Wielding a bottle as a weapon, a man attacked Father Jamie McMorrin, assistant priest at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, while the priest was praying in a pew. The priest “managed to fend him off with a chair before the attacker ran out of the Cathedral,” the archdiocese said in a statement.

“This was terrible, frightening and totally unacceptable,” said John Swinney, Scotland’s second-leading official.