A papal visit would be another blow to Scottish anti-Catholicism

You wait 2,000 years for a papal visit and three come along almost at once. Reports in the Scottish press suggest that Pope Francis would like to say Holy Mass while in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit in November. It would mark the third time a sitting pope has visited Scotland and celebrated Mass there. Saint John Paul II was the first to come, in 1982, and led an estimated 300,000 in worship at Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park, then in 2010 his apostolic successor Benedict XVI gave an open-air Mass in the same park to a crowd of 70,000. Both events were seen as successes, attracting interest from non-Catholics and prompting reams of favourable media coverage.

This was especially significant in a country where open hostility towards and pervasive discrimination against Catholics was a living memory, and, in the case of 1982, more than that. William Wolfe, president of the SNP, objected