Diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh
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 regular clergy, 14 male religious communities and 28 female ones. The see takes its title from the two cities of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, and of St Andrews, a city on the coast of Fife, which, before the Protestant Reformation, was the seat of an archbishop. Edinburgh was not a 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 Scotland, Edinburgh was included in the diocese of St Andrews. The exact date of the foundation of the see of St Andrews is not known, but it existed before the year 900. The first bishops were all Celts, but in the period following the marriage of St Margaret with the King of Scotland, some Englishmen occupied the see. Until 1225 the bishops of St Andrews exercised a de facto primacy over the Scottish Church, but this primacy was never expressly recognized. Honorius III ordered that the assembly of bishops should be presided over by some bishop elected by the assembly. In the 15th century, the Archbishop of York (England) sought to arrogate supremacy over the Scottish Church, but the Scottish bishops successfully opposed this claim, and in 1472 a bull of Sixtus IV raised the see of St Andrews to an archiepiscopal metropolitan see 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 archbishop and head of a separate ecclesiastical province, the sees of Dunkeld, Dunblane, Galloway and Argyll were taken from St Andrews and given to Glasgow as suffragan sees. In 1571 John Hamilton, eighth Archbishop of St Andrews, 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 interim period the few Catholics of the archdiocese remained for about a century under the jurisdiction of the prefects and vicars apostolic of England. 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 latter of which included all the ancient archdiocese of St Andrews. When the hierarchy was restored in 1878, the archdiocese of St Andrews was reconstituted with the title of St Andrews and Edinburgh, with Edinburgh as the episcopal city instead of St Andrews. 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 Andrews and Edinburgh, while Glasgow became an archbishop 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 of it only fragments remain today. The present cathedral of St Mary in Edinburgh was built in 1896.