BRUGES, Diocese of. — In Belgium, a suffragan of Mechelen. The historic city of Bruges did not have a bishop’s seat at the time of its political and economic splendor; it then depended on the diocese of Tournai. However, 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 Bruges, much less extensive than the present one, received its constitution and organization from a bull of Pius IV on 11 March 1561. It soon suffered greatly 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, Bruges counted 17 bishops, all learned and zealous prelates. The diocese was suppressed as a result of the Napoleonic concordat (bull Qui Christi Domini, 1801), and its territory was incorporated into the diocese of Ghent. Its restoration, already sought by King William I of the Netherlands in 1827, 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 since its restoration up to the present day, some, such as Mgr. G. B. Malou (1849–64) and Mgr. Gustave Joseph Waffelaert (1895–1931), have also made a name for themselves in ecclesiastical scholarship. The diocese has 344 parishes, 1,315 diocesan priests and 444 religious priests, with 990,873 inhabitants, almost all of them Catholic.
The ancient diocese of Bruges was extremely rich (as is the new one) in religious foundations, most of them concentrated in the city after the religious wars; 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 St Donatian was destroyed in 1799; the present one (since 1839) is the former collegiate church of St Saviour, a Gothic brick church (parts of the current building date from the 13th–16th centuries), rich in paintings by Flemish masters. The collegiate church of Our Lady (Notre-Dame), also 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 internal tribune of the Lords of Gruuthuuse (1471–72), Michelangelo’s marble *Madonna and Child*, and many paintings.
The Basilica of the Precious Blood of Christ (Le Saint-Sang), consisting of two superimposed churches (one Romanesque, the other Gothic, 12th and 14th centuries), preserves the relic brought from the Holy Land in 1149 by Count of Flanders Thierry of Alsace; the annual procession (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 Bruges.
The Hospital of St John, in a building partly dating from the 13th century, takes pride in its collections of paintings by Hans Memling (other works by Flemish primitives such as Memling, Jan van Eyck, Gérard David, Hugo van der Goes are in the Municipal Museum). Among the institutions of religious life, we may note the English Augustinian convent, a boarding school run by English Canonesses since 1629 and still very much alive, and, much older and far more famous, the old Béguinage, one of the rare surviving examples of this typically Flemish form of devout feminine life; its originality and intense pictorial color have made it a favorite subject for writers and artists who have dealt with the city.