BRUGES, Diocese of. - In Belgium, a suffragan of Malines. The historic city of B. had no episcopal see at the time of its political and economic splendor; it then depended on the diocese of Tournai. But it was one of the new dioceses erected in the ecclesiastical reorganization of the Low Countries carried out by Paul IV in 1559 at the request of Philip II. The diocese of B., much less extensive than the present one, received its constitution and organization from a bull of Pius IV on 11 March 1561. Shortly afterward it had much to suffer because of civil strife; the Calvinists of Ghent, who occupied the city from 1578 to 1584, proscribed Catholic worship and destroyed many religious monuments. From 1559 until the French Revolution, B. counted 17 bishops, all learned and zealous prelates. The diocese was suppressed as a consequence of the Napoleonic concordat (bull Qui Christi Domini, 1801) and its territory was incorporated into the diocese of Ghent. Its reestablishment, already obtained by King William I of Holland in 1827, was carried out only in 1834, that is, after the proclamation of national independence. The boundaries of the new diocese coincide with those of the civil province of West Flanders. Of the six bishops it has had from the restoration down to the present day, some, such as Msgr. G. B. Malou (1849-64) and Msgr. Gust. Gius. Waffelaert (1895-1931), also made a name for themselves in the ecclesiastical sciences. The diocese has 344 parishes, 1,315 priests of the diocesan clergy and 444 regular priests, with 990,873 inhabitants, almost all Catholics.
The ancient diocese of B. was very rich (as is also the new one) in religious foundations, for the most part concentrated in the city after the wars of religion; their still surviving monuments have assured the Venice of the North its deserved fame in the history of religious art. The ancient cathedral of St. Donatian was destroyed in 1799; the present one (since 1839) is the ancient collegiate church of St. Saviour, a Gothic church in red brick (the parts of the present building date from the 13th-16th centuries), rich in canvases by Flemish painters. The collegiate church of St. Mary (Notre-Dame), likewise Gothic (parts from the 13th to the 15th century), boasts treasures such as the marble and copper mausoleums of Duke Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, the interior gallery of the lords of Gruuthuuse (1471-72); the marble Madonna and Child by Michelangelo and many paintings. The basilica of the Precious Blood of Christ (le Saint-Sang), composed of two superimposed churches (the one Romanesque and the other Gothic, 12th and 14th centuries), preserves the relic, brought from the Holy Land in 1149 by the count of Flanders Thierry of Alsace; the annual procession (Monday after 2 May), in which the relic is carried solemnly through the streets in its great chased gold reliquary, is an event that draws great crowds to B.
The hospital of St. John, in a building that dates in part to the 13th century, is proud of its collections of canvases by Hans Memling (other paintings by Flemish primitives, Memling, G. Van Eyck, Gérard David, Hugo van der Goes, are in the Municipal museum). Among the institutions of religious life we note the English convent of St. Augustine, a boarding school run by the English Canonesses since 1629 and still in full activity, and, much older and much more celebrated, the old beguinage, one of the rare survivors of this typically Flemish form of devout female life; its originality and its intense picturesque color have made it an obligatory theme for the writers and artists who have dealt with the city.