GLASGOW, ARCHDIOCESE OF. – Archdiocese and province in the southwest of Scotland; currently comprises the city and county of Dumbarton. The archdiocese has an area of 250 sq. km.; it has 1,250,000 inhabitants, of whom 290,400 are Catholics, with 60 parishes, 240 diocesan priests and 58 regular clergy, one seminary, 13 male religious communities and 22 female (1949).
The see was founded about 543 by St. Kentigern (or Mungo), who established there a Christian community of Britons, Scots and Picts. Owing to racial struggles for supremacy and the confusion of the times, there was no regular succession of bishops until the time of St. David, King of Scotland, who restored the see of Glasgow in 1115. From then until 1560 there were 24 bishops, among whom William Turnbull, who in 1450 obtained from Pope Nicholas V the charter for the foundation of the University of Glasgow, of which the first Catholic rector was appointed in 1931 after the episode of the “Reformation.” In 1492 Pope Innocent VIII raised the see to the rank of metropolitan with the suffragan sees of Argyll, Dunblane, Dunkeld and Galloway. The Catholic religion was prohibited by the Scottish Parliament in 1560, and the see of Glasgow remained vacant from 1603 until the restoration of the hierarchy on 4 March 1878, when Glasgow was re-established as an archiepiscopal see, directly dependent on the Holy See (“special daughter of the Roman Church”), but without suffragans. The industrial development of western Scotland in the 19th century greatly increased the importance of Glasgow, which, through the influx of Catholics from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, became numerically the largest diocese in Scotland. Pope Pius XII, with his apostolic constitution *Dominici gregis* of 25 May 1947, divided the archdiocese, and Glasgow became an ecclesiastical province; part of the archdiocese was added to Galloway, while other parts were erected into the new dioceses of Motherwell and Paisley, suffragans of Glasgow. The old cathedral of St. Mungo, begun in the 12th century and completed in the 15th, was used as a Presbyterian church; the present Catholic cathedral is dedicated to St. Andrew.