In 1807 the Catholic church founded an Apostolic Prefecture in Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies, with the goal of bringing the faith to the inhabitants of the archipelago and providing pastoral care for the Catholics among the Dutch colonial population. The advent of the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands in 1795, which adopted a more liberal policy toward religion, made this institutional establishment of Catholicism in the islands possible. By 1842 the prefecture had been elevated to the rank of apostolic vicariate and in 1961 to archbishopric.
In the course of this long period the church gathered a great deal of information, not only on church matters but on the wider sphere of existence in the colony, including the crucial years of transition to the Indonesian republic. The archive survived the Second World War intact and can thus provide scholars with source material ranging uninterruptedly over a century and a half.