Welcome to the Scottish Catholic Archives, the National Archives of the Catholic Church in Scotland. The Scottish Catholic Archives, an agency of the Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference of Scotland, is responsible for providing archive and records management services to the Church at national, diocesan and parish level. This section provides information about the Archives
Brief history of the archives of the Catholic Church in Scotland
Following reformation in the 16th century, the archives of the Scottish Church were centred at the Scots College Paris. In the following three centuries, attempts were made to return the archives to Scotland. The Historic Collections of the Church now gathered, dating from 1177, bring together the largest body of pre and post reformation Scottish Catholic documentary history in the UK and Ireland. Added to the Historic Collections are the Archives of the Dioceses of Aberdeen, Dunkeld, Argyll and the Isles, Galloway, Motherwell and the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh which bring the documentary heritage of the Church forward from 1878, when the Hierarchy was restored to Scotland.
Following the assembling of the archives by various key individuals in the Church, the Bishop's of Scotland decided to locate the Archives in 1958 in Edinburgh to ensure that the archives of the Church were made available alongside the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. This key relationship between the Church and the national collections continues to grow to this day.
The Scottish Catholic Archives are located in the heart of the New Town of Edinburgh, and based in an early nineteenth-century Georgian townhouse, the Scottish Catholic Archives contains over 500 linear meters of manuscripts and a research library of 10,000 non-manuscript items.