LERIDA, DIOCESE of. — In Spain, in the province of the same name. The earliest information concerning this diocese (Ilerda) dates from the sixth century, and its first bishop was a certain Pietro; it is not known, however, what boundaries it encompassed. At present it has an area of 7,848 sq. km., with 222,707 inhabitants, of whom 222,667 are Catholics (1949), served by 261 diocesan priests and 2 religious priests; one major seminary and one minor seminary, 9 male and 44 female religious communities. It is a suffragan of Tarragona. The patron saint of the diocese is St. Giovanni Battista.
Its boundaries are the dioceses of Barbastro and Urgel to the north, Solsona and Urgel to the east, Tarragona, Tortosa and Huesca to the south, and Saragozza to the north-west. Of its 261 parishes, 129 are in the civil province of Huesca, 2 in that of Saragozza, and the remainder in the province of the same name. After the Moorish invasion in the eighth century, its bishops wandered through the regions near the Pyrenees, and thus came to be called « Pallarienses » or « Ripacurcienses », until 957, when the cathedral of Roda was consecrated by Archbishop Aimerico of Narbonne; there Bishop Odesindo and his immediate successors established their see. By virtue of a bull of Urban II of 1099, confirmed by another of Paschal II in 1100, this see was transferred to Barbastro, whose church, in the following year, that is, after the city had been completely conquered by King Pietro I of Aragon, was consecrated by Bishop Poncio. Finally, after the Saracens had been expelled from L. in 1149 through the efforts of Count Raimondo Berengario of Barcelona, the episcopal see definitively returned to its original site; nevertheless, many bishops subsequently called themselves « Ilerdenses et Rotenses ». The old cathedral was erected in 1203 through the efforts of the Aragonese king Pietro and Count Ermengardo II of Urgel, who held joint lordship over the city, under Bishop G. de Camporells, and was consecrated in 1279 by G. de Moncada. Its style is Romanesque-Gothic, very elegant, especially in the crossing, the façade and the cloister. Unfortunately, in 1707, during the war of succession to the Spanish crown, it was converted into a fortress and badly disfigured, serving down to our own times as a barracks; but in 1918 the government declared it a national monument and subsequently restored II. The new cathedral, begun in 1761 and consecrated in 1781, stands in the lower part of the city; it is Neoclassical in style and, like the old one, is dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin. The archive is very rich. This diocese suffered greatly in the revolution of 1956: the cathedral and a great many other churches were burned, and the bishop and half the clergy were killed; efforts are currently being made to repair such devastation.