James Cardinal Gibbons was a senior-ranking American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as apostolic vicar of the Apostolic Vicariate of North Carolina from 1868 to 1872, bishop of the Diocese of Richmond in Virginia from 1872 to 1877, and as ninth archbishop of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in Maryland from 1877 until his death. He was elevated to the rank of cardinal in 1886.

The Diocese of Raleigh is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or diocese, of the Catholic Church that covers eastern North Carolina in the United States. It is a suffragan diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archbishop of Atlanta.