Archdiocese of Seattle

The Archdiocese of Seattle (Latin: Archidiœcesis Seattlensis) is an archdiocese of the Catholic Church in western Washington State in the United States. The diocese was known as the Diocese of Nesqually from 1850 to 1907. The mother church of the archdiocese is St. James Cathedral in Seattle. Its archbishop is Paul D. Etienne. The archdiocese succeeded to the Diocese of Nesqually headquartered in Vancouver, Washington, established in 1850 as a suffragan diocese of the Archdiocese of Oregon City. The diocese was elevated to metropolitan archdiocesan status in 1951.

The Archdiocese of Seattle encompasses 144 parishes west of the Cascade Range. It is the metropolitan archdiocese of two suffragan dioceses:

As of 2022, the archdiocese reported that it served approximately served 899,000 Catholics in 143 parishes with 191 diocesan priests, 79 religious priests, 113 permanent deacons, 92 male religious and 234 female religious.

The archdiocese has eleven hospitals, two health care centers, nineteen homes for the elderly, three day care centers, ten specialized homes, and 111 centers for social services.

The Catholic presence in what was then Oregon Country dates to the arrival in the 1830s of missionary priests François Blanchet and Modeste Demers from the British colony of Lower Canada.

In 1843, the Vatican established the Vicariate Apostolic of the Oregon Territory and named François Blanchet as its vicar apostolic. In 1846, Pope Gregory XVI divided the vicariate into three dioceses:

That same year, Gregory XVI named Augustin-Magloire Blanchet, the brother of François Blanchet, as the bishop of Walla Walla. According to contemporary accounts, Augustin-Magloire Blanchet was unhappy to discover that Walla Walla was no more than a trading post. He immediately ran into conflict with the Oblate order priests in the diocese who were performing missionary work. They refused Blanchet's efforts to assign them to parishes. Blanchet also tried to claim an Oblate mission property for the diocese that the Oblates had received from a Native American tribe.

In November 1847, conflicts between Protestant missionaries and the Cayuse escalated into violence. Several tribesmen murdered ten Americans, including two Protestant missionaries, near Walla Walla in what was termed the Whitman massacre (Whitman was the leader of the missionaries). Despite attempts by the Cayuse tribe to defuse the conflict, American settlers raised militias to punish them for the killings. Local Protestants accused the Catholic clergy of being in league with the Cayuse. This animosity, the warfare between the U.S. Army and the Cayuse and the failure of the diocese to grow prompted the Vatican to move Blanchet to safety in St. Paul in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.