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The Scots College Rome, 1600-2000

by Raymond McCluskey

ISBN: 9780859765244
Imprint: John Donald
Publication Date: Mar 2006
Format: Paperback
Price: £12.99
Stock Status: in stock

It emerged out of increasing papal optimism that James VI of Scotland, his queen Anne of Denmark already converted, might be ready to imitate Henry IV of France and convert to the Catholic Church. It was not to be. Nevertheless, the Scots College began its work of providing priests to maintain the faith in desperate times, particularly in the heartlands of the North-East of Scotland and the Western Isles. It survived the internecine strife between Jesuits and seculars, the struggle for a non-Italian rector in favour of a Scot, and the trials and tribulations of the Napoleonic era (when the college had to close for a period), and emerged again to play a major role in influencing, through its former students as priests and bishops, the predominantly Irish-origin community in post-Catholic Emancipation. Being at the college was instrumental in promoting the Scottish Church. The thirty-eight year rectorship of William Clapperton (1922-1960) saw the college come through the years of the Second World War relatively unscathed and the beginnings of the preparations for the removal to a new site in 1964. There the college remains to this day, facing the challenges which modern society and culture present.

This book, produced by a team of specialists, is the first scholarly attempt at a complete history of the college. It fills a historiography in providing the seminal account of what is almost certainly the oldest extant Scottish institution on the Continent.

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