CINCINNATI, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - A city in the State of Ohio in the United States and the see of a metropolitan archdiocese comprising a territory of approximately 31,200 sq. km., with as suffragans the dioceses of Cleveland, Columbus, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and Toledo.
In 1948, out of a total population of 1,576,256, the archdiocese counted approximately 285,689 Catholics (a good portion of whom were of the Negro race). The clergy consists of 1 auxiliary bishop, 515 diocesan priests, and 329 regulars, with 25 churches, 82 missions, 5 chapels, 1 major seminary, 1 minor seminary, 13 academies and normal schools, 3 colleges for boys, 2 for girls, 4 Latin schools, 43 high schools, and 37 parochial schools with 37,786 pupils. In 1947, 10,975 baptisms were administered, of which 1,782 were of adults. The archdiocese has 10 male and 20 female religious communities.
Northeastern Ohio began to be evangelized as early as 1749, but white colonization there only began toward the end of the 18th century. Among the first colonists, Catholics were mainly at Somerset, where Abp. Flaget of Bardstown—then the ordinary of Ohio—brought the Dominicans, who, under the leadership of Fr. Edward Fenwick, founded a priory there. As for Cincinnati, the first attempts to establish the Catholic Church there were made in 1811. Abp. Flaget, during his first visit, celebrated Mass there, and in 1821 obtained from the Holy See that Ohio be separated from Bardstown to form a diocese with its see at Cincinnati, suffragan to Baltimore. The new diocese had the same Bp. Fenwick as its first bishop.
He died in 1832 of cholera, contracted during a visitation of his diocese. To him is owed, in particular, the foundation of the celebrated Athenaeum of St. Francis Xavier in Cincinnati (1829). The immigration of German and Irish Catholics accelerated the consolidation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Ohio. Many dioceses were indeed later erected by subdivisions of that of Cincinnati, which in 1850 was raised to metropolitan status with as suffragans the dioceses of Louisville (formerly Bardstown), Detroit, Vincennes (now Indianapolis), Nashville, and Cleveland, to which were later added those of Covington, Fort Wayne, Columbus, Grand Rapids, and Toledo. On May 22, 1937, the dioceses of Detroit and Grand Rapids were detached from the ecclesiastical province of Cincinnati to form the province of Detroit; then on December 10 of the same year, the dioceses of Louisville, Covington, and Nashville passed to the new province of Louisville.