Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

The Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon (Archidioecesis Portlandensis in Oregonia) is a Latin Church archdiocese of the Catholic Church in western Oregon in the United States.

Established in 1846, it was the second Catholic archdiocese established in the United States after the Archdiocese of Baltimore. (The Archdiocese of New Orleans is older, having been created in 1793 when the city was still Spanish territory, but became an Archdiocese in 1850.) In 2004, during a sexual abuse scandal, it became the first archdiocese to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The mother church of the archdiocese is Saint Mary's Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland. As of 2023, the archbishop of Portland is Alexander Sample.

The Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon has the following suffragan dioceses:

As of 2024, the archdiocese served 430,700 Catholics. It had 101 diocesan priests, 129 religious priests, 71 permanent deacons, 343 women religious, and 58 religious brothers. The archdiocese had 124 parishes, 23 missions, one seminary, 41 elementary schools, ten secondary schools, and two Catholic colleges.

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. By 1829, Lucier had established a permanent land claim next to the Willamette Fur Post near French Prairie. At this time, the region was claimed by both the United States and Great Britain.

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. However, the British-owned Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) which owned fur trading concessions in the region, objected to Provencher establishing a Catholic mission in the Willamette Valley. To appease the HBC, Provencher agreed to move the mission north of the Columbia River into present-day Washington State. In 1838, he sent the missionary priests Reverend François Norbert Blanchet and Reverend Modeste Demers to Fort Vancouver in Washington.

In 1843, the Vatican established the Vicariate Apostolic of the Oregon Territory, with Blanchet as its first vicar apostolic. Along with all of Oregon, the vicariate also included present-day Idaho and Montana. The following year, Reverend Pierre-Jean DeSmet, along with other priests and a contingent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, arrived in Astoria, Oregon, from Belgium.