HEXHAM AND NEWCASTLE, Diocese of. - In the province of Liverpool (England). The diocese has an area of 7,700 sq km with a population of 2,242,701 inhabitants, of whom 247,234 are Catholics distributed in 148 parishes served by 329 diocesan priests and 38 regulars, 8 male religious orders and congregations and 18 female communities; in 1948 there were 588 conversions. The episcopal residence is at Newcastle on 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 at Hexham, and appointed St. Eata "bishop of the Bernicians." After 3 years Bernicia was subdivided; St. Eata remained bishop of Lindisfarne, while Trumbert became bishop of Hexham, and was 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 as far as the Tees. Among the successors of St. Eata were St. John of Beverley (687-705), St. Wilfrid (705-709), after he had resigned the see of York, St. Acca, to whom St. Bede dedicated several of his writings, and Tidfert, who died ca. the year 820 at the time of the Danish incursions. Tidfert had no successor and Hexham had to be merged into the diocese of Lindisfarne, which was transferred ca. the year 883 to Chester-le-Street, and then in 995 to Durham.
In 1850, when Pius IX restored the Catholic hierarchy in England, he re-established the diocese of Hexham, to whose name that of Newcastle was joined on 23 May 1861, in which city is found the beautiful Cathedral in Gothic style, the work of Pugin (1844), dedicated to Mary Most Holy. 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; furthermore the martyrs Bl. Thomas Percy (1572), Bl. John Boste (1594) and others. Near Durham is found the famous Seminary of Ushaw; 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 of St. Cuthbert.