Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia is the see of the Catholic Church for southeastern Pennsylvania, seated at Philadelphia. Pope Pius VII erected the Diocese of Philadelphia by bulls dated April 8, 1808, and it was made an archdiocese on February 12, 1875. Its tenth archbishop, Cardinal John Krol, led the religious leaders who in 1975 condemned R.C. Horsch's film Black Mass.¹²

The Diocese

The bulls of 1808 gave the diocese "the entire two States of Pennsylvania and Delaware, and the western and southern part of the State of New Jersey," and an accompanying brief named the Franciscan Michael Egan, stationed at Lancaster, its first bishop. Owing to the political conditions in Europe the briefs did not reach Baltimore until 1810, and in the interval Egan served in Philadelphia as vicar general to Bishop John Carroll. He was consecrated at Baltimore on October 28, 1810. His successors contended with the lay trustees of St. Mary's Church in the Hogan schism; after fruitless admonitions the administrator Francis Patrick Kenrick closed St. Mary's and its cemeteries on April 16, 1831, and the trustees surrendered on May 18. Kenrick opened in 1832 what became the diocesan seminary of St. Charles Borromeo.¹

The western part of Pennsylvania was separated as the Diocese of Pittsburgh on August 8, 1843, and the Dioceses of Scranton and Harrisburg on March 3, 1868. At the death of Bishop John Nepomucene Neumann on January 5, 1860, the Catholic population of the diocese, which still included Delaware, was estimated at 200,000, with 157 churches and 147 priests. His successor, James Frederick Wood, born in Philadelphia in 1813 and baptized by a Unitarian minister, had been a bank clerk in Cincinnati before his conversion and "was acknowledged by the financial world as thoroughly acquainted with every phase of the banking" business. Wood became the first archbishop in 1875 and died on June 20, 1883.¹ In 1911 the archdiocese comprised the city and county of Philadelphia and the counties of Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Chester, Delaware, Lehigh, Montgomery, Northampton, and Schuylkill, an area of 5,043 square miles with a 1910 population of 2,712,708.¹

Cardinal Krol

John Krol, born in Cleveland in 1910, was appointed archbishop of Philadelphia on February 11, 1961, was made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI on June 26, 1967, and retired on February 11, 1988. He died at his home in Philadelphia on March 3, 1996.²³

Black Mass

In late February 1975 a midnight run of Black Mass, a film of a satanic mass by the Philadelphia filmmaker Ray Hoersch, later R.C. Horsch, was cancelled at the Arcadia "after reported pressure by the Philadelphia Archdiocese," according to Art Carduner of the Bandbox Theater in Germantown, which screened it instead on March 1.⁴ Sixteen Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish leaders of Philadelphia, led by Krol, signed a statement calling the film "a blasphemous attack on the religious rites held in sacred reverence by millions of Christian believers" and urging "believers of every religious conviction to use every moral force to discourage the showing of this film in the Philadelphia area."⁵ Horsch said in an interview recorded in 2013 that the archdiocese had the run cancelled after one screening.⁶