Dr Jenny Wormald, an historian at the University of Edinburgh, and member of the Society of Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, has written to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Commission for Culture, likening the move to a break-up of the Vatican archives.
Elsewhere, Dr Wormald has called the plan to move the pre-1878 holdings to a new facility in Aberdeen, while dispersing the remainder to Scotland's eight dioceses, as "unjustifiable and unnecessary cultural and scholarly vandalism".
The Church has claimed that the older materials in the archive can only be satisfactorily housed in a state-of-the-art library at the University in Aberdeen and have pointed to structural problems and hazards in a Glasgow building acquired by the Church to create a new Episcopal centre and archive as a reason for dispersal of the more modern materials.