Catholic Churches in Pennsylvania: 1,792 Parishes Mapped by County and City

Pennsylvania holds 1,792 Catholic parishes in the Churches List directory, second only to New York's 2,264 and 7.1 percent of the 25,275 Catholic listings nationwide. The Pennsylvania map is the industrial map: parishes follow the anthracite seams, the steel valleys, and the railroad towns, where each immigrant community built its own national parish within a generation of arriving.

Philadelphia leads with 134 parishes and Pittsburgh holds 100, but the third tier is the Pennsylvania signature: Erie (37), Scranton (30), Wilkes-Barre (25), and Johnstown (25), mid-sized cities whose parish counts rival metros three times their size. Scranton and Wilkes-Barre alone, the anthracite twin cities, hold 55 parishes between them.

Which Pennsylvania cities have the most Catholic churches?

The parish spread reaches 683 Pennsylvania municipalities, the widest dispersion in this series, because the coal and steel geography planted parishes in boroughs of a few thousand people: one Polish, one Slovak, one Italian, and one Irish parish in a single patch town was the standard pattern of 1910. Diocesan consolidations have merged many since, and the directory reflects the survivors.

A selection of Catholic congregations across Pennsylvania

The table holds 60 of the 1,792 Catholic congregations listed in Pennsylvania, selected for record completeness. The Catholic tradition page and the Pennsylvania state page hold the complete lists.

Where Catholic congregations stand in Pennsylvania: the map

How Catholic's Pennsylvania footprint compares nationally

Nationally the directory lists 25,275 Catholic parishes. Pennsylvania's 1,792 stand second among states, and nine of them occupy buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, with 873 publishing websites, the largest absolute website count of any tradition-state pair in this series. The consolidation era makes the directory's correction loop matter here: parish mergers outpace most data sources, and the listing a family remembers may now share clergy and schedules with two others.

How this map was assembled

Counts come from the Churches List directory snapshot of June 11, 2026: 1,792 congregations in Pennsylvania carry the Catholic tradition label, out of 25,275 nationwide and 17,007 Pennsylvania churches of all traditions. Tradition labels derive from each congregation's source records and self-description; 873 of the Pennsylvania listings carry a website. The directory does not rank congregations. Corrections are applied through the corrections page.

Related reading in The Letter: Pittsburgh's industrial Catholic arc profiles the Slovak, Polish, Italian, and German congregations behind the city's 100 parishes, and the Catholic parish network of New York State maps the only larger state system. The Catholic tradition page lists all 25,275 parishes nationwide.