LA PAZ, Archdiocese of. - City and archdiocese in Bolivia, capital of the province of the same name. The archdiocese comprises the entire department of the same name and the province of Magdalena in the department of El Berni.
It has an area of 111,567 sq km with 1,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 980,000 are Catholics. It has 122 parishes, served by 48 diocesan priests and 86 regulars, one seminary, 12 male religious communities and 14 female (Annuario Pontificio 1951, pp. 239-40).
The city of L. P. was founded in 1548 as Nuestra Señora de la Paz. The diocese was created on 4 July 1608 by Paul V by dismemberment from the diocese of Charcas. The first bishop appointed, Diego Zambrana y Guzman, did not take possession of it; he was followed by the Dominican Domenico Balderrama, Feliciano de la Vega, Juan de Queipo Llano y Valdes, who completed the first cathedral; the first synodal constitutions were published by Bishop Juan de Dios Bosque (1874-90). The cathedral N. S. de la Paz was begun in the 17th century, but the work proceeded very slowly; in the 19th century it was resumed, and its architects were first the Bolivian p. M. Sanauja, then Vespignani, then Campanovo.
Other churches: that of St. Dominic, erected in 1590; the oldest is that of St. Sebastian, first dedicated to St. Peter; furthermore the church and convent of the Conception, the church and convent of La Merced; the church of St. Joseph has attached to it a flourishing college of the Jesuits; the churches of St. Teresa, of St. Raphael, of the Good Shepherd, of the Holy Spirit, etc. Pope Pius XII, with the apostolic constitution Ad spirituale bonum fidelium of 18 June 1943, separated L. P. from the ecclesiastical province of Sucre and elevated L. P. to a metropolitan see, assigning to it as suffragans the dioceses of Cochabamba and Oruro. Then the same Pontiff, with the apostolic constitution Quod Christiane plebis of 25 Dec. 1949, by dismemberment of the archdiocese of L. P., created the prelature nullius of Corocoro, as a suffragan of L. P.
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Enrico Josi