BE careful what you wish for: that is the admonition the Catholic Church ought to bear in mind when calling for an apology for historic anti-Catholic discrimination. The origin of this aphorism is uncertain, though its style and timbre have led to it being commonly attributed to old Chinese philosophers. Some of the more excitable members of the Scottish Catholic hierarchy and their most influential advisers might thus regard the adage as a heresy. A rough approximation is to be found in Matthew 7 of the King James Version of the New Testament; it is as evocative as it is poetic. Confucius himself might even have been proud to have written it. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

The Catholic bishops’ request for an apology forms part of their submission to Lord Bracadale’s independent Hate Crime Legislation Review. His Lordship is considering the extent to which current legislation offers the most effective method of dealing with hate crimes. I suppose it was depressingly inevitable that the ultramontane wing of the church in Scotland would get round to demanding one of these types of apologies.

They were important once, as when deployed as part of the South African process of Truth and Reconciliation. In recent years, though, governments have strategically used them as elaborate exercises in virtue signalling, replete with the emotional accoutrements that make some people feel good about themselves. The Catholic Church should not be in the business of seeking historical redress. Along with its sister denominations it still has much to contribute to the development of a modern, liberal and enlightened Scotland but it won’t do so by advancing the victimhood myth.

The Church is concerned with a raft of statistics that have emerged in recent years which appear to suggest Catholics in Scotland encounter a disproportionately high number of “hate crimes”. This though is an unsatisfactory term to describe the lively graffiti that has sprouted on the walls of some Glasgow neighbourhoods. Like many unruly manifestations of anti-social behaviour in these types of communities, its roots lie in something far more profoundly wrong than in the desire of some semi-literate wee scrote to espouse unkind sentiments about Catholics.

A sharp lesson in the recent history of our nation is required for those members of the hierarchy who cling to this sense of historical grievance. In the space of a few decades from the middle of the 19th century onwards, Scotland offered rough succour to tens of thousands of Irish fleeing the effects of the Great Famine in that country, an apocalypse worsened by the anti-Catholic penal laws ruthlessly imposed by the British Government. The overwhelming majority brought with them an old and disdained faith as well as the prospect of a threat to jobs and incomes in a labour market that would be squeezed by the effects of economic depression and the predations of property owners in Scotland’s urban slums. Their fate was similar to that of all immigrant peoples throughout the world when ignorance and fear are whipped up by governments to squash any fledgling signs of working class solidarity.

Yet, while other immigrant peoples throughout Europe continue to suffer violent oppression and genocide within three generations Scotland had reached an understanding with its Catholic Irish underclass. The advent of comprehensive education in 1964 and the opportunities granted by the opening up of our highest centres of learning were enthusiastically grabbed by the descendants of those first waves of Irish immigrants. In a remarkably short space of time the Catholic Irish, from facing widespread discrimination and suspicion, began to play an influential role in shaping Scotland’s destiny.

Certainly, anti-Catholicism was a very real and cruel phenomenon but just as real was the quiet decency of many Protestants who put away their deeply-held resentments and reached out uncertainly to their new neighbours. The construction of Glasgow’s St Andrews Cathedral in the late 19th century was bedevilled by sporadic sectarian attacks but many Protestants joined their Catholic neighbours in volunteering to guard the building as it took shape. It is a small part of the largely unheralded story of basic Christian humanity that in time allowed this benighted Irish community to flourish and to contribute massively to the improvement of Scotland. It destroys the fashionable narrative of atheistic liberalism that hates all manifestations of Christianity in modern Scotland and thus seeks to hold it responsible for a historic and deep-rooted sectarianism that exists largely in their febrile imaginations.

The Hate Crime Legislation Review is not an authentic attempt at rooting out this sort of behaviour from Scotland’s communities. Rather it can be viewed as one in a series of government attempts to impose a top-down solution to something that it doesn’t like the look of. It finds common cause with the discredited Named Persons legislation, the minimum pricing of alcohol and the proposed ban on smacking. It has little to do with sincerely seeking to improve lives and more to disguise its lamentable failures in doing something truly sustainable radical about alleviating social distress in our poorest communities. It is a chimera and a hollow and dishonest thing.

Sadly, the leadership of the Catholic Church in Scotland appears to have bought into this government dishonesty. Instead of choosing to highlight ancient sins it ought instead to acknowledge how the poor Irish Catholic community in Scotland was able to emerge successfully from fear and misunderstanding with the help of an innate and unfussy Scottish Presbyterian rectitude.

Yes, be very careful what you wish for. If the Catholic Church continues to seek an apology as redress for ancient wrongs then what are we to demand of it in return? Shall we scrutinise its continued whitewashing of historic sex abuse or the way it dehumanised and marginalised gay people, especially those brave few of its own members who were forced to suffer in silence even as their own leaders condemned them as “grotesque” and ‘disordered’? And what are we to say of its own historic errors in demonising early Socialism and the Red Clydesiders?

The Catholic hierarchy ought to be more concerned with joining its brothers and sisters in the reformed traditions to resist the tide of atheistic humanism which carries a genuine existential threat to its freedom to worship the Saviour of the World. It should be keeping its gunpowder dry for the slew of liberal hostility it will face over next year’s centenary of the 1918 Education Act that brought forth our Catholic schools.