There are 21 of them in the territory of the Republic of Poland, 21 of Latin rite besides three of Greek and one of Armenian rite. The diocese of Wloclawek, of which I have been the Ordinary since 1929, does not differ much, in pastoral affairs, from its neighbouring dioceses of Eastern and Central Poland. Hence a brief survey of its history and of its state on the eve of the war,'will give quite a good picture of the whole Polish Church.

The capital of the diocese, Wloclawek, called in the Latin documents of the Middle Ages ‘Vladislavia,’ is situated on the left bank of the Vistula, at the place where the river has run a third of its way from Warsaw to the sea. At first the religious centre of this district (fertile Cuiavia) was Kruszwica, to-day a small town on the edge of lake Goplo. There Bishop Lucidus, native of Italy, developed his apostolic activity in the last decades of the tenth century, soon after the Poles had become Christian. He and his 13 successors—called by the Polish annalist, Jan Dlugosz, ‘bishops of Kruszwica’—were most probably missionary bishops, without a strictly specified territory. It was only in the thirteenth century that Michael Godziemba (1222-52), the first bishop of Polish extraction, left Kruszwica for the banks of the Vistula and founded (c. 1230) the See of Wloclaw, as Wloclawek was then called. The foundation's of the original Cathedral, which like all the castles in Poland at that time, was built of wood, can be still seen in the basement of a house on the bank of the river.