Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh
The Diocese of Pittsburgh is a diocese of the Catholic Church in Western Pennsylvania in the United States. It was established on August 11, 1843. The diocese is a suffragan diocese of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The cathedral church is Saint Paul Cathedral in Pittsburgh. The bishop of Pittsburgh is Mark Eckman.
Territory
The Diocese of Pittsburgh includes 61 parish-groupings in the counties of Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Greene, Lawrence, and Washington, an area of. It had a Catholic population of 625,490 in 2022. As of July 2021, the diocese had 194 active priests.History
1750 to 1800
In 1754, the first mass within the present-day Diocese of Pittsburgh was celebrated at Fort Duquesne in present-day Pittsburgh by a French Franciscan chaplain. A chapel was built at the fort, dedicated to the Virgin Mary under the title of "The Assumption of Our Lady of the Beautiful River." When the French destroyed the fort in 1758, the mission became a ruin. The region passed into British rule with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The region became part of the Province of Pennsylvania.Unlike the other British colonies in North America, the Province of Pennsylvania did not ban Catholics from the colony or threaten priests with imprisonment. However, the colony required any Catholics seeing public office to take an oath to Protestantism. In 1784, a year after the end of the American Revolution, Pope Pius VI erected the Apostolic Prefecture of United States of America, including all of the new United States.
In 1789, Pius VI converted the prefecture to the Diocese of Baltimore, covering all of the United States. With the passage of the US Bill of Rights in 1791, Catholics received full freedom of worship.
1800 to 1850
In 1808, Pope Pius VII erected the Diocese of Philadelphia, covering all of Pennsylvania. In 1843, the four American bishops and one archbishop met in the Fifth Provincial Council of Baltimore. They recommended that the Vatican erect a Diocese of Pittsburgh and nominated Michael O'Connor, vicar general of Western Pennsylvania and pastor of St. Paul's Church in Pittsburgh, to be appointed the first bishop.The Vatican erected the Diocese of Pittsburgh on August 11, 1843, by taking its territory from the Diocese of Philadelphia. The new diocese covered all of Western Pennsylvania. The pope appointed O'Connor as bishop. After his consecration in Rome, O'Connor traveled to Ireland to recruit clergy for his new diocese. He found eight seminarians from Maynooth College, a seminary in Maynooth, and seven Sisters of Mercy from Dublin. O'Connor arrived in Pittsburgh in December 1843.
In 1844, O'Connor founded a girls' academy and St. Paul's orphan asylum, a chapel for African Americans, the Pittsburgh Catholic and St. Michael's Seminary. To serve the German immigrants in his diocese, he welcomed the Benedictine monks, who founded Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, the first Benedictine monastery in the United States.
To further education of Irish-Catholic immigrants in the diocese, he invited the Franciscan Brothers of Mountbellew in Ireland to come to the United States. They established the first community of religious brothers in the United States in Loretto.
1850 to 1900
In 1853, the Vatican erected the Diocese of Erie, taking the northern counties from the Diocese of Pittsburgh. After O'Connor resigned in 1860, Michael Domenec from Philadelphia was consecreated as the second bishop of Pittsburgh. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, the diocese went heavily in debt to finance expansion projects. The Panic of 1873 resulted in a debt crisis for the diocese.In 1876, Pius IX erected the Diocese of Allegheny, taking several counties from the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and named Domenec as its first bishop. He was succeeded by John Tuigg of Pittsburgh.
During his tenure as bishop, Tuigg succeeded in stabilizing the diocesan finances. The Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost, the predecessor of Duquesne University, was founded in 1878 in Pittsburgh by a group of Holy Ghost priests from Germany. After Tuigg suffered his first stroke, Pope Leo XIII appointed Richard Phelan of Pittsburgh as coadjutor bishop in 1885.
In July 1889, the Vatican reversed course, suppressed the Diocese of Allegheny and reintegrated all of its territory back into the Diocese of Pittsburgh. After Tuigg died in December 1889, Phelan succeeded him as bishop. During this period, Catholic immigrants of many nationalities flooded into Western Pennsylvania to work the mines and steel mills. Phelan set up new national parishes with pastors who could speak the immigrants' native languages.
1900 to 1980
In 1901, the Vatican erected the Diocese of Altoona, taking its territory from the Diocese of Pittsburgh. In 1903, Pope Pius X named Regis Canevin of Pittsburgh as coadjutor bishop in that diocese. Canevin succeeded Phelan after his death in 1904. Canevin died in 1921.Hugh Charles Boyle of Pittsburgh was the sixth bishop of that diocese in 1921. During his 29-year tenure, Boyle sponsored a comprehensive school-building program in the diocese. The Brothers of the Christian Schools opened Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh in 1927. The Sisters of Mercy opened Carlow College, a women's college, in Pittsburgh in 1929. It is now Carlow University
In 1948, Monsignor John Dearden of Pittsburgh was appointed coadjutor bishop of the diocese by Pope Pius XII to assist Boyle. When Boyle died in 1950, Dearden automatically succeeded him as bishop. The Vatican in 1951 erected the Diocese of Greensburg, taking its territory from the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Dearden was appointed archbishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit in 1958
To replace Dearden, Pius XII named Bishop John Wright from the Diocese of Worcester. Wright attended the Second Vatican Council in Rome. Following the council's advancements in ecumenism, he believed that an "immediate unity in good works and charity" would arise between Catholics and Protestants. In 1961, Wright opened the Bishop's Latin School in Pittsburgh as the pre-seminary high school of the diocese. La Roche College was founded in McCandless, Pennsylvania, in 1963 by the Sisters of Divine Providence as a private college for religious sisters. Today it is La Roche University.
Wright promoted music and culture during his time in Pittsburgh. He commissioned the composer Mary Lou Williams, to perform a jazz mass at a local Catholic school, and helped her to establish the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival. In 1969, Pope Paul VI appointed Wright as the prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome.
The next bishop of Pittsburgh was Auxiliary Bishop Vincent Leonard of Pittsburgh, appointed by Paul VI in 1969. During his tenure, Leonard became one of the first American bishops to release diocesan financial reports to the public. He also established a due-process system to allow Catholics to appeal any administrative decision they believed was a violation of canon law.
1980 to 2000
Leonard resigned as bishop of Pittsburgh in 1983, due to severe arthritis. Pope John Paul II then named Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Bevilacqua of the Diocese of Brooklyn as the tenth bishop of Pittsburgh that same year.In 1986, Bevilacqua banned women from participating in the Holy Thursday foot-washing service. He said that the service was a re-enactment of the Last Supper, in which Jesus only washed men's feet. After pushback from Catholic women and from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bevilacqua relented, allowing individual pastors to decide. However, he refused to attend services that allowed the washing of women's feet. In 1987, John Paul II appointed Bevilacqua as archbishop of Philadelphia.
The next bishop of Pittsburgh was Auxiliary Bishop Donald Wuerl from the Archdiocese of Seattle, appointed by John Paul II in 1988. Despite the weak financial condition of the diocese, Wuerl decided to expand health services. Wuerl worked with hospitals and community groups to create a group home for people suffering from HIV/AIDS. In 2003, Wuerl conducted a successful $2.5 million fundraising campaign to create the Catholic Charities Free Health Care Center in Pittsburgh. The clinic served the uninsured working poor.
Wuerl reorganized the diocese in response to demographic changes, the decline of the local steel industry, and the diocese's weak financial position. He closed 73 church buildings, including 37 churches, and reduced 331 parishes to 214 parishes through mergers. Wuerl was named archbishop of the Archdiocese of Washington in 2006.
2000 to present
appointed bishop David Zubik from the Diocese of Green Bay as the twelfth bishop of Pittsburgh in 2007. Between 2005 and 2010, the diocese closed 16 elementary schools.In 2012, the diocese joined other parties in suing the Obama administration regarding the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The diocese objected to a regulation that would force Catholic hospitals and other such institutions to provide health insurance coverage of contraceptives to their employees. These cases were consolidated and made it to the Supreme Court as Zubik v. Burwell. The court vacated a lower court ruling and forced the cases back to the lower courts.
In 2015, Zubik announced On Mission for the Church ALIVE!, an initiative to start reorganizing parishes in 2018. The plan was to merge 188 parishes to 57 parish groupings served by clergy teams.
Zubik formulated the ALIVE! plan in response to decreasing mass attendance, a significant drop in offertory collections and a declining number of priests; by 2025 the diocese was projected to have a 50% drop in the number of priests from 2018.
In 2018, the diocese closed Saint Rosalia Academy in Greenfield. It also merged North American Martyrs School and Saint Bernadette School in Monroeville into the new Divine Mercy Academy. In 2020, the Pittsburgh-East Regional Catholic Elementary Schools closed East Catholic School in Forest Hills and Saint Maria Goretti in Bloomfield. PERCES also merged Saint Anne School in Castle Shannon, Saint Bernard School in Mount Lebanon, Our Lady of Grace School in Scott Township, and Saint Thomas More School in Bethel Park into one school program.