Guadalajara, Archdiocese of

GUADALAJARA, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - Archdiocese and city in the State of Jalisco in Mexico.

It has an area of 52,000 sq km and a population of 1,407,680 inhabitants, of whom 1,379,680 are Catholics; it has 128 parishes served by 632 secular priests and 64 regular priests, two seminaries, 32 male religious communities and 130 female ones (1949).

The diocese was created by Paul III on 13 July 1548 by detachment from the diocese of Michoacán; the bishop, however, resided at Compostela in the province of Tepic; Pius IV transferred it to G. in 1560.

Bishop F. Galindo y Chávez (d. 1702) founded the seminary in 1699 and established its library; Bishop A. Alcade, transferred from Yucatán to the see of G. in 1771, founded there the university and the S. Miguel de Belén hospital. Pope Pius IX raised G. to an archdiocese on 19 March 1863; its suffragans are the dioceses of Aguas Calientes, Colima, Tepic and Zacatecas.

The cathedral, dedicated to Mary Most Holy Assumed into heaven, was begun in 1571, completed in 1618 and consecrated in 1716; in the sacristy one admires a painting of the Most Holy Virgin by Murillo.

To the west of the city and adjacent to the seminary one admires the church of S. Monica, with its characteristic and sumptuous exterior. Other notable churches are those of St. Francis, with a baroque façade and two domes (1550); the church of the Carmine, whose interior is decorated with allegories drawn from Holy Scripture; furthermore the churches of St. Philip Neri and of St. Augustine.

The city of G. was founded in Apr. 1530 by Cristobal de Oñate, who called it Espiritu Santo, but in 1542 he changed its name to G. because it was the birthplace of his companion Nuño de Guzmán.

Enrico Josi