PORTSMOUTH, DIOCESIS of. — City in England. The diocese (a suffragan of Westminster) was founded in 1882 by the division of the diocese of Southwark. It comprises the counties of Hampshire and Berkshire, together with the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands. Its patrons are Our Lady Immaculate and s. Edmondo of Canterbury. It has approximately 124 parishes, served by 133 secular priests and 254 religious.
It contains the abbeys of Douai (Woolhampton), Quarr (ancient, refounded in 1908), Farnborough (1884), belonging to Benedictine monks, and Ryde (belonging to nuns, 1882); altogether there are 64 religious communities (43 in 1910). It has 148 public churches and 33 private and institutional ones. The population (1931 census) amounts to 1,399,969 inhabitants, including approximately 60,000 Catholics. There are 36 elementary schools and 38 other schools; 3 hospitals and 6 orphanages. In 1949 there were 376 conversions, 256 infant baptisms, and 350 marriages.
The diocese is more or less identical with the ancient diocese of Winchester, destroyed by Elizabeth in 1559; since 1940 its bishop has been Mgr. John Henry King: his predecessors were John Vertue (1882–1900), John Baptist Cahill (1900–10), and William Timothy Cotter (1910–40). The dio-
cese of Winchester dated from 635; among its bishops were s. Swithun (852–62), s. Elphage (984–1006), William of Wykeham (1367–1404), Waynfte (1447–86), Richard Fox (1500–1509), Thomas Wolsey (1529–30), Stephen Gardiner (1531–55), and the last, John White (1556–60). In the Cathedral, dedicated to s. Swithun, the marriage of the English queen Maria to Filippo II of Spain was solemnized in 1554. It is also a magnificent example of the Romanesque and Gothic architecture of the 12th–15th centuries. Also noteworthy are the churches (formerly the abbeys of Romsey and Dorchester, the latter a cathedral church from 634 to 1085, when it was transferred to Lincoln), and the ruins of the abbeys of Abingdon, Beaulieu, Netley, and Reading. Among the ruins of the last, Pugin built a Catholic church in 1837. William Wykeham founded the collegiate school of Winchester in 1378, and the devout king Enrico VI that of Eton in 1441.
During the apostasy of the 16th century Hampshire remained largely faithful. Under Enrico VIII, the ven. Thomas Dingley and the blessed John Rugge were martyred in 1539, and the blessed Margaret Pole, mother of Cardinal Pole, in 1541; under Elizabeth, the blessed John Slade and John Body (1583), Thomas Hemerford and John Mundyn (1584), Swithun Wells, Lawrence Humphreys, Roger Dickinson (a native of Lincolnshire), and Ralph Milnes (1591), and the venerables John Adams (1586), Thomas Pilchard (1587), Robert Nutter (1600), Nicholas Tichborne (1601), and Thomas Tichborne (1602). The blessed Robert Anderton and William Marsden, from Lancashire, were also captured and martyred on the Isle of Wight in 1586. The blessed Anne Lyne lived for several years in Hampshire. The pupils of the school of Winchester were forced by military violence to adopt Anglican worship in 1559; the prisons then filled up. In 1645 the Catholic garrison of Basing House, which opposed the Puritans, was burned. In the 18th century Richard Challoner, apostolic vicar of the “London District,” visited Berkshire and Hampshire in 1741 and 1749. The priest John Milner went on mission to Winchester between 1779 and 1803. From 1903 many religious men and women found refuge there from the Masonic persecution in France, among them the English Benedictine monks who came from Douai to Woolhampton in 1903.
During the Second World War (1939–45) the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans; several Catholic churches were destroyed and others damaged. In 1946 many previously unknown letters of Robert Parsons and others were found at Milton. In the same year the body of the devout Richard Challoner was transferred to Westminster Cathedral from the tomb of the Catholic Barrett family of Milton.