EDMONTON, ARCHDIOCESE of. — Capital of the province of Alberta in Canada, with the dioceses of Calgary and St. Paul as suffragans, and the apostolic vicariates of Gronard and Mackenzie.
In 1948 it had 60,000 Catholics out of a population of 325,000, under the direction of 96 diocesan and 53 regular priests, 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, Brothers of the Christian Schools, and Franciscans of the Atonement), and 22 female communities.
The diocese of E. owes its existence to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, tireless organizers of the Church in western Canada. Indeed, on 22 September 1871 it was separated from the diocese of St. Boniface, which comprised the present civil provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, a territory of approximately 1,000,000 sq. km.; a new diocese was established with its see at St. Albert, as a suffragan of the new ecclesiastical province of St. Boniface, erected on the same day and entrusted to the care of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Its first bishop was a holy and zealous Oblate, the Servant of God Vital Grandin. From the new diocese, on 20 January 1891, the apostolic vicariate of Saskatchewan was separated (which in turn became the diocese of Prince Albert in 1907); then, on 30 November 1912, the diocese of Calgary was formed and assigned to it as a suffragan, together with the apostolic vicariates of Athabaska and Mackenzie, when it was raised to a metropolitan archdiocese and its see transferred to E., the capital, on the same day, of the new civil province of Alberta (1905).
As a result of the substantial immigration that followed, the archdiocese has many French, English, German, and Polish parishes, as well as Ukrainian parishes of the Greek rite.
The cathedral is dedicated to St. Joseph.