[1] Over a period of about eighty years, from 1880, the territory of the present Democratic Republic of Congo became divided into dioceses with their bishops, with apostolic vicariates being the intermediate stage.
Three were sent (whether they were Dominicans or Franciscans or members of a Lisbon chapter isn't known); they finally baptised the head chief and many other subordinate ones at Banza-Congo, in a wooden structure called the Church of the Holy Cross.
In 1518, a grandson of this chief, known as Henry, who had been ordained in Portugal, was made titular bishop of Utica and appointed by Leo X Vicar Apostolic of Congo.
Pope Paul V, who personally assisted the ambassador in his last moments, gave him a magnificent state funeral and erected to his memory a monument at St. Mary Major's.
While the Portuguese always confined themselves to the Lower Congo, as early as the seventeenth century the missionaries had traversed the course of the Zaire and a seventeenth-century map has been discovered which traces the river according to data supplied by them.