PORTSMOUTH, Diocese of. - City in England. The diocese (suffragan of Westminster) was founded in 1882 by dismemberment of the diocese of Southwark. It comprises the counties of Hampshire and Berkshire with the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands. Its patrons are Our Lady Immaculate and St. Edmund of Canterbury. It has about 124 parishes, served by 133 secular priests and 254 religious.
It contains the abbeys of Douai (Woolhampton), Quarr (ancient, refounded in 1908), Farnborough (1884), of the Benedictine monks, and Ryde (of the nuns, 1882); in all there are 64 religious communities (in 1910, 43). It has 148 public, private and institutional churches, 33. The population (census of 1931) amounts to 1,399,969 inhabitants, with about 60,000 Catholics. Elementary schools 36, others 38; 3 hospitals, 6 orphanages. In 1949 there were 376 conversions, 256 infant baptisms, 350 marriages.
The diocese is approximately identical to the ancient diocese of Winchester, destroyed by Elizabeth in 1559; since 1940 the bishop is Msgr. John Henry King: his predecessors were John Vertue (1882-1900), John Baptist Cahill (1900-10) and William Timothy Cotter (1910-40). The diocese of Winchester dated from 635, among whose bishops were St. Swithun (852-62), St. Elphege (984-1006), William of Wykeham (1367-1404), Waynflete (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 St. Swithun, the marriage of the English queen Mary to Philip II of Spain was solemnized in 1554. Moreover it is a magnificent example of the Romanesque and Gothic architecture of the 12th-15th centuries. Also notable are the churches (formerly 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 Henry VI that of Eton in 1441.
In the apostasy of the 16th century Hampshire remained largely faithful. Under Henry VIII the Ven. Thomas Dingley and the Blessed John Rugge were martyred in 1539, the Blessed Margaret Pole, mother of Card. 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 Venerable John Adams (1586), Thomas Pilchard (1587), Robert Nutter (1600), Nicholas Tichborne (1601), and Thomas Tichborne (1602). Also the Blessed Robert Anderton and William Marsden, from Lancashire, were captured and martyred on the Isle of Wight in 1586. The Blessed Anne Lyne lived for some years in Hampshire. The pupils of the school of Winchester were forced by military violence to Anglican worship in 1559; then the prisons filled up. In 1645 the Catholic garrison of Basing House, which opposed the Puritans, was burned. In the 18th century Richard Challoner, vicar apostolic 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 Masonic persecution in France, among them the English Benedictine monks who came from Douai to Woolhampton in 1903.
In 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 hitherto 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.
Bibliography15 works
Enrico E. G. Rope