New York State

The Catholic Parish Network of New York State: 2,264 Communities Across Eight Jurisdictions

The Archdiocese of New York, the Diocese of Brooklyn, and six upstate suffragans share the largest statewide Catholic network in the country.

March 26, 2026 3 minute read Churches List editorial desk

Sepia stipple map of New York State with cross-topped steeple symbols along the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and the Finger Lakes, connected by a gold thread.

New York State holds 2,264 Roman Catholic parishes, administered through eight distinct jurisdictions: the 1808-founded Archdiocese of New York, the 1853-founded Diocese of Brooklyn, the 1957-founded Diocese of Rockville Centre, and five upstate suffragans.

New York State holds 2,264 Roman Catholic parishes, the largest Catholic parish count of any American state. The network is administered through eight distinct ecclesiastical jurisdictions: the Archdiocese of New York (Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, and seven counties north of the city), the Diocese of Brooklyn (Brooklyn and Queens), and six upstate suffragan dioceses. The distribution is uneven. The downstate metropolitan area holds roughly 900 parishes; the remaining 1,364 are spread across 52 upstate counties.

2,264New York State Catholic parishes

8Distinct Catholic jurisdictions in New York

1808Year the Diocese of New York was created

The Archdiocese of New York: 288 parishes, the senior see

The Archdiocese of New York was established in 1808 as the Diocese of New York, one of four dioceses carved from the Diocese of Baltimore that year. It was elevated to an archdiocese in 1850. The territory runs from Staten Island north to Columbia County and covers Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Sullivan, and Ulster. The archdiocese's 288 active parishes make it the fourth-largest Catholic jurisdiction in the country by parish count, behind Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston.

The Diocese of Brooklyn: 179 parishes in the most densely Catholic county in the United States

The Diocese of Brooklyn, created in 1853, covers only Brooklyn and Queens (Kings and Queens counties). Its 179 active parishes sit on roughly 180 square miles, the densest Catholic parish grid in the United States by land area. Kings County recorded 1,030,000 Catholics in the 2020 Official Catholic Directory, more than 30 states. The diocese is distinct from the archdiocese even though they share the five boroughs; the split reflects a nineteenth-century dispute over ethnic parish assignments that the Vatican resolved by giving Brooklyn and Queens an independent ordinary.

The Diocese of Rockville Centre: 133 parishes covering all of Long Island east of Queens

The Diocese of Rockville Centre, erected in 1957 from the Diocese of Brooklyn, covers Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island. Its 133 parishes serve a Catholic population that at 2020 count was larger than that of 32 states. The diocese is financially troubled (it declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2020 over sex-abuse claim settlements) but remains operationally active. Most of the diocese's parishes are postwar plantings on the suburban Long Island grid that Robert Moses laid out between 1940 and 1960.

The upstate dioceses: Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Ogdensburg

The five upstate dioceses cover a geographically enormous territory but a population that has shrunk by roughly 25% since 1970. The Diocese of Buffalo alone has closed more than 100 parishes since 2007. The five dioceses together hold about 1,350 active parishes, most of them in cities and inner-ring suburbs rather than in the depopulating rural counties.

The Diocese of Ogdensburg, covering the North Country from the Canadian border to the Adirondacks, is the smallest of the five by Catholic population (roughly 90,000) but the largest by territory (roughly 12,000 square miles). Ogdensburg's parish network dates largely to the French Canadian migration into the paper-mill towns of Malone, Massena, and Watertown in the 1880s–1920s.

Parish consolidations: the closing pattern after 2000

New York's Catholic parish count peaked around 2,900 in 1970 and has fallen by roughly 20% since. Most of the closures have happened in Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse (deindustrialization) and in Brooklyn (ethnic-parish consolidation). The Archdiocese of New York closed 33 parishes in a single 2014–2015 round of consolidations. Rockville Centre has closed fewer parishes but has merged pastorates (one pastor, multiple parish buildings) in roughly 40 cases.

Manhattan parishes anchor the national Catholic media presence

Five Manhattan parishes sit at the top of the American Catholic cultural landscape out of proportion to their size: St. Francis of Assisi at West 31st Street (the Franciscan friary that serves the Midtown workforce), St. Francis Xavier at West 16th Street (the Jesuit parish that has served Catholic intellectuals since 1851), The Church of Saint Agnes at East 43rd Street (home of the Traditional Latin Mass in Manhattan and the historical parish of Archbishop Fulton Sheen), and Saint John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church at 210 West 31st Street (the German national parish, staffed by the Capuchin Franciscans).

New York State's 2,264 Catholic parishes are administered through eight jurisdictions, split by a nineteenth-century Vatican decision that Brooklyn and Queens should not answer to the Manhattan archbishop.