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Poles apart: the new Presbyterian pulpit war has begun

The island faiths have always seemed to me, at distant consideration, a fairly detached bunch, roused only by the threat of Sunday ferry sailings or the sight of an untethered child’s swing on the Sabbath, writes Allan Brown. Okay, they don’t like anything much unless it involves walking slowly to church in a hat formerly owned by their great-grandfather, but these austere elaborations of the Calvinist reform tradition — the Free Church, the Free Church (Continuing) and the Free Presbyterian Church — always seemed too remote, too isolationist, to care about the world beyond Benbecula.

But there’s one thing that does rouse their Presbyterian passions. They’ve really got it in for the sons of St Peter. They are implacably set against Catholicism. One might imagine that the recent influx of Polish people of that persuasion might seem something of a cross for them to bear, were they in the business of bearing crosses, that is.

In fact, the Poles are catnip to the Protestant proselytiser. They’re still — it is assumed — tentative in their adopted nation, vulnerable, looking for hospitality and succour, removed from the wellsprings of their faith. The Rev John MacLeod, assembly clerk of the Free Church (Continuing), says they are a natural constituency.

Full story at the Sunday Times.