Bishop of Salford

The Bishop of Salford is the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salford in the Province of Liverpool, known also on occasion as the Northern Province.

With the gradual abolition of the legal restrictions on the activities of Catholics in England and Wales in the early 19th century, Rome decided to proceed to bridge the gap of the centuries from Queen Elizabeth I by instituting Catholic dioceses on the regular historical pattern. Thus Pope Pius IX issued the Bull "Universalis Ecclesiae" of 29 September 1850 by which thirteen new dioceses which did not formally claim any continuity with the pre-Elizabethan English dioceses were created.

One of these was the diocese of Salford, which took up the reins from the Vicariate Apostolic of the Lancashire District.

In the early period from 1850 the diocese was a suffragan of the Metropolitan See of Westminster, but a further development was its assignment under Pope Pius X, on 28 October 1911, to a newly created Province of Liverpool.

At the diocese's creation the territory assigned to it was the Hundreds of Salford and Blackburn. The diocese currently covers an area of 1,600 km² of Greater Manchester and adjacent parts of Lancashire.

The see is in the City of Salford in Greater Manchester, where the Bishop's "cathedra" or seat is located in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Evangelist, which was dedicated on 14 June 1890.

The Bishop's residence is Wardley Hall, Worsley, Manchester.

The current bishop is the Right Reverend Terence John Brain, the 10th Bishop of Salford, who was installed on 7 October 1997.

List of the Bishops of the Catholic Diocese of Salford, England