CHARLOTTETOWN, DIOCESIS of. — In Canada. Capital of Canada’s smallest province (Prince Edward Island), C. is suffragan to Halifax in Nova Scotia. It comprises the whole territory of Prince Edward Island (5,656 sq. km) and a county of the province of Québec, namely the Magdalen Islands. In 1947, among 51,107 inhabitants, there were 46,426 Catholics under the direction of 79 diocesan priests and 5 religious, with 47 parishes, 12 missions with churches, 1 college, 10 academies for girls and 1 for boys, 3 hospitals, and 1 orphanage.
This territory, which the Franciscans called Ile-St-Jean, began to be colonized by Europeans in 1719, when this and other islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence were donated by France to the count of Saint-Pierre. From then on, the Sulpicians (1721–23), the Franciscans (1724), and secular priests spread Catholicism there. But the sacking of the settlements and the deportation of the inhabitants carried out by the English in 1758 left the island without resident priests until 1772, when the emigration of Scottish Catholics led by the priest G. Macdonald began. The colony progressed, and in 1819 the S. Congregation of Propaganda Fide made it an apostolic vicariate suffragan to Québec.
It comprised the territory of the present province of New Brunswick and was erected as a diocese on 11 Aug. 1829, with its episcopal see at C. In Sept. 1842, the territory of the civil province of New Brunswick was detached to form the diocese of St-Jean; in May 1852 Halifax was elevated to a metropolitan see, and C. became its suffragan, together with the diocese of Antigonish.