{"id":2877,"date":"2006-04-21T08:31:58","date_gmt":"2006-04-21T08:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/poland-in-the-highlands.html"},"modified":"2006-04-21T08:31:58","modified_gmt":"2006-04-21T08:31:58","slug":"poland-in-the-highlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/poland-in-the-highlands.html","title":{"rendered":"Poland in the Highlands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tablet article on Polish immigration to Scotland<\/a>. The Scottish government embarked on a concerted program to recruit workers from Poland a few years ago, and it’s bearing fruit:<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s only standing room left for Mass in Polish at St Francis of Assisi Church in Aberdeen. A few hundred people pack into the pews and dozens more are crammed into the back of the church. Many of them are young, wrapped up tightly in scarves and anoraks, ready to do battle on the way home with an icy wind blowing off the North Sea. <\/p>\n

Polish Chaplain to the Diocese of Aberdeen, Father Jozef Kolasa, is the crowd-puller. He travels widely to say Mass and hear confessions from some of the thousands of Polish people who have come to the north-east and to the Highlands of Scotland in the two years since Poland joined the EU. In their own country unemployment is around 18 per cent and wages are much lower than in the UK \u2013 teachers and social workers earn about \u00a3150 a month. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t like confessing in English so they wait for me to visit. I come here every month, so I say to them \u2018Just don\u2019t sin!\u2019\u201d says Fr Jozef with a smile. He says there are now an estimated 5,000 Polish people in Inverness and up to 6,000 in Aberdeen. And since he has been in Scotland only seven months himself, he understands what it\u2019s like to struggle with a foreign language and the culture shock of a new country and new job. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tablet article on Polish immigration to Scotland. The Scottish government embarked on a concerted program to recruit workers from Poland a few years ago, and it’s bearing fruit: There\u2019s only standing room left for Mass in Polish at St Francis of Assisi Church in Aberdeen. A few hundred people pack into the pews and dozens…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPoland in the Highlands - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/poland-in-the-highlands.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Poland in the Highlands - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tablet article on Polish immigration to Scotland. The Scottish government embarked on a concerted program to recruit workers from Poland a few years ago, and it’s bearing fruit: There\u2019s only standing room left for Mass in Polish at St Francis of Assisi Church in Aberdeen. 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The Scottish government embarked on a concerted program to recruit workers from Poland a few years ago, and it’s bearing fruit: There\u2019s only standing room left for Mass in Polish at St Francis of Assisi Church in Aberdeen. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}