St. Andrews and Edinburgh, Diocese of

ST. ANDREWS AND EDINBURGH, Diocese of. - In Scotland, it comprises the counties of Edinburgh, Berwick, Haddington, Lothians, Peebles, Roxburgh, Selkirk, almost all of Stirling and part of Fife.

It has a population of 600,000 inhabitants, of whom 95,157 are Catholics, distributed in 74 parishes, served by 167 diocesan priests and 76 regulars, with male religious communities and 28 female ones. The see takes its title from the two cities of E., the capital of Scotland, and of St. A., a city on the coast of Fife, which, before the Protestant Reformation, was the seat of an archbishopric. E. was not an episcopal see before the Reformation. At the beginning of its history the city belonged to the diocese of Lindisfarne in Northumbria and, when the diocesan system was established throughout all Scotland, E. was included in the diocese of St. A. The exact date on which the see of St. A. was founded is not known, but it existed before the year 900. The first bishops were all Celts, but in the period that followed the marriage of St. Margaret to the king of Scotland, some Englishmen occupied the see. Until 1225 the bishops of St. A. exercised a de facto primacy over the Scottish Church, but this primacy was never expressly recognized and in 1225 Honorius III ordered that the assembly of the bishops be presided over by some bishop elected by the assembly. In the 15th century, the archbishop of York (England) sought to arrogate to himself supremacy over the Scottish Church, but the Scottish bishops successfully opposed his claim and in 1472 a bull of Sixtus III raised the see of St. A. to a metropolitan archbishopric of all Scotland with the twelve suffragan sees of Glasgow, Dunkeld-Aberdeen, Moray, Brechin, Dunblane, Ross, Caithness, Orkney, Argyll, the Isles and Galloway. However, when in 1492 Glasgow also became an archbishopric and head of a separate ecclesiastical province, the sees of Dunkeld, Dunblane, Galloway and Argyll were removed from St. A. and given to Glasgow as suffragan sees. In 1571 John Hamilton, the eighth archbishop of St. A., was hanged by the reformers, and, although a successor was elected, he was never consecrated and the see remained vacant until the restoration of the hierarchy in 1878. In the interim period the few Catholics of the archdiocese remained for about a century under the jurisdiction of the English prefects and apostolic vicars. In 1653 a prefect of the Scottish mission was appointed by the Holy See. Forty years later Bishop Nicholson was consecrated the first vicar apostolic of Scotland. In 1726 the country was divided into two vicariates, the Highland and the Lowland; about a hundred years later it was divided into three vicariates, the Highland, the Lowland and the Eastern, the last of which comprised the whole of the ancient archdiocese of St. A. When the hierarchy was restored in 1878, the archdiocese of St. A. was reconstituted with the title of St. A. and E., with E. as the episcopal city in place of St. A. Of the sees that existed in Scotland before the Protestant Reformation, Moray, Brechin, Dunblane, Ross, Caithness and Orkney were not restored in 1878. Dunkeld, Aberdeen, Galloway and Argyll and the Isles became suffragans of St. A. and E., while Glasgow became an archbishopric without suffragans. The ancient Cathedral dedicated to St. Andrew, begun in the 12th century and completed in the 14th, was destroyed in 1559 by the reformers and only fragments of it remain today. The present cathedral of St. Mary in E. was built in 1896.

Filippo Flanagan