Press Play with Madeleine Brand
A Growing Catholic Church in the West
On the East Coast, the Catholic Church is closing or merging parishes and shrinking the number of Catholic schools. But here in the West, the Catholic Church is growing—in part because more than a third of the registered Catholics in the U.S. are Hispanic.
On the East Coast, the Catholic Church is closing or merging parishes and shrinking the number of Catholic schools. But here in the West, the Catholic Church is growing—in part because more than a third of the registered Catholics in the U.S. are Hispanic. In fact, the fastest-growing diocese in the West is Fresno, where the Catholic population has more than doubled in the last ten years to 1.2 million.