This is the oldest Canadian diocese west of Toronto.[1]
History
When the American expedition of 1810 entered the Willamette Valley of present-day Oregon, it included 13 French-Canadian Catholics. Several of them, including the fur trader Étienne Lucier, decided to settle there.[2] In 1836, Lucier and 15 other Catholic settlers petitioned Auxiliary Bishop Norbert Provencher, head of the church in present-day Manitoba, to send a priest to their settlement. They constructed St. Paul's Church, the oldest church in Oregon, in St. Paul, Oregon that same year.[3] In 1838, he sent the missionary priests François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers, who had been instructed by Archbishop Joseph Signay of Quebec: "In order to make yourselves sooner useful to the natives... you will apply yourselves... to the study of the Indian languages... so as to be able to publish a grammar after some of your residence there."[3][4][2][5]
The Diocese of Vancouver Island was erected on 24 July 1846, being one of three dioceses in the Pacific Northwest created out of the Vicariate Apostolic of the Oregon Territory, although the population of Catholics there was "a mere handful."[6]Modeste Demers became the new diocese's first bishop. The territory included Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, New Caledonia (mainland British Columbia), and the Queen Charlotte Islands. When the United States purchased Alaska in 1867 from the Empire of Russia, it came under the jurisdiction of the Diocese.
The Diocese of Vancouver Island was elevated to an archdiocese on 19 June 1903 and then renamed Archdiocese of Victoria in 1904. During the period 1846–1903, it was under the influence of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon, which either directly appointed or had considerable influence over the appointment of the bishops of Vancouver Island.[1]
The Archdiocese of Victoria was lowered to the status of a diocese in 1908, when the metropolitan see was moved to Vancouver.
