BRUGES, DIOCESE of. — In Belgium, suffragan of Malines. The historic city of B. had no episcopal see during the period of its political and economic splendor; at that time it depended on the diocese of Tournai. But it was one of the new dioceses erected in the ecclesiastical reorganization of the Netherlands carried out by Paul IV in 1559 at the request of Philip II. The diocese of B., considerably less extensive than the present one, received its constitution and organization through a bull of Pius IV dated 11 March 1561. Soon afterward it suffered greatly as a result of the civil conflicts; 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. had 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 restoration, obtained as early as 1827 from King William I of the Netherlands, was effected 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 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 ecclesiastical scholarship. The diocese has 344 parishes, 1,315 diocesan priests and 444 regular priests, with 990,873 inhabitants, almost all Catholics.
The ancient diocese of B. was exceedingly rich (as is the new one as well) in religious foundations, most of them concentrated in the city after the wars of religion; their surviving monuments have secured for the Venice of the North its well-deserved fame in the history of religious art. The ancient cathedral of S. Donatian was destroyed in 1799; the present one (since 1839) is the former collegiate church of S. 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 S. Mary (Notre-Dame), also Gothic (parts dating from the 13th to the 15th century), boasts treasures such as the marble and copper mausoleums of the dukes Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, the interior gallery of the lords of Gruuthuuse (1471–72), Michelangelo’s marble Madonna and Child, and many paintings. The basilica of the Most Precious Blood of Christ (le Saint-Sang), consisting of two superimposed churches (one Romanesque and the other Gothic, from the 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 (the Monday after 2 May), in which the relic is solemnly carried through the streets in its large chased-gold reliquary, is an event that draws great crowds to B.
The hospital of S. John, in a building dating in part from the 13th century, takes pride in 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 should mention the English convent of S. Augustine, a boarding school run by English canonesses since 1629 and still flourishing, and, much older and much more celebrated, the old beguinage, one of the few surviving examples of this typically Flemish form of devout female life; its originality and intense pictorial character have made it an obligatory subject for the writers and artists who have concerned themselves with the city.