SAN FRANCISCO, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - Archdiocese and city in the State of California (U.S.A.). S. F. today (1951) has a population of 3,031,560 inhabitants spread over an area of 16,856 sq. miles. Catholics number 725,000. There are 873 priests, of whom 405 are religious, from 13 different congregations; 200 parishes, 153 chapels, 40 missions and 21 stations. There are furthermore 149 brothers and 39 female congregations (2,339 nuns), 319 seminarians in the two seminaries and 498 religious in the 9 scholasticates. The Jesuits are in charge of two universities: University of San Francisco (St. Ignatius College) and University of Santa Barbara.

SAN FRANCISCO IN CALIFORNIA - Church of St. Francis known as the "Mission Dolores" (1776).(courtesy of Msgr. A. P. Frutos)

The archdiocese of S. F. was erected on July 29, 1853. The ecclesiastical province of S. F. is today composed of 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 May 3, 1535 and began the mission of California under the direction of Fr. Martin de la Coruña. The bay of San Francisco was discovered on Nov. 1, 1769 by Portola and the mission of S. F., also called Dolores, was founded on Oct. 9, 1776. For more than half a century the mission prospered under the direction of the Franciscans. In 1834 it suffered from the secularization of the Mexican government and fell into ruin.

On Apr. 1, 1840 the Holy See erected the diocese of the two Californias and Msgr. Francisco García Diego y Moreno was named its bishop. Thanks to the bishop's intervention with the Mexican government, the secularization law was abolished. 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 Apr. 27, 1840, and the Congregation of Propaganda divided upper California into two dioceses (July 29, 1853): S. F. and Monterey; at the same time S. F. was elevated to an archdiocese (Monterey became its suffragan) and Msgr. Joseph 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 Marysville, which later became the diocese of Grass Valley on Feb. 3, 1868; on May 28, 1886, to form the diocese of Sacramento with the addition of 10 counties in California and 1 in Nevada.

Bibliography3 works

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

Castone Carriere

@incollection{ec10_san_francisco_arcidiocesi_di, author = {Carrière, Gastone}, title = {San Francisco, arcidiocesi di}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {X}, pages = {1756--1758}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1953}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/san-francisco-arcidiocesi-di} }

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San Francisco, Archdiocese of

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