The history of the archdiocese of Atlanta is a story of growth and challenge. In 1790, English Catholics left Maryland and settled in Locust Grove, where they built a simple log church that became the state’s first Catholic community.

By 1820, the Catholic population of the Carolinas and Georgia had grown enough to warrant their first bishop, John England. The diocese was changed to include all of Georgia and parts of Florida in 1850, when Francis X. Gartland was appointed bishop of the Diocese of Savannah.

Georgia Catholics had increased to some 4,000 before the Civil War. During that conflict, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Atlanta’s oldest church, was saved from Sherman’s fire, surviving to see the beginning of other historic Georgia foundations – the Village of St. Joseph, Sacred Heart, the Marist Schools, St. Joseph’s Infirmary, St. Anthony’s, Our Lady of Lourdes – that had their beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth.

In 1936, the Cathedral of Christ the King was erected in time to celebrate the establishment of Georgia’s own diocese, Savannah-Atlanta, which flourished for nearly 20 years. In 1956, the diocese of Atlanta was created and Francis Hyland appointed its first bishop.

Bishop Hyland fed and nurtured the young Church of north Georgia for six years, until failing health forced his resignation. In 1962, Atlanta was established as a Metropolitan Province, the ecclesiastical center of the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia. It was to be known as the Archdiocese of Atlanta, with its first archbishop, Paul Hallinan. Florida was later made a separate province.

Archbishop Hallinan served at a time of broad change within the Church and society, implementing reforms of the Second Vatican Council and a strict social justice agenda within the local Church.

After Archbishop Hallinan’s death in 1968, Archbishop Thomas Donnellan was chosen as the second archbishop of Atlanta. He presided over unprecedented growth and a Catholic population that had expanded to 150,000 by the 1980s.

Archbishop Eugene Marino, the first black to hold the position of archbishop in the United Sates, was named to lead the archdiocese of Atlanta after Archbishop Donnellan’s death in 1988. He resigned on July 10, 1990 and Bishop James Lyke was appointed to administer the archdiocese. He was named fourth archbishop of Atlanta on April 30, 1991 and installed June 24.