Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle
In the province of Liverpool (England). The diocese covers an area of 7,700 sq. km. with a population of 2,242,701, of whom 247,234 are Catholics distributed in 148 parishes served by 329 diocesan priests and 38 regular clergy, 8 male religious orders and congregations, and 18 female communities; in 1948 there were 588 conversions. The episcopal see is at Newcastle upon Tyne.
In the year 674, St Wilfrid founded an abbey at Hexham in Northumbria. In 678, St Theodore of Canterbury divided the diocese of York and formed that of Bernicia, with two episcopal sees, at Lindisfarne and Hexham, and appointed St Eata as “bishop of the Bernicians.” After three years, Bernicia was subdivided; St Eata remained bishop of Lindisfarne, while Trumbert became bishop of Hexham, succeeded in 684 by St Cuthbert. In the same year, St Cuthbert went to Lindisfarne, while St Eata moved to Hexham, where he died in 686. Hexham extended from the river Aln to the Tees. Among the successors of St Eata were St John of Beverley (687–705), St Wilfrid (705–709), after resigning the see of York, St Acca, to whom St Bede dedicated several of his writings, and Tiderft, who died c. 820 at the time of the Danish incursions. Tiderft had no successor, and Hexham was merged into the diocese of Lindisfarne, which was transferred c. 883 to Chester-le-Street, and then in 995 to Durham.
In 1850, when Pius IX restored the Catholic hierarchy in England, he reconstituted the diocese of Hexham, to whose name was added on 23 May 1861 also Newcastle, in which city stands the fine Gothic-style cathedral, the work of Pugin (1844), dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It comprises the former dioceses of Durham and Carlisle and the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Durham. Its first bishop was William Hogarth, formerly vicar apostolic of the Northern District, who died in 1866. Among his successors are remembered Henry O’Callaghan (1888–89), formerly rector of the English College in Rome (1867–88), and Thomas Wilkinson (1889–1909). To this diocese belonged Sts Bede, Cuthbert, Oswald, Wilfrid, Eata, and many others; also the blessed martyrs Thomas Percy (1572), John Boste (1594), and others. Near Durham is the famous Ushaw Seminary; there is preserved the episcopal ring of St Cuthbert, which the bishop wears at sacred ordinations.
The diocese is under the patronage of Our Lady Immaculate and St Cuthbert.