SAN SEBASTIANO DE RIO DE JANEIRO, ARCHDIOCESE OF. — In the federal district of Brazil. It is part of the ecclesiastical province of the same name, which also includes the dioceses of Niterói, Espírito Santo, Barra do Piraí, Campos, and Valença. The archdiocese covers an area of 1,350 sq. km., with approximately 2,000,000 inhabitants. It has 105 parishes, 250 diocesan priests and 286 religious priests, 65 male religious communities and 145 female ones, a major and minor seminary, a Catholic university, numerous colleges run by religious orders, and other cultural centers, social works, etc. The patron saint is St. Sebastian.
I. HISTORY
The Bay of Rio was discovered on 19 January 1502 by Portuguese explorers, among whom was Vespucci, who believed it to be the mouth of a great river (River of January). Despite the beauty, wealth of the region, and the excellent harbor it offered, no colony was founded by the discoverers until they became aware of the establishment of a Huguenot republic by French emigrants led by Nicolas de Villegagnon, who had allied themselves with the indigenous peoples and were making extensive use of the region’s commercial advantages. Driven by religious and patriotic zeal, the Portuguese fought and finally expelled the French, then establishing a village (1567) which, in honor of the saint whose feast was celebrated on the day of victory and in honor of the King of Portugal, was named São Sebastião. The Jesuits who accompanied the expedition and directed the first constructions devoted themselves to the education of the indigenous peoples and soon after established a college in the center of the emerging city, whose first rector was the famous Father Manuel da Nóbrega.Rio, which in 1572 was already the seat of the southern government of Brazil, three years later was chosen as the seat of a *prelatura nullius* (bull *In supereminenti militantis Ecclesiae* of 19 July 1575); elevated on 16 November 1676 to a suffragan diocese of Salvador (bull *Romani Pontificis pastorali sollicitudo*), its territory originally encompassed all of southern Brazil and part of the west, as far as the great division made by the papal brief *Candor lucis aeternae* of 6 December 1745, which gave rise to the dioceses of São Paulo, Mariana, and the *prelature nullius* of Cuiabá and Goiás. For political reasons, however, shortly after this division, Rio regained all the regions from Santa Catarina to the Río de la Plata, which were governed by a vicar general until the creation of the diocese of Porto Alegre in 1848. In 1763, Rio became the capital of the State of Brazil, i.e., the seat of the viceroys, who did much to promote its prosperity, and later became a Portuguese metropolis, hosting for thirteen years the dynasty and government that Napoleon expelled from Lisbon.
Along with the radical improvements that the city underwent in the last forty years, there was a growing religious progress in the diocese, which the bull *Ad universas orbis ecclesias* of 27 April 1892 raised to the status of metropolitan see of the ecclesiastical province of southern Brazil, its remaining territory being subdivided with the creation of the dioceses of Petrópolis (now Niterói) and Espírito Santo. The most significant religious events in Rio in recent years have been the National Eucharistic Congress of the centenary (1922), the coronation of the Madonna Apa—
