A CATHOLIC church is to be built at Culloden, near the battlefield where the hopes of the Catholic House of Stuart for a restoration to the British throne died 261 years ago.
The new place of worship will be about a mile from the site of the 1746 battle which ended in defeat for the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and his Jacobite army.
Most of the Highland Clans on the Jacobite side were Catholic or E
piscopalian, while the majority of the larger number of Scots on the Hanoverian government side were Presbyterians.
The new building will be the first Catholic church built in Inverness since St Ninian's in 1959. It will also end a 30-year wait by the local congregation for their own premises.
Canon Duncan Stone, the parish priest at St Mary's, in Inverness, identified a two-acre site and bought the land from the Forestry Commission for a new building to meet the needs of the Catholic people who were moving into new housing developments during the 1970s.
The congregation, dedicated to St Columba, held its first mass in the gym at Duncan Forbes Primary School at Culloden with about a dozen people. Today, the congregation is about 120 and will mark its 30th anniversary on 4 January when it is hoped Canon Stone, now 90, will join the celebrations.
The first turf on the building site will be cut next Thursday by Bishop Peter Moran of the Aberdeen diocese, and Don Williams, chairman of the congregational committee. Work is due to start on 7 January and dedication of the church is scheduled for September or October next year. The first wedding has already been booked.
Inverness is the fastest growing city in the UK and its expanding population is being swelled by many Catholics from India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe, including 5,000 from Poland. There are Polish priests in Inverness and Tain as well as Polish sisters from the Society of the Sacred Heart in Inverness.
Over the years, the new parish of St Columba has raised more than £250,000 towards the church, but still needed to find £500,000 to meet the total cost of the project at £750,000.
The Aberdeen diocese will provide a loan for the building and an appeal will be launched to help repay the money.
Father James Bell, spokesman for Aberdeen Diocese, said: "The population of the Highlands has grown significantly over the past 30 years, but in Culloden the population is largely indigenous, native Highlanders and from other parts of Britain."
The church will be designed and built by Uist Building Contractors and Reynolds Architects who built the Catholic Church at Portree, opened in 2005.
The full article contains 463 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
