A researcher at the University of Glasgow has called on Scottish Catholics to share their experiences of living with their faith in Scotland.
Matthew Thompson is working towards an MLitt in history on “Experiences, Attitudes and Reactions of Catholics living in Scotland” from the 1950s to the 1980s. He said that his interest came from his own Catholic background and the recognition that while there were similar studies of Catholic social attitudes and experiences in Ireland and England there was a shortage of such work on the Scottish experience, despite recent advances by Professor Sir Tom Devine and others.
Among the specific changes Thompson identified was the opening of a second tertiary educational institution in Glasgow – Strathclyde University – in 1964.
Its newly granted status “presented greater opportunity for people from more Catholic areas to attend university” and he was interested in aspects of this, such as “how the culture at university may have differed from their home communities”.