the Middle Ages, was extinguished at the Reformation, and was reborn three centuries later by Irish immigrant families and a priest who had trained as a stonemason. It holds one distinction shared by no other church in Scotland: it was raised as a memorial to Mary Queen of Scots.

The deep roots lie in the town's medieval mother church. St Michael has been associated with Linlithgow since at least the twelfth century: a royal charter of 1138 granted the church "with its chapels and lands, and all other rights belonging thereto", wording that shows St Michael's of Linlithgow was already a foundation of considerable size and influence. In 1242 David de Bernham, Bishop of St Andrews, formally dedicated the great parish church of St Michael that still stands on its mound beside Linlithgow Palace — long known as a mother church, and intimately bound to the Stewart kings. Mary Queen of Scots was born in the palace at the end of 1542 and baptised in St Michael's, and the church's hierarchy exerted real influence over Scottish life in the last pre-Reformation generations.

The sixteenth century brought that world down. Moderate voices within the church — among them the courageous Linlithgow priest Ninian Winzet — pressed for internal reform of genuine corruption while resisting the militants; but the militants prevailed, and John Knox's "rascally multitude" was among those who desecrated St Michael's of Linlithgow. Catholic worship in the town ended in 1561, when Patrick Frenche, instituted only two years earlier, was replaced by the Protestant minister Patrick Kinloquhy. Frenche is thought to have fled the country with Winzet, who lamented being "expelled, banished, and shut out of my kindly toun of Linlithgow and my tender friends". After Parliament's act of 1567 criminalised the saying or hearing of Mass, organised Catholic life in Linlithgow effectively vanished from the record; travelling priests must have passed through, but for nearly three hundred years the faithful left almost no trace.

The revival came from across the Irish Sea. In the mid-nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the Irish famine, large numbers of Irish Catholics came to Scotland; many worked the farms around the royal burgh in spring and summer, and the rise of the West Lothian shale oil industry then turned a seasonal workforce into a permanent Catholic population. Petitioning the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, these families secured Linlithgow's first resident priest in some three hundred years. Father Andrew Smith took up their cause and obtained permission for Sunday Mass in Spence's Tannery, in one of the riggs off the High Street; the congregation soon moved to the Baird Hall, but a hired hall was never going to satisfy people who wanted a church of their own.

What they lacked in money they made up in providence: the next appointment, Father John M. Murphy, had trained as a stonemason before his call to the priesthood. Within a year of arriving he advertised in the Glasgow Observer a grand bazaar "to raise funds for the erection of a church dedicated to Queen Mary", and then, with the willing labour of the young men of the parish, set about building the church himself. The Archbishop laid the foundation stone on 14 June 1887 — the ceremonial trowel survives in the archives, inscribed to "His Grace Archbishop Smith… on the occasion of his laying the foundation stone of the Mary Queen of Scots Memorial Church". On that day the parish, until then dedicated to St Joseph, took the name of St Michael — recovering the town's ancient patron — while the church remained, uniquely in Scotland, a memorial to Mary Queen of Scots. Such was the congregation's eagerness that Mass was first celebrated in the partially completed building on St Valentine's Day 1888, with the unfinished portions simply bricked up until funds allowed; the church was officially dedicated in 1893. The building is the work of Peter Paul Pugin of Pugin & Pugin, the celebrated Victorian dynasty of Catholic church architects, and is designed in the Gothic Revival style. Under Father Murphy's successor, Father Easson, the building programme continued: plans were submitted to double the size of the church at a cost of £1,100, and in June 1894 the Archbishop celebrated a Pontifical High Mass there.

The parish wasted no time founding a school. St Joseph's School — keeping the parish's old dedication — opened on 1 July 1889, its first building completed in the church grounds in 1892. Education had begun even earlier in the Baird Hall under the Sisters of Mercy, with children walking in daily from villages around Linlithgow; in the 1880s two teachers taught a hundred and fifty pupils. The work was hard: children were often needed on the farms, and the school had to close more than once for outbreaks of infectious disease. The Education (Scotland) Act of 1918 brought St Joseph's, like other Catholic schools, into the state system, and the school flourished through the twentieth century — bursting at the seams by 1949, sending its junior secondary pupils to Bo'ness from 1955 and later to St Mary's Bathgate and St Kentigern's Blackburn, and moving into its present building on Preston Road in the early 1960s, where it thrives today in close partnership between teachers, parents and the parish.

The twentieth century tested the parish sorely. The Great War took its men, and the Depression killed the demand for shale oil on which so many families depended, leaving many with little or no earnings. Yet the milestones kept coming: the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation stone was celebrated in 1938, and the high altar was consecrated in 1946. The dominant figure of the century was Father Michael McGovern, parish priest from 1940 for forty years, whose energy gave the parish its tennis courts, the Queen Margaret Hall, and — opened in 1942 from a small two-bedroomed cottage — the Laetare International Youth Centre. During the war the Laetare grounds housed Polish soldiers, who built a shrine to the Blessed Virgin that still stands in the church grounds, a moving memorial of wartime Linlithgow. As the town grew into a commuter base for Edinburgh and Glasgow and new industries came to West Lothian, the congregation grew with it. The parish was later served by Canon Hugh Gordon and by Father James Ferrari, under whom the church celebrated its centenary; Father Pat Boylan followed, succeeded in June 2009 by Father Paul Kelly.

Today St Michael's remains an active Catholic parish within the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, worshipping in Pugin's church on Blackness Road beside the loch. Its setting could hardly carry more history: a few minutes' walk brings the visitor to Linlithgow Palace and to the medieval St Michael's Parish Church — now a burgh church of the Church of Scotland — where the story began. Between the mother church on the mound and the memorial church by the Low Port lies the whole extraordinary arc of Catholic Linlithgow: royal charters and a queen's baptism, reformers and exiles, three silent centuries, Irish navvies and shale miners, a stonemason-priest building with his own hands, Polish soldiers raising a shrine, and a living parish still keeping the name of St Michael over the town.