The Diocese of Lubbock serves an ethnically diverse people in the dusty lower Texas Panhandle. Outside the fairly prosperous city of Lubbock, home to Sprint and other large companies, the diocese is open farmland and scrub. While some areas (called “caprock”) are flat and can support irrigated agriculture, most of the land is broken, scarred by canyons and dry washes, too poor even to run cattle on. The Panhandle resembles popular notions of the Old West, and indeed this is frontier territory for the Catholic Church. There are only two Catholic schools in the 23,000-square-mile diocese, one elementary and one secondary. Two of Lubbock’s counties have no Catholic church at all; another ten have only a single church or mission. About 80 percent of the Catholic population is Hispanic, many of them employed as farm workers at very low wages. As a result, rural parishes and missions can provide little beyond Mass and sacraments. A diocesan publication ruminates: “Since Catholics within our diocese are primarily Hispanic, we have historically been the brunt of a dual prejudice…against Catholics and against Hispanics.”
The Diocese of Lubbock has:
- 80,742 Catholics (16 % of total population)
- 63 parishes and missions
- 39 active priests
2010 Grant
$125,000
Contact Information
PO Box 98700
Lubbock, TX 79499-8700
Tel: 806-792-3943
Fax: 806-792-8109
email: lbehnke@catholiclubbock.org
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