Pressure grows on Church over archives controversy

Senior News Reporter

Wednesday 18 July 2012

MORE than 100 academics have now signed a petition to protest against plans by the Catholic Church to divide up its priceless archive across different locations in Scotland.

ROW: The current home of the archives.

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MARTIN WILLIAMS

Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, is among those who have added their names to a letter written on behalf of the Society for Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Studies which calls for the move to be suspended.

The manuscripts, pamphlets and letters – which include correspondence from Mary Queen of Scots – are to leave Columba House in Edinburgh, with pre-1878 material to be housed at Aberdeen University's new state-of-the-art library. Later documents are due to shift to a new episcopal centre currently under construction in Glasgow.Columba House closed its doors indefinitely at the end of last month because there was no-one left to look after the archive service.The curator has been absent on long-term sick leave and his assistant was told by the church to leave immediately rather than work out a month's notice after she submitted her resignation.The archive move has infuriated a large number of scholars in Scotland and overseas, with academics publicly voicing their opposition to the plan.The Scottish Catholic Heritage Commission, which has led the move, has defended its position following widespread criticism.Archbishop Mario Conti, president of the Heritage Commission of the Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference of Scotland, says the move will guarantee the archive's security and preservation in suitably equipped surroundings. The early part of the collection was originally housed in Aberdeen until 1958.But Dr Jenny Wormald, chairwoman of the Society for Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, said despite the furore, the church had gone silent on the issue, offering "no academic justification for what it is doing".She said: "Any body which could abruptly and unnecessarily close Columba House at a moment's notice, and offer to reopen after six weeks one day a week, or just possibly two, demonstrates only that it does not begin to understand the demands and challenges, the pains and exhilaration of sustained and productive archival research."The only piece of determined consistency to emerge from the hierarchy is that the archives will be broken up; anything rather than leave alone a system which has operated so well for over half-a-century, and at such benefit to the Church." Dr Wormald added: "Should we not be told why? Not by the spokesmen for the archdiocese of Glasgow, who have spread muddle, confusion and sometimes worse."Mr MacCulloch, one of the letter's signatories, was ordained a deacon in the Church of England but declined ordination to the priesthood because of the church's attitude to his homosexuality.He presented a six-part television series called A History of Christianity, which first aired on BBC 4 in 2009 and then on BBC 2 in 2010. He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to scholarship. Aberdeen University will also become the custodian of the Blairs Library, which has been on loan to the National Library of Scotland since 1974. It is an immensely valuable collection of about 27,000 books and pamphlets from before 1801, several of which are the only surviving copies.The university has said the collections of the church mostly date from a period when Catholicism in Scotland was, with the exception of a few households in the Lowlands, exclusively northern.No-one from the Catholic Church was available for comment.

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Pressure grows on Church over archives controversy

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