I guess you can convert the font with fontxchange for Mac OS X. Scribus doesn't have any problems with OT fonts. I have some 3.000 fonts, roughly 500 converted from Type1 to OTF, none of them causes problems. Even two or three TTF fonts converted to OTF are running great. As long as the font will support the extended character set, you'll even get the German Umlauts like ä,ö,ü,ß or the Spanish ñ, etc. into your system.
So I guess that with Fontforge and fontxchange most of the users now will be able to clean weird fonts :-)