VARSaw (Warszawa), ARCHDIOCESE OF. — Archdiocese and capital city of Poland. It has an area of 12,400 sq. km., with a population of 1,990,000 inhabitants, of whom 1,652,000 are Catholics, distributed in 297 parishes, served by 481 diocesan priests and 199 regular clergy; it has two seminaries, major and minor, 30 male religious communities and 124 female (Ann. Pont. 1953, p. 443).
The diocese was erected by Pope Pius VI on 15 Dec. 1798, by detaching it from the diocese of Poznań; the first bishop was Msgr. G. Boneza Miaskowski (d. 1804). The same Pontiff, following the Concordat with Emperor Alexander I, elevated the diocese to metropolitan status with the bulls Militantis Ecclesiae of 11 March 1817 and Ex imposita nobis of 30 June 1818. The first archbishop was Msgr. Fr. Skarbek Malczewski; Pope Pius VII then granted the Ordinary the title of Primas Regni Poloniae with the brief Romani Pontifices of 6 Oct. 1818. The present archbishop, Cardinal St. Wyszyński, has united “ad personam” the archiepiscopal see of Gniezno.
NOTABLE CHURCHES: St. John the Baptist (1392–98), collegiate from 1402, cathedral from 1798, with 9 chapels of historical value and various monuments; Our Lady in the New Town (1409), church and cloister of the Bernardines of the 15th century, rebuilt in 1533 and 1660, where the relics of Bl. Ladislaus of Gielniów, patron of Poland and Lithuania, are preserved (see SANDOMIERZ); the Holy Cross (1696), with various monuments and tombs of notable persons; St. Hyacinth (1604–38).
Warmund, Blessed — Sermon of V. to the people against Ardoin, blessing his brother and Eurardus, a person otherwise unknown, on the occasion, it seems, of the second excommunication (907–99). The text, preserved in the Liber benedictionum per totius anni circulum, compiled at