SANT'ANDREA and EDINBURGH, DIOCESE of. — In Scotland, it comprises the counties of Edinburgh, Berwick, Haddington, Lothians, Peebles, Roxburg, Selkirk, almost all of Stirling, and part of Fife.
It has a population of 600,000 inhabitants, of whom 95,157 are Catholics, distributed among 74 parishes, served by 167 diocesan and 76 religious priests, and by 32 religious communities for men and 28 for women. The see takes its title from the two cities of E., the capital of Scotland, and S. 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 Landisfarne in Northumbria and, when the diocesan system was established throughout Scotland, E. was included in the diocese of S. A. The exact date on which the see of S. A. was founded is unknown, but it existed before 900. The first bishops were all Celts, but in the period following the marriage of S. Margherita to the king of Scotland, some Englishmen occupied the see. Until 1225 the bishops of S. A. exercised a de facto primacy over the Scottish Church, but this primacy was never expressly recognized, and in 1225 Onorius III ordered that the assembly of bishops should be presided over by a bishop elected by the assembly. In the 15th century, the archbishop of York (England) sought to claim supremacy over the Scottish Church, but the Scottish bishops successfully opposed his claim, and in 1472 a bull of Sisto III raised the see of S. A. to a metropolitan archbishopric for all Scotland, with the twelve suffragan sees of Glasgow, Dunkel-Aberdeen, Moray, Brechin, Dunblane, Ross, Caithness, Orkney, Argyll, the Isles, and Galloway. However, when in 1492 Glasgow also became an archbishopric and the head of a separate ecclesiastical province, the sees of Dunkeld, Dunblane, Galloway, and Argyll were removed from S. A. and given to Glasgow as suffragan sees. In 1571 John Hamilton, the eighth archbishop of S. 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. During the intervening period, the few Catholics of the archdiocese remained for approximately 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 as the first apostolic vicar of Scotland. In 1726 the country was divided into two vicariates, the Highland and the Lowland; approximately one 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 former archdiocese of S. A. When the hierarchy was restored in 1878, the archdiocese of S. A. was reconstituted under the title of S. A. and E., with E. as the episcopal city in place of S. 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 S. A. and E., while Glasgow became an archbishopric without suffragans. The ancient Cathedral dedicated to S. Andrea, 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 S. Maria in E. was built in 1896.