JACK GLASS: Pastor Jack Glass, who has died of cancer aged 67, was the most public face of Scottish anti-Catholicism for the last 40 years. He was as devout in his commitment to self-publicity and established his name as being more religiously extreme than the Rev Ian Paisley by demonstrating outside a fundamentalist conference in Edinburgh over the precise definition of predestination.
Glass attracted more widespread attention when he led demonstrations against the Pope's visit to Glasgow in 1982, under the slogan "No Antichrist Here". When Leah Tutu, wife of South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, opened a centre in Glasgow Glass interrupted the proceedings with a shout of "Hang Nelson Mandela". The liberal Scottish cleric Ron Ferguson said recently that the outcome of an encounter with Glass was "Protestant tinnitus for at least three days".
Glass was born the only child of working-class parents. At the age of 12, at the end of a Sunday school service, he said that he felt a compulsion that God wanted his life. He studied moral philosophy and English at Glasgow University, and launched the Zion Sovereign Grace Baptist Chapel in the mid-1960s. Over the years, it built up a healthy congregation on the south side of Glasgow, and a few others around Scotland. He occasionally dabbled in politics. At the 1970 general election, he polled 1,200 votes as a Protestant Independent candidate in Glasgow Bridgeton. The following year, he wrenched the Tricolour from Irish Solidarity Campaign demonstrators in Glasgow. In 1982, he stood against Roy Jenkins in the Glasgow Hillhead by-election, attracting 388 votes on a "No Pope Here" ticket.
Billy Connolly was one of his targets in the 1970s, particularly on account of the comedian's brilliant monologue which placed the Last Supper in the Saracen's Head public house in Glasgow. Glass organised protests outside the "blasphemous" concerts. In January, in a BBC documentary on his struggle against cancer, The Devil And Jack Glass, he said his tumour was a personal attack by Satan. He is survived by his wife Peggy, two daughters and a son.
Jack Glass: born 1936; died February 24th, 2004.