GLASGOW, ARCHDIOCESE of. — Archdiocese and province in south-western Scotland; it 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 299,400 are Catholics, with 60 parishes, 240 diocesan priests and 58 religious priests, one seminary, 13 male and 22 female religious communities (1949).
The see was founded around 543 by St Kentigern (or Mungo), who established there a Christian community of Britons, Scots, and Picts. Because of the 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 G. in 1115. From then until 1560, 24 bishops succeeded one another, among them William Turnbull, who in 1450 obtained from Pope Nicholas V the founding charter for the University of G., of which the first Catholic rector was appointed in 1931, after the episode of the “Reformation.” In 1452, Pope Innocent VII elevated the see to metropolitan rank, 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 G. remained vacant from 1603 until the restoration of the hierarchy on 4 March 1878, when G. was re-established as an archiepiscopal see, directly dependent on the Holy See (“specialis filia Romanae Ecclesiae”), but without suffragans. The industrial development of western Scotland in the 19th century greatly increased the importance of G., which, owing to the influx of Catholics from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, became numerically the largest Scottish diocese. Pope Pius XII, by his apostolic constitution Dominici gregis of 25 May 1947, divided the archdiocese, and G. became an ecclesiastical province; part of the archdiocese was added to Galloway, while other parts were erected into the new dioceses of Montherwell and Paisley, suffragans of G. The old Cathedral of St Mungo, begun in the 12th century and completed in the 15th, is now used as a Presbyterian church; the present Catholic Cathedral is dedicated to St Andrew.