Archdiocese of Košice

The Archdiocese of Košice (, ) is a Latin archdiocese of the Catholic Church in eastern Slovakia, with its seat in Košice. It covers the central and eastern parts of the Prešov and Košice regions, with an area of 10,403 km2. The diocese's area has a total population of 1,153,505 people, of which around 61% were of Catholic faith as of 2012. The Cathedral of St. Elizabeth serves as the seat of the diocese.

The current Archbishop, Bernard Bober was appointed on June 4, 2010, and canonically took power of the archdiocese on July 10, 2010. He had formerly served as auxiliary bishop under Alojz Tkáč. On June 11, 2016, priest Marek Forgáč was appointed as the new auxiliary bishop by Pope Francis.

History It was first created in 1804 under name Diocese of Košice as a suffragan to the Archdiocese of Eger.

Owing to strained relations between the Vatican and Czechoslovakia, the diocese remained vacant from 1925 to 1990, under apostolic administrators, except for the period between 1939 and 1948, when it was governed by a residential bishop following the return (1938–1945) of the territory to Hungarian rule (after the First Vienna Award).Luboslav Hromjak, Pietro Gasparri, il governo cecoslovacco e la Slovacchia in Laura Pettinaroli e Massimiliano Valente, Il cardinale Pietro Gasparri, segretario di Stato (1914-1930), Heidelberg University Publishing, 2020, pp. 185-206. The essay explicitly discusses the government's "persecutory policy against the Church" (politica ecclesiastica di carattere persecutorio, p. 189).

In 1977, the metropolitan was changed to the newly established ecclesiastical province of Trnava. On 31 March 1995, a new ecclesiastical province was created, changing the status of the diocese into archdiocese with the suffragans of Spiš and Rožňava.

St Charles Borromeo Seminary, the diocese's main seminary, was founded in 1994.

Archdiocese of Košice

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