Modern Orkney’s best known Catholic site is the exquisitely decorated “Italian Chapel”, built in 1942 by prisoners of war
(Alamy / Ian Rutherford)
Apr 19 2024
It’s an old argument: is Catholicism properly indigenous to this country, or a relatively recent foreign import? There are certainly places in Britain where the Catholic religion has maintained a tenacious or tenuous presence from medieval until modern times, but others from which it would appear to have been eradicated entirely, pulled up by the roots.
My own roots connect me to a part of Scotland where Catholic faith and practice has felt very much like an exotic and late-flowering transplant. Growing up in the Orkney Islands in the 1970s, I never encountered anything that could be called prejudice or sectarianism. Yet it was not possible to be unaware that my family’s religion was an oddity, and a statistical improbability. Mass-goers at the little Church of Our Lady and St Joseph in Kirkwall were a motley assortment of wanderers from post-war Europe, from mainland Scotland or, like my father, from distant England. The small number of native Orcadians in the congregation included a handful of converts; among them, my mother, and my parents’ friend, the poet George Mackay Brown.
I have been in semi-regretful “exile” from Kirkwall since leaving for university in the early 1980s. But in late middle-age I’ve returned to Orkney – in my mind, at least – to write a history of the islands and their place in the making of modern Britain. The Catholic strand in that story is fragile, but attempting to follow it raises some profound questions about identity and belonging.
“The Orcades are islands almost under the pole, not far from Norway, Denmark and Germany, and perhaps on this account little observant of Catholic faith and law.” James V of Scotland, writing to Paul III in 1541, wanted the Pope to confirm his candidate for the vacant bishopric of Orkney. He thus grossly exaggerated the spiritual desolation of the isles, an outpost of Scandinavian settlement which two generations earlier landed in his grandfather’s possession as the result of a marriage treaty with Denmark. The diocese contained one of Scotland’s finest churches, St Magnus Cathedral, remodelled by James’ bishop-designate, Robert Reid, as a centre of preaching and learning. It housed the shrine of Orkney’s martyred twelfth-century earl, Magnus, a pacifist Viking.
A fifteenth-century papal indulgence describes pilgrims flocking to the shrine from all parts of the kingdom of Norway. Orkney’s 70-odd islands also hosted a profusion of minor chapels: every Norse settler of note built one, and the chapels of the more important landowners in time became parish kirks. From the perspective of Rome, the islands may have been “remote”, but no Orcadian lived far from a sacred locus for the saying of Mass.
Economic and cultural links to now-Lutheran Scandinavia aroused little enthusiasm for change among Orkney’s merchants in the mid-sixteenth century, although one of Bishop Reid’s cathedral priests did decamp to Wittenberg. Rumours of the defection perhaps reached the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, then in Swiss exile. In early 1559, he enthused that “the Gospel Light … has at last arrived at the extreme limits of the Ocean – in fact, at the Orkneys themselves – and so, with the circle of its journey thus completed, it has no further places to which it can extend”.
This was hope and hyperbole but, even in Orkney, the Reformation could not be kept at bay. Reid’s successor, Bishop Adam Bothwell, decided his best bet, politically and perhaps spiritually, was to throw in with John Knox and the Protestant lairds who in 1560 seized control of the Scottish government. Early the following year, Bothwell came to a meeting in Kirkwall of the traditional Norse folkmoot, and urged the islanders to “be content of mutation of religion”. It caused a commotion, and the bishop had to hide in his palace while rioters brought in chaplains to say Mass and celebrate sacraments after the accustomed manner.
Over time, change was imposed and accepted. Bishop Bothwell was reappointed as “superintendent” by the General Assembly, and helped to implement a disciplinary system of presbyteries and parish kirk sessions, presided over by preaching ministers who, almost without exception, came from mainland Scotland. One minister, writing about Orkney in the early 1640s, asserted confidently that “all today are of the Reformed religion”.
The authorities in Edinburgh worried Orkney might be one of those outlying regions where “Jesuits and papists chiefly resort”. Yet the agents of the Counter-Reformation seem to have left the islands largely alone. In the early seventeenth century, Irish Franciscans evangelised heroically in the Western Isles, and secured the lasting allegiance of the lower half of the Outer Hebrides. No equivalent missionary effort stretched to Orkney. A stray Lazarist, labouring in the northern Highlands, wrote in 1657 to St Vincent de Paul about his activities: “I even went to the Orkney Islands.” There was no lasting dividend. In 1737, the General Assembly undertook one of its regular surveys of Scotland’s religious complexion and received a satisfactory report from the presbyteries comprising the Synod of Orkney: “There are no papists within the bounds of this Synod.”
Yet if there were no papists, Orkney’s Presbyterian ministers, through the whole course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, worried about “popery” in the hearts and minds of parishioners. By this, they meant a range of old-fashioned, “superstitious” customs and rituals: charms involving snippets of Latin prayer; reluctance to labour on feast days of saints to whom kirks were dedicated; the lighting of midsummer “Johnsmas” bonfires.
Most of all, the ministers complained about habits of pilgrimage to ruined chapels, undertaken to restore bodily health. Dozens of such ruins littered the lived environment, but the chapels with the greatest aura of sanctity had been built to make access difficult, in what anthropologists would call “liminal” locations – on the boundaries of topographical features and, by implication, of seen and unseen worlds. One was the Norse chapel on the Brough of Birsay, a tidal island on the western Atlantic edge of the Orkney mainland. Another was on the Brough of Deerness.
Pilgrims climbed to the chapel there along a narrow cliff-edge path, an ascent rendered only somewhat less precarious by latter-day provision of a chain handrail. Among Orkney’s most renowned healing shrines was the Chapel of St Tredwell in little Papa Westray. It was one of several chapels constructed on a crannog, an artificial Iron Age island, thrusting into the waters of a loch. On the mainland, a now almost entirely vanished pilgrimage chapel once known as “Our Lady of Grace” sat atop a sliver of land jutting into Harray Loch. I scrambled on to it in the autumn of 2021, to encounter there a palpable sense of hovering between Earth and Heaven as, under a vast dome of cerulean sky, I gazed across the expanse of still water, through a cluster of encircling holms, to the great Neolithic stone circle of Brodgar.
Orcadians frequenting such places doubtless considered themselves good Protestant Christians, but there were things the Kirk and its ministers could help with, and things they couldn’t. By the late 1700s, pilgrimage was said to be in decline, but at St Tredwell’s Chapel and the Brough of Deerness archaeologists have found votive coins dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Institutional Catholicism returned to Orkney in the high Victorian period, amid considerable local suspicion. Visiting priests, operating within the scope of Propaganda Fide’s geographically ambitious “North Pole Mission”, ministered to a small community of Irish immigrants and visiting sailors. The little church in Kirkwall was consecrated in 1877, just prior to the restoration of the Scottish hierarchy, though no priest was routinely resident in the town before the 1920s.
Modern Orkney’s best-known Catholic site, however, is not Our Lady and St Joseph, but the exquisitely decorated “Italian Chapel”, built from conjoined Nissen huts by homesick POWs captured in North Africa in 1942. They were encamped on the tiny island of Lamb Holm, where they laboured on concrete-block barriers to close the eastern approaches to Scapa Flow. The chapel was restored after the war by the lead craftsman, Domenico Chiocchetti, and cultural contacts still continue between Orkney and Chiocchetti’s home town of Moena in the Dolomites. The chapel is a symbol of reconciliation, and ecumenical encounter – between denominations, and between Christians and the secularly-minded. Tourists flock to visit, and Orcadians of all sorts have long taken it to their hearts.
The Italian Chapel is splendidly, almost absurdly, incongruous – a fragment of bright Mediterranean religion on a windswept thumbnail of dour Scottish grassland. But the impulse to seek peace and healing in desolate places lies deep in the cultural fabric of Orkney’s Catholic past. In strangeness, a tug of memory, and a flash of recognition. – The Tablet
