Glasgow, Archdiocese of

GLASGOW, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - Archdiocese and province in the south-west of 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 regulars, one seminary, 13 male religious communities and 22 female (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 foundation charter for the University of G., of which the first Catholic rector was had in 1931, after the episode of the "reformation." In 1452 Pope Innocent VII 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 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 the west of Scotland in the 19th century greatly increased the importance of G. which, through the influx of Catholics from Ireland and from the Scottish Highlands, became numerically the largest Scottish diocese. Pope Pius XII, with his apostolic constitution Dominici gregis of 25 May 1947, divided the archdiocese, and G. became an ecclesiastical province; one part of the archdiocese was added to Galloway, while other parts were erected into the new dioceses of Motherwell 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.

Filippo Flanagan