Scotland's last seminary under threat

Senior Church leaders are now convinced it is no longer practical to keep the crumbling Scotus College in Bearsden, Dunbartonshire, open because of dramatically falling numbers.

But student priests at the college remain anxious about their future, which they feel is best placed close to the community they serve.

Father William McFadden, the vice-rector at Scotus College, said: "Clearly the students are worried about their future, it’s not just a case of moving them abroad.

"The average age of our students is 35, so they are more mature and have a variety of responsibilities in the community, as well as family commitments like looking after elderly parents."

Training for the seminarians involves working closely with a number of organisations on placement to gain first hand experience in hospitals, schools and outreach projects.

Fr McFadden added: "Consideration has to be given to the wider role of the students in the community where they build their experience, as well as the symbolic presence of the college.

"It is currently used for training student priests but could be used for ongoing training programmes for priests or used as a headquarters for the secretariat of the Bishops’ competitors."

Today, there are only 37 candidates studying for the priesthood in Scotland, with numbers estimated to drop to as few as 25 in five years’ time.

Twenty years ago, there were 136 students studying in Scottish seminaries for the diocesan priesthood while ten years ago, the year of the foundation of Scotus College, the number was 79. Closure would mean seminarians going to the Pontifical Scots College in Rome or the Royal Scots College in Salamanca, Spain.

Peter Kearney, the spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, said: "At present it is cheaper to send our student priests to Salamanca or Rome.

"The building in Salamanca is state-owned for our use in perpetuity, but if we leave, it reverts back to the state.

"There is a similar situation in Rome. Scotus College is the only asset we have that would raise finance. This is an important consideration as training costs mount."

The annual cost of funding student places currently runs at approximately 1 million, representing a figure of some 22,500 per student, every year.

However, the Church would stand to gain millions of pounds from property developers for the land, in an upmarket area on the edge of Glasgow.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: "From these figures, it is clear that there is major over-provision of seminary places for the Catholic Church in Scotland at the present time. This comes at a time when the source of finance from student grants has all but disappeared, and so the cost 0of priestly formation is now completely laid upon the community.

"The bishops are conscious of their responsibility of stewardship of the finances of the Church and so are addressing the question of whether the money currently being invested in priestly formation could be better deployed."

In recent comment over the state of the Catholic Church, Ian Willock, a lecturer and the editor of Open House, a magazine commenting on the Catholic tradition, was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the Church.

However, he did see lay members as a great untapped resource where men and women, familiar with the faith and its teaching, could lead prayer services and dispense holy communion, consecrated by priests.

The University of Abertay, in Dundee, has already launched a course for eucharistic ministers to educate them in theology, and at Ninewells Hospital a lay woman helps out as a hospital chaplain.

Last year, Archbishop Keith O’Brien, the president of the Bishops’ Conference, said he believed the answer to the ongoing lack of priests might be found in the Episcopal Church, where they have both priests and non-stipendiary priests.

The unpaid role would be created where men who decided to go into the priesthood late in life kept their jobs and fulfilled a ministerial role, helping at weekends and at funerals.

Archbishop O’Brien recognised it was not taking place at the moment, but saw it as "one of the ways ahead".

Scotus College became the national seminary after Gillis College in Edinburgh closed in 1992. Scotland’s junior seminary, St Mary’s, in Blairs, Aberdeenshire, closed in 1986.