A Labour Member of the Scottish parliament has called on Holyrood to recognise the growing problem of anti-Catholicism in Scotland follows a government report showing that Catholics are the victims of 57 per cent of all religiously aggravated offences reported in the country.

Elaine Smith MSP raised the subject in the Scottish Parliament last week, following an incident in which a church near Glasgow was vandalised, the Catholic Herald reported.

Smith pointed out that Catholics are now the victims of more hate crime than all other religious groups in Scotland combined.

On top of this, the trend is growing, with a 14 per cent increase in Catholics being targeted in one year.

Smith called on the SNP Government to 'go out to the Catholic population and listen to their concerns', adding that anti-Catholicism does not hold the same place in the public debate as Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Responding on behalf of the Scottish government, the SNP's Annabelle Ewing stressed the existing commitment to tackle such crimes, saying that £13million had been invested since 2012 to tackle sectarianism.

But Smith then quoted archbishop Philip Tartaglia of Glasgow, who has said: 'Our problem is not so much sectarianism but anti-Catholicism.'

The Catholic Herald pointed out that last year a Catholic Church official made a similar warning. Anthony Horan, director of the bishops' Catholic Parliamentary Office, told a committee at the Scottish parliament: 'My overriding concern is the culture of fear that runs right through society and which makes people feel at best uncomfortable and at worst totally frightened to be open about their faith.'

In the 2015 Social Attitudes Survey, 15 per cent of Scots said they were Catholic and 35 per cent that they belonged to the Church of Scotland, while slightly more than half of Scots said that they were not religious at all.