ANGERS, DIOCESE OF. – In western France, a suffragan of Tours, with its see in the city of Angers, the capital of the department of Maine-et-Loire. The diocese comprises approximately the territory of Maine-et-Loire and has a population of 470,000 Catholics, with 416 parishes, 910 diocesan priests, and 135 regular clergy. The number of its religious communities and the development of its educational institutions are signs of an intense Christian vitality.
The city is the ancient capital of the country of the Andes or Andecavi, which, after resistance to the lieutenants of Caesar, was subdued and became one of the regions of the Third Lyon. The capital was then called Juliomagus; but at the time of the disintegration of the empire, when the Andecavi entered the Armorican confederation, the city resumed the name of the ancient people, becoming Andegavia, and the province itself became Anjou.
The period in which Christianity was introduced into the region is unknown; the existence of the diocese is historically attested from the 4th century. The first bishops who distinguished themselves were: St Apotemius, St Prosper his successor, St Maurilius; then St Renatus and St Albinus, who in 543 saw the Benedictine abbey of Glandfeuil founded at Saint-Maur. Later followed the abbeys of Saint-Serge, around 646, of Saint-Florent, around 650, of Saint-Albin of Angers, followed in the 11th–14th centuries by numerous monastic foundations. Charles of Anjou, the future king of Sicily, founded there a university which became famous, to which the region owed its later victorious resistance against the Protestant Reformation and against the Jansenism of the Arnaulds in the following century.