Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gdańsk

Archdiocese of Gdańsk Archidioecesis Gedanensis Archidiecezja Gdańska
Co-Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Location
Country	Poland
Statistics
Area	2,500 km2 (970 sq mi)
Population - Total - Catholics	(as of 2013) 965,077 900,608 (93.3%)
Information
Rite	Latin Rite
Cathedral	Archcathedral Basilica of The Holy Trinity, Blessed Virgin Mary and St Bernard in Gdańsk Oliwa
Co-cathedral	The Co-Cathedral of St Mary
Current leadership
Pope	Francis
Metropolitan Archbishop	Sławoj Leszek Głódź
Auxiliary Bishops	Wiesław Szlachetka Zbigniew Zieliński
Website
Website of the Archdiocese

The Archdiocese of Gdańsk (Latin: Gedanen(sis)) is an archdiocese located in the city of Gdańsk in Poland.

According to the church statistics Sunday mass attendance was 38.1% in 2013 making it lower than the Polish average of weekly mass attendance (39.1%)

After World War I the Free City of Danzig was split from Germany according to the Treaty of Versailles. The Catholic congregation West of the Vistula belonged to the Diocese of Chelmno, which was formerly also part of the German Empire but after 1919 part of the Second Polish Republic and East of the Vistula to the Diocese of Ermland, which remained part of Weimar Germany. Germans within the administration of the Diocese of Chelmno were replaced by Polish priests and the Polish language was implemented as binding. While about 130,000 people in Danzig were catholic, only about 10 percent of them were Polish-speaking and the first attempts to reorganize the ecclesiastical allocation were made in spring 1919, when members of the German congregation asked for an affiliation to the Diocese of Ermland.

While these attempts were supported by the German government, the Polish government tried to preserve the current situation. Pope Pius XI decided to establish an Apostolic Administrator of the Free City of Danzig on 24 April 1922, which was directly subordinated to the Pope. In 1925 a concordat between Poland and the Holy See was signed and the Apostolic Administrator was now supposed to be subordinated to the Nuncio of Warsaw, which caused protests among the local populace. Thus the Pope established the exempt Diocese of Danzig on 30 December 1925 and appointed Edward O'Rourke as the first Bishop on 2 January 1926.