Apostolic Vicariate of Natal
(1850-1951) former Catholic missionary jurisdiction, South Africa
The Vicariate Apostolic of Natal (Latin: Vicariatus Apostolicus Natalensis) was a Latin Catholic missionary, quasi-diocesan jurisdiction in South Africa.
Antecedents
The history of the Catholic Church in South Africa goes back to 1660, when a French bishop and a few priests were saved from the wreck of the Marichal near the Cape of Good Hope. They were only allowed to land, not to minister to the few Catholics who were already in Cape Town. Only in 1803 a Catholic priest was permitted to say Mass in the Cape Colony. Joannes Lansink, Jacobus Melissen and Lambertua Prinsen landed at Cape Town in 1803; the following year they were expelled.
Pope Pius VII, by letters Apostolic dated 8 June 1818, appointed Edward Bede Slater the first Vicar Apostolic of the Cape of Good Hope and the neighbouring islands, Mauritius included. Slater on his way to Mauritius in 1820, left Patrick H. Scully at Cape Town in charge of the Catholics. In 1826 Theodore Wagner became resident priest. He was succeeded by E. Rishton in 1827.
On 6 June 1837, Gregory XVI established the Vicariate of the Cape of Good Hope, separate from Mauritius, and from that time Cape Colony had its own bishops.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Apostolic Vicariate of Natal” as (1850-1951) former Catholic missionary jurisdiction, South Africa. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as (1850-1951) former Catholic missionary jurisdiction, South Africa. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4780675. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1660, 1803, 1818 and 1820.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apostolic Vicariate of Natal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.