Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington


The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is a particular church of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. It comprises the District of Columbia and Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince George's and Saint Mary's counties in the state of Maryland. It was originally part of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
This Archdiocese crosses a state line. Three other U.S. Roman-rite dioceses also do this, but they each have territory in more than one state.
The Archdiocese of Washington is home to The Catholic University of America, the only national university operated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institution of higher education in the country.
In addition, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a minor basilica dedicated to the nation's patroness, the Immaculate Conception, is located within and administered by it, and it is not the Archdiocesan cathedral. The cathedral of the archdiocese is the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown Washington.

Prelature

The ordinary of the Archdiocese of Washington is an archbishop whose cathedra is the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in the City of Washington and who is metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of :Category:Roman Catholic Ecclesiastical Province of Washington|Washington. Its sole suffragan see is the Diocese of Saint Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands.
The first Archbishop of Washington was Michael Joseph Curley in 1939. Eight years later, on November 15, 1947, the archdiocese received its first residential archbishop, with the appointment of Patrick Aloysius O'Boyle. Donald William Cardinal Wuerl served as the most recent ordinary of the Archdiocese. Wuerl resigned as Archbishop of Washington on October 12, 2018 in the wake of revelations about his poor handling of incidents of sex abuse when he served as Bishop of Pittsburgh. However, Wuerl still led the Archdiocese as apostolic administrator until a successor was installed.
On March 28, 2019, rumors were reported that Wilton Daniel Gregory of Atlanta had been offered the position of Archbishop of Washington. On April 4, 2019, his appointment by Pope Francis was confirmed by the Vatican. The same day, the Archdiocese of Washington announced that Archbishop Gregory would indeed be installed as the seventh Archbishop of Washington. Gregory, who was originally scheduled to be installed on May 17, 2019, was installed on May 21, 2019, becoming the first African American to lead the Archdiocese of Washington.

History

On March 25, 1634, the first Catholic Mass in the English-speaking colonies was celebrated by Fr. Andrew White, S.J., on St. Clement's Island, Maryland, in what is now part of the Archdiocese of Washington. The Catholic founders of the Maryland settlement then established the colony as a place of religious freedom. During the colonial era, however, when others took power, Catholics would become a persecuted people suffering the wrath of oppression allowed by local penal laws.
Upon the founding of the United States, a Jesuit priest, Father John Carroll, was elected head of the missionary territory of the United States. In 1789 the Diocese of Baltimore was established with Carroll as its first bishop, and given ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the entire nation.
On July 22, 1939, Pope Pius XII separated the cities of Washington and Baltimore, creating two archdioceses, under the oversight of one archbishop in persona episcopi. This process of separation was officially concluded on November 15, 1947, with the appointment of Washington's first residential archbishop. The Archdiocese of Washington became a metropolitan see on October 12, 1965, when the Diocese of Saint Thomas became its first suffragan see.

Sex abuse scandal

On September 26, 2018, it was announced that the Archdiocese of Washington was now one of four American Catholic dioceses under investigation by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for reports of sex abuse. Accused former cardinal and Washington archbishop Theodore McCarrick had served in each diocese. On October 15, 2018, the Archdiocese of Washington released the names of 31 clergy who served in the archdiocese and were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors since 1948. On August 15, 2019, archdiocesan priest Urbano Vazquez was convicted of four counts of sexual abuse involving two girls.
In October 2019, the Washington Post reported that police were investigating an allegation that the former Bishop of Wheeling-Charleston, Michael Joseph Bransfield, had molested a 9-year-old girl during a September 2012 pilgrimage to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., while on a trip led by Bransfield. Prior to being appointed bishop of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston in 2004, Bransfield long served at the Basilica, being named assistant director and director of liturgy, director of finance, and director at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The Archdiocese of Washington was subpoenaed for documents in connection with the investigation. Bransfield denied the allegation. In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Bransfield had paid $350,000 to Vatican and church officials during a sex abuse probe against him. The "hush money" payments involved acts of sex abuse he reportedly committed when he was at the Washington Basilica in the 1980s. The same report also revealed that during his time as Archbishop of Washington, McCarrick used his "Archbishop's Special Fund" to make similar hush money payments in order to cover acts of sex abuse he had committed in other Catholic dioceses. The archdiocese took in nearly a third less money in its 2019 annual fundraising appeal, which had been renamed from "Cardinal's Appeal" to "Annual Appeal", in the wake of the scandals.

Bishops

The list of bishops and their terms of service:

Archbishops of Washington

  1. Michael Joseph Curley, concurrently the Archbishop of Baltimore
  2. Cardinal Patrick Aloysius O'Boyle
  3. Cardinal William Wakefield Baum, appointed Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education and later Major Penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary
  4. Cardinal James Aloysius Hickey
  5. Theodore Edgar McCarrick
  6. Cardinal Donald William Wuerl
  7. Wilton Daniel Gregory

    Auxiliary bishops

Schools

The archdiocese centralized school administration as part of its Center City Consortium, which was established in 1997.
; High schools

Colleges

Colleges and universities

In addition to the nearly four dozen of its parishes which have their own cemeteries, the archdiocese owns and operates five major cemeteries:
Two former parish cemeteries are also operated by the archdiocese: