Southern Arizona is a scenic wonder: rugged mountains toward New Mexico in the east, sagebush desert toward California in the west. The Diocese of Tucson is the fifth largest in the contiguous United States, covering nearly 43,000 square miles. It shares a 350-mile border with Sonora, Mexico and must minister as best it can to the thousands of immigrants who stream through every year. The growing Catholic population is about 30 percent Hispanic and five percent Native American. Southern Arizona is home to four reservations, one of them the size of the state of Connecticut, for the Apache, Tohono O’odham and other tribes. While the city of Tucson is thriving, parishes and missions in border towns like Pirtleville and Double Adobe survive with small congregations and scant resources. They struggle to cover basic expenses: salaries, education textbooks, travel, utilities, and so on. Many could not make ends meet without help from the diocese and from national mission agencies. Fully half of these churches have incomes of less than $150,000 a year, about one-tenth the budget of a typical parish in New Jersey or Ohio.
The Diocese of Tucson has:
- 379,850 Catholics (23% of total population)
- 120 parishes and missions (48 without resident pastor)
- (74 parishes | 46 missions)
- 64 active priests
2010 Grant
$125,000
Contact Information
111 S. Church Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85702
520-792-3410
email: diocese@diocesetucson.org
www.diocesetucson.org
