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. On 29 September 1850, Pope Pius IX issued the BullUniversalis Ecclesiae which created thirteen new dioceses which did not formally claim any continuity with the pre-Elizabethan English dioceses of which one of these was the diocese of Salford and went on to take up the reins of part of the former 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 (600 sq mi) and consists of a large part of Greater Manchester and adjacent parts of Lancashire.
The see is in the Salford area of Greater Manchester, where the Bishop's cathedra or seat is located in the Salford Cathedral, which was dedicated on 14 June 1890.
Formerly coadjutor bishop of Portsmouth (1960–1964). Appointed Bishop of Salford on 28 August 1964. Retired on 22 June 1983 and died on 30 September 1999.[10]
^"Bishop John Francis Vaughan". Catholic-Hierarchy. Retrieved 22 November 2011. Note: The website has the incorrect middle name.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)