San Francisco, Archdiocese of (SAN FRANCISCO, ARCIDIOCESI DI) - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. X, p. 1038

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

SAN FRANCISCO, ARCHDIOCESE of. — Archdiocese and city in the State of California (U.S.A.). S. F. now (1951) has a population of 3,031,560 inhabitants scattered over an area of 16,856 sq. miles. Catholics number 725,000. There are 873 priests, of whom 405 are religious, belonging to 13 different congregations; 200 parishes, 153 chapels, 40 missions, and 21 stations. There are also 149 brothers and 39 women’s congregations (2,339 sisters), 319 seminarians in the two seminaries, and

Article illustration — (courtesy of Msgr. A. P. Frutos) SAN FRANCISCO IN CALIFORNIA – Church of St. Francis called «Mission Dolores» (1776).

498 religious in the 9 houses of study. The Jesuits are responsible for two universities: University of St. Francis (St. Ignatius College) and University of Santa Barbara.

The archdiocese of S. F. was erected on 29 July 1853. The ecclesiastical province of S. F. today comprises the dioceses of Reno, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, and the apostolic vicariates of Honolulu and Guam.

The Franciscans landed with Cortes at the Bay of S. Cruz on 3 May 1535 and, under the direction of Fr. Martin de la Coruña, began the mission of California. The Bay of San Francisco was discovered on 1 Nov. 1769 by Portola, and the mission of S. F., also called Dolores, was founded on 9 Oct. 1776. For more than half a century the mission flourished under the direction of the Franciscans. In 1834 it suffered from the secularization carried out by the Mexican government and fell into ruin.

On 1 Apr. 1840 the Holy See erected the diocese of the two Californias, and Msgr. Francesco García Diego y Moreno was appointed its bishop. Thanks to the bishop’s intervention with the Mexican government, the secularization law was repealed. When Upper California became part of the United States, the Mexican government refused permission for an American to govern the Church of Lower California. Consequently, Pius IX detached the entire Mexican territory from the diocese of Monterey or S. Diego, erected by Gregory XVI on 27 Apr. 1840, and the S. Congr. of Propaganda divided Upper California into two dioceses (29 July 1853): S. F. and Monterey; at the same time S. F. was raised to an archdiocese (Monterey became its suffragan), and Msgr. Giuseppe Sadoc Alemany, bishop of Monterey, was chosen as archbishop of S. F.

The archdiocese of S. F. was divided several times: in 1861, to form the apostolic vicariate of Merysville, which subsequently became the diocese of Grass Valley on 3 Feb. 1868; on 28 May 1886, to form the diocese of Sacramento, with the addition of 10 counties in California and 1 in Nevada.

BIBL.: J. Gilmary Shea, Hist. of the Cath. Church in the Un. States, IV, Nuova York 1893, pp. 703-708; T. F. Meehan, s. V. in Cath. Enc., XIII, pp. 439-43; The Official Cath. Directory, 1959, Nuova York 1950, p. 202. Castone Carriere