Archdiocese of Philadelphia to celebrate its 200th anniversary

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, one of the oldest and largest dioceses in the nation, will celebrate its 200th anniversary today with bell-ringing and a birthday cake.

Pope Benedict XVI's first papal visit to the United States, which begins in one week, will celebrate the diocese's creation in 1808, along with the creation that year of the dioceses of New York, Boston and Bardstown, Ky.

Benedict will visit Washington on April 15 and spend three days in New York City before returning to Rome on April 20. Although he is not visiting the Philadelphia area, he, too, will be celebrating a birthday; he turns 82 on April 16.

Philadelphia had just 11 priests and 30,000 Catholics - about 3 percent of the local population - when Pope Pius VII broke up what was then the national Diocese of Baltimore into more manageable entities. The new archdiocese then comprised all of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the southern half of New Jersey.

Today, 11 other dioceses exist in the original Diocese of Philadelphia, which became an archdiocese in 1875. It now counts 1.48 million members in Philadelphia, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Bucks Counties, making it the seventh largest Catholic archdiocese or diocese in the nation.

(Little Bardstown, now the Diocese of Louisville, went on to spawn 40 dioceses, including Chicago, Detroit and Cincinnati.)

Locally, Catholics account for about 38 percent of the five counties' population, and are served by about 882 diocesan and religious order priests in 270 parishes. Philadelphia's archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, has asked all the parishes and schools of the archdiocese to mark the occasion by ringing their bells 200 times for two minutes at 2 p.m.

Rigali will also celebrate the day by cutting a giant birthday cake on the steps of the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul at 18th Street and the Parkway. He will be accompanied by school children, laity, clergy, and members of religious orders.

He will also mark the close of the archdiocese's year-long bicentennial with a 4 p.m. Mass on Sunday at the Pavilion at Villanova University. It is open to the public.