EDMONTON, ARCHDIOCESE OF — Capital of the province of Alberta in Canada, with as suffragan dioceses Calgary and Saint Paul, and the apostolic vicariates of Grouard and Mackenzie.
In 1948 it had 60,000 Catholics out of a total population of 325,000, under the care of 96 diocesan priests and 53 regulars, with 178 churches, 103 missions, 75 stations, 1 seminary, 2 colleges, 16 schools and academies, 3 schools for Indians, 5 male religious communities (Franciscans, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Redemptorists, Christian Brothers, and Franciscans of the Atonement) and 22 female communities.
The diocese of Edmonton owes its existence to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, tireless organizers of the Church in western Canada. Indeed, on 22 September 1871, a territory of about 1,000,000 sq. km comprising the present civil provinces of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan was detached from the diocese of Saint-Boniface and a new diocese was erected with its see at Saint-Albert, suffragan to the new ecclesiastical province of Saint-Boniface, established on the same day and entrusted to the care of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate; the first bishop was a saintly and zealous Oblate, the Servant of God Vital Grandin. From this new diocese, on 20 January 1891, the apostolic vicariate of Saskatchewan was detached (which in turn became in 1907 the diocese of Prince Albert); then on 30 November 1912 the diocese of Calgary was formed, assigned to it as suffragan along with the apostolic vicariates of Athabasca and Mackenzie, on the occasion of its elevation to a metropolitan archdiocese and its transfer to Edmonton, capital of the new civil province of Alberta (1905).
Owing to the heavy immigration that followed, the archdiocese contains many parishes for French, English, German, Polish and also Ukrainian Greek-Rite Catholics.
