The Diocese of Saint Petersburg () is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church in the Tampa Bay region of Gulf Coast Florida.
The Diocese of Saint Petersburg is a suffragan diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Miami. Its mother church is St. Jude the Apostle Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Florida. As of 2023, the current bishop is Gregory Parkes.
Statistics
The Diocese of St. Petersburg comprises , encompassing Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco, Hernando, and Citrus counties. The principal cities are Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater.
As of 2023, the diocese had a total Catholic population of approximately 500,000, with 280,000 of them registered with the diocese.
History
1500 to 1800
In the mid-1500s, present day Florida became a Spanish colony. The first Catholic presence in the Tampa Bay are was the ill-fated mission of the Spanish missionary Reverend Luis de Cancer. He arrived by sea with several Dominican priests in present day Bradenton in 1549. Encountering a seemingly peaceful party of Tocobaga clan members, they decided to travel on to Tampa. Several of the priests went overland with the Tocobaga while Cáncer and the rest of the party sailed to meet them.
Arriving at Tampa Bay, Cáncer learned while still on his ship that the priests in the overland party had been slaughtered by their companions. Refusing advise to leave the area, Cáncer went ashore, where he too was murdered. The Spanish attempted to establish another mission in the Tampa Bay area in 1567, but it was soon abandoned.
After the signing of the 1763 Treaty of Paris to end the Seven Years War, the British took control of the Spanish colonies in Florida, prompting many Catholic settlers to leave. In 1783, after the end of the American Revolution, the British returned all of Florida to Spain and Catholic settlers began returning to the area.
In 1793, Pope Pius VI established the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas with jurisdiction over all of Spanish Florida.
1800 to 1900
In 1850, Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Savannah, which included all of Florida east of the Apalachicola River. Seven years later, the same pope move this Florida territory into a new Apostolic Vicariate of Florida and named Bishop Augustin Verot as vicar apostolic. Since the new vicariate had only three priests, Vérot travelled to France in 1859 to recruit more. He succeeded in bringing back seven priests. The first Catholic church in Tampa, St. Louis, was founded in 1859.
In 1870, Pius IX elevated the Vicariate of Florida into the Diocese of St. Augustine and named Vérot as its first bishop. The new diocese covered all of Florida except for the Florida Panhandle region. The Tampa Bay region would remain part of this diocese for the next 98 years.
The Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary founded the Academy of the Holy Names, a girls school in Tampa, in 1881. It was the first Catholic school on the Florida Gulf Coast.
Arizona jurist Edmund F. Dunne established the Catholic colony of San Antonio in Pasco County in the early 1880s. Residence in the community was originally restricted to practising Catholics; most of the settlers were Irish and German immigrants.
A yellow fever epidemic in Tampa in 1888 killed three of the resident priests in the area. Bishop John Moore then invited the Jesuit order from New Orleans to assume control of St. Louis Church. In succeeding years, as the area grew in population the Jesuits established more parishes and schools.
Benedictine monks and nuns entered the region in 1880s, founding Saint Leo Abbey in 1886 and Holy Name Priory in 1889. the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Redemptorists and the Salesians also entered the diocese.
1900 to 1968
The parish of Saint Mary, Our Lady of Grace, founded in 1908, was the first Catholic parish in St. Petersburg. The first Catholic church in Clearwater, St. Cecelia, was dedicated in 1924.After World War II, Bishop Joseph P. Hurley of St. Augustine started a massive program of purchasing property throughout Florida to develop new parishes for the increasing Catholic population. He also recruited many priests from the northern states and Ireland to serve in Florida. He founded over 40% of the parishes within the present Diocese of St. Petersburg.
1968 to 1988
On June 17, 1968, Pope Paul VI erected the Diocese of St. Petersburg with territory taken from St. Augustine and Miami. He appointed Auxiliary Bishop Charles B. McLaughlin of the Diocese of Raleigh as the first bishop of St. Petersburg. The pope designated the Cathedral of St. Jude the Apostle in St. Petersburg as its seat.