Majorca (Mallorca), Diocese of

MAJORCA (MALLORCA), DIOCESE OF. - It embraces the island of this name and that of Cabrera in the Balearic Islands (Spain). In 1851 the see of Iviza was united to it, which was separated again in 1927. Its area is 4,306 sq. km.; the inhabitants number 327,119, all Catholics; the parishes 123; the diocesan priests 386; the regulars 158; there is a conciliar seminary (of St. Peter the Apostle); 37 male and 190 female religious communities (1949). The episcopal residence is in Palma de M. It is a suffragan of Valencia.

Little information is available on the Christian antiquity of this region, and the same obscurity surrounds the origin of the diocese. It seems, however, that in the 5th century there was a bishop who, during the Vandal domination, would have been under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan see of Sardinia. At a Council held at Carthage in 480 there appears a Helias de Maiorica. The first certain information about the Christianity of M. is a bull of Pope Romanus (year 897), in which certain possessions that they enjoyed in the Balearic Islands are confirmed to the episcopal see of Gerona and its diocese. These, however, in the middle of the 11th century, depended on the bishop of Barcelona, as some curious privileges prove that the prelate Guislaberto obtained from the Moorish king Mugend of Denia. Since the nearby Mediterranean coasts of Catalonia suffered so much from the incursions of the Saracens of the Balearics, the count of Barcelona, Raymond Berengar III, in 1114 wished to conquer them for the Catholic religion; but the great military expedition, in which the Barcelona bishop Raymond Guillem died, succeeded only halfway; nevertheless Pope Paschal II congratulated the count. In 1205 Innocent III promised King Peter II of Aragon that he would institute an episcopal see at M. after he had freed it from Mohammedan power, which happened under his son James I in 1228. However, the diocese was not erected until 1238, whose first bishop was Raymond of Torelles, who held a Synod there in 1250 and began the Cathedral. The first prelates were immediately subject to the Apostolic See, but after the erection in 1492 of the province of Valencia, M. was aggregated to it as a suffragan. The Cathedral rises on the site occupied before 1229 by the mosque of Almudaina and according to the promise made by King James before the conquest. The style is Lombard Gothic, with some modifications that embellish it; the three naves are most graceful. It is the first Spanish cathedral where the canonical choir was transferred from the center to the apse and the episcopal throne to the original place. It is dedicated to M. S. but Assunta.

Among the bishops are remembered Egidio Sanchez Muñoz (antipope Clement VIII), and Rodrigo Borja, the future Alexander VI. In the diocese is the Cistercian abbey of Nuestra Señora de la Real, inaugurated in 1236 by Nunio Sana (Cottineau, II, col. 1715). Patroness of the diocese is the Immaculate Conception.

Giuseppe M. Pou y Marti