Scots College (Rome)
The Pontifical Scots College (Italian: Il Pontificio Collegio Scozzese) in Rome is the main seminary for the training of men for the priesthood from the dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland.
It was established, in response to the religious persecution which began with the Scottish Reformation Parliament and ended only with Catholic Emancipation in 1829, by a bull of Pope Clement VIII on 5 December 1600.
[2] At this time, exiled clergy attempted to recover and reform existing Scottish ecclesiastical institutions abroad, or establish new ones, in accordance with the counter-reformation ethos of the Council of Trent (1545–63), which recommended the training of diocesan priests within seminaries.
[2] At first the college was sited in a little house in what is known today as the Via del Tritone, opposite the church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli.
[7] The martyrdom of Saint John Ogilvie in Glasgow compelled the students to take a mission oath whence the sole purpose of the College became the training of priests.
A church, Sant'Andrea degli Scozzesi, was constructed in the 1640s adjacent to the buildings of the college for the celebration of feasts and burial of the dead.
[8] The College of the mid seventeenth century was at times embroiled in the competition between secular clergy and Jesuits, the latter being accused of recruiting students for their own number.
[7] In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the college became a centre for the promotion of the cult of Saint Margaret of Scotland, having been gifted some relics.
A relic was obtained from the Scots College Douai, until then the main centre of devotion to the Saint, with the altar of St Margaret in Sant'Andrea degli Scozzese being provided with a painting.
Grant set about renovating the buildings, and began with the refurbishment of Sant'Andrea degli Scozzesi, reopened on Saint Andrew's Day 1847.
Busts of notable Scottish Catholics can still be seen on the façade of the building, including[citation needed] the last of the Stuarts, Henry Cardinal Duke of York.
[16] The first half of the 20th century saw two Rectors appointed directly to the episcopate; Robert Fraser, who had seen the institution through its tercentenary celebrations, and Donald Mackintosh who oversaw the years during the First World War.
The stairways around the chapel and crypt were decorated with twenty stained glass windows created by Giovanni D'Aloisio depicting scenes from the history of the Church in Scotland.
[19] On 14 April 2016, the community of the Scots College were granted a private audience with Pope Francis at the Apostolic Palace to mark the 400th anniversary of its becoming a seminary.
[21][22] After a 2020 review projected unaffordable upgrade costs for the Via Cassia seminary, the Scottish Bishops announced a plan to relocate to a more central location in Rome beginning in 2021.
Former students Robert Phillip, later joined the French Oratory, and William Thomson, later a Franciscan, were confessors to Henrietta Maria of France.
George Conn, who arrived in 1619 and left in the same year, later became a Franciscan, canon of San Lorenzo in Damaso, secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini and honorary chamberlain of Pope Urban VIII.
[7][28] William Ballantine, a student from 1641 to 1646, was named the first Prefect of the Scottish Mission in 1653 and was imprisoned in London for two years by order of Oliver Cromwell.
During the fabricated Popish Plot, which gripped the kingdoms of England and Scotland, Alexander Lumsden, a former student of the college and Dominican Friar, was condemned to death in London.
Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), better known as Baron Corvo; a writer, artist, photographer and eccentric, was expelled from the college without receiving ordination.
[29] Canon John Gray (1866–1934), English poet and founding parish priest of St Peter's Morningside Edinburgh, studied at the college from 1898 until 1901.
Paul Laverty (born 1957), a screenwriter and lawyer, studied for priesthood but did not continue to ordination and obtained a degree in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University.
