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 by the Indians. Its religious development was slow, so that it did not attain episcopal dignity until 1620 (and not 1582, as some writers have believed) by virtue of a bull of Pope Paul V, which dismembered its territory from the Paraguayan see of Asunción, retaining for it the title of the Most Holy Trinity, which the city itself bore. Thus B. A. was not the first episcopal see of modern Argentina, since the diocese of Tucumán already existed from 1570, whose bishop resided first at Santiago del Estero and from 1699 at Córdoba. Both 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 Pedro Carranza, who governed the diocese until 1655; he was succeeded by eminent prelates, though not without interruption, as there are several gaps in the series of bishops of that see, mainly during the French Revolution and the separatist crisis of the provinces of La Plata in the first half of the last century. In the papal diploma of erection dated 6 April 1620, it is stated: “The city of the Most Holy Trinity of the Port of Buenos Aires in the West Indies is situated in the province of the Río de la Plata and has the cathedral church under the invocation of St Martin; however, it does not possess the dignity, canons, prebends and other benefits necessary for a cathedral, but these shall be established by the present bishop with the endowment of the Catholic king.” As the city of B. A. grew in importance through the development of its commercial port and was the capital of the Viceroyalty of La Plata from 1776 to 1810, the diocese assumed first place in importance among all those watered by the rivers Uruguay, Paraná and Salado.
After the provinces of La Plata had emancipated themselves from Spain, with which they had waged a bitter war from 1810 onwards, mainly supported by the government of B. A., it was thought to elevate that see to metropolitan status, but this had to wait until 1865, owing to Spain’s opposition to the recognition of the new situation of those dioceses and then to the discordant civil and military events that prevented the internal settlement of the nation. 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. has been the only archbishopric in Argentina and has had as suffragan sees the ancient see of Córdoba del Tucumán and the new one of Salta, erected in 1866, to which were added those of San Juan del Cuyo in 1834 and Paraná in 1854, and at the end of the century, namely in 1897, the other three of La Plata, Santiago del Estero and the new Tucumán, dismembered from Salta. Then, as the Argentine population grew enormously through European immigration, Pius X in 1910 gave B. A. two further suffragans, Catamarca and Corrientes. Nevertheless, the metropolitan territory of B. A. remained still enormously extensive, embracing besides the district of the federal capital, Martín García Island, 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 metropolitan status, the metropolitan see of B. A. lost all its ancient suffragans, receiving only three of the new ones, namely Mercedes, Azul and San Nicolás. Within its still vast territory there is a splendid religious life, as was shown by the great International Eucharistic Congress of 1934 and as is seen in the numerous institutions of culture and charity. At the present time (1948) it has 115 parishes, with 340 secular priests and 548 regular clergy. The inhabitants number 3,050,000, of whom 3,000,000 are Catholics. – See Pl. XIII.
Giuseppe M. Pou y Marti