Polish migration benefits Scottish Church

A?huge increase in the number of Polish migrants to Scotland has delivered a boost to the Catholic Church.

A report by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford found a twentyfold increase in the number of Poles moving to Scotland from 2001 to 2011. A senior media analyst at the observatory, Robert McNeil, said that censuses in Scotland for the same period showed that Roman Catholicism has remained at a constant level while other Churches have declined.

The report said that an estimated 56,000 people born in Poland were living in Scotland in 2012, making Poles the country’s largest immigrant group. However, Andrew Kocha of the Polish Family Support Centre in Edinburgh suggested the numbers had peaked and that Scotland was becoming less attractive to Polish people. “We have had a couple of people come to us and say, if we don’t find work soon we will have to go home. So I think numbers will decrease because of the lack of jobs,” he said.

Overall, the study reported that migration to Scotland is growing more rapidly than in the rest of the UK. It revealed that while the proportion of Scottish residents born outside the United Kingdom remains small – almost half that of England and Wales – the actual number had grown by 93 per cent in the decade from 2001 to 2011. The equivalent figure for England is 61 per cent, for Northern Ireland 72 per cent and Wales 82 per cent.

Edinburgh is numerically the largest centre for immigrants with more than 73,000 ­residents born outside Scotland in 2012. The city of Aberdeen has the highest proportion of migrants, with 33,000 people, making them 15 per cent of the population. Glasgow has 86,000 migrants.

A report by an independent group, Christian Research, published in 2008 found that in 2005 the number of Catholics attending Mass outnumbered the numbers attending Church of Scotland services. It attributed the change to Polish Catholic migrants who, it said, were boosting church attendance.