BUENOS AIRES, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - Capital of Argentina, B. A. was founded in 1536 by Pedro de Mendoza and rebuilt in 1580 by Juan de Garay after its complete destruction caused by the Indians. Its religious development was slow, so that only in 1620 (and not in 1582, as some writers have believed) did it receive episcopal dignity by virtue of a bull of Pope Paul V, which detached its territory from the Paraguayan see of La Asunción, preserving for it the title of the Most Holy Trinity, which the city itself had. B. A. was therefore not the first bishopric of modern Argentina, because the diocese of Tucumán already existed since 1570, whose bishop resided first at Santiago del Estero and from 1699 at Cordova. The two sees depended on the metropolitan see of La Plata or Las Charcas, later called Sucre, in present-day Bolivia.
The first bishop of B. A. was the Carmelite Pietro Carranza, who governed the diocese until 1655, and he was succeeded by eminent prelates, though not without interruption, since we see several gaps in the series of bishops of that see, chiefly during the French Revolution and the separatist crisis of the provinces of La Plata in the first half of the last century. In the pontifical diploma of erection of 6 April 1620 we read: "The city of the Most Holy Trinity of the Puerto de Buenos Aires in the West Indies is situated in the province of the Rio de La Plata and has its cathedral church under the invocation of St. Martin; however it does not possess the dignity, canonries, prebends and other benefices necessary for a cathedral, but these shall be instituted by the present bishop, with prior endowment by the Catholic king." As the importance of the city of B. A. grew through the commercial development of the port, and as from 1776 to 1810 it was the capital of the viceroyalty of La Plata, the diocese rose in importance to first place among all those washed by the rivers Uruguay, Paraná and Salado. Once the provinces of La Plata had been emancipated from Spain, with which they waged a hard war from 1810, sustained chiefly by the government of B. A., it was thought to raise that see to a metropolis, but it was necessary to wait until 1865, because of Spain's opposition to recognition of the new situation of those dioceses, and then because of the civil and military discords that hindered the nation's internal consolidation. For these reasons the episcopal sees of the nation remained for many years without bishops. From that year (1865) until our own time B. A. was the only Argentine archbishopric and had as suffragan sees the ancient see of Cordova del Tucumán and the new one of Salta, erected in 1806, to which were added those of S. Juan del Cuyo in 1834 and of Paraná in 1854, and at the end of the century, that is in 1897, the other three of La Plata, Santiago del Estero and the new one of Tucumán, detached from Salta. Then, as the Argentine population grew enormously because of European immigration, Pius X in 1910 gave B. A. two further suffragans, Catamarca and Corrientes. Nevertheless the metropolitan territory of B. A. still remained enormously extensive, embracing besides the district of the federal capital, the Island of Martín García, and the provinces of Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. Finally in 1934, with the erection of ten other dioceses and the elevation of six already existing ones to metropolises, the metropolis of B. A. lost all its ancient suffragans, receiving only three of the new ones, namely Mercedes and Azul, S. Nicolás. In its still vast territory there is a splendid religious life, as the great International Eucharistic Congress of 1934 demonstrated and as can be seen in the numerous institutions of culture and charity. It currently counts (1948) 115 parishes, with 340 diocesan priests and 548 regulars. The inhabitants number 3,050,000, of whom 3,000,000 are Catholics. - See Pl. XIII.
