Angus MacDonald (18 September 1844 – 29 April 1900) was a Scottish Roman Catholic priest, who later served as the first Bishop of Argyll and the Isles from 1878 to 1892 and as the third Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh from 1892 to 1900.
The Bishop embraced this role in order to end the absolute power of the Anglo-Scottish landlord class to profit through rackrenting and the Highland Clearances on their estates, and to improve the living standards of the laity during a time when he led "the most impoverished Diocese in Britain.
[1][2] After his ordination to the priesthood on 7 July 1872, he was first stationed at St Patrick's Church, Anderston, Glasgow, then sent to Arisaig, Inverness-shire to help the aged Father William Mackintosh, at whose death he took charge of that parish.
He took up his residence at St Columba's Cathedral in Oban, where he devoted himself to rebuilding the Catholic Church after centuries of religious persecution throughout his new and scattered diocese, which he regularly visited in all seasons and in all kinds of weather.
In May 1883, Bishop MacDonald wrote a letter to the Crofter's Commission from the Oban Rectory he shared with the famous Scottish Gaelic poet Fr.
I believe that a statement of this case will show the existence of a widespread evil, in the dependent and downgrading position in which such tenants are apt to be placed - with no security of tenure, no guarantee against removal at will, and with the fear constantly hanging over them, that if they assert their rights they may be made to suffer for it, without having power to obtain redress...
A further influence was the knowledge that the roots of the Clearances lay in the Classical Liberalism preached in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations during the Scottish Enlightenment and in that ideology's hostility to, "bigotry and superstition"; which were, in 18th- and 19th-century Scotland, routinely used as shorthand for Roman Catholicism.