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The Church's governing body in the United States is the U. S. Conference Of Catholic Bishops , made up of the Hierarchy of Bishop s and Archbishop s of the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands , although each bishop is independent in his own Diocese , answerable only to the Pope . No Primate for Catholics exists in the United States. The Archdiocese of Baltimore, the first Diocese established in the country, received ''Prerogative of Place'' in the 1850s , which confers to Its Archbishop a subset of the Leadership responsibilities granted to primates in other countries. STATISTICS Over 19,000 parishes exist in 195 dioceses or archdioceses:
This gives the Catholic Church the third highest total number of churches in the U.S., behind Southern Baptists and Methodists. However, because the average parish is significantly larger than the average church from those denominations, there are about 2.5 times as many Catholics as Southern Baptists and almost 5 times as many as Methodists. The Church has over 30,000 diocesan priests, and over 15,000 priests vowed to a specific order; also over 30,000 lay ministers, 13,000 deacons, 75,000 sisters, and 5,600 brothers. 150,000 Catholic School teachers operate in the United States, teaching 2.7 million students. There are about 60-70 million people in the United States who were baptized as Catholics, or roughly 26% of the U.S. population. As of 2002, a Pew Research poll found that roughly 24% of the adult U.S. population self-identifies as Catholic.[http://pewforum.org/publications/reports/poll2002.pdf (Note that due to conversion, the number that have ever been baptized will generally be higher than the number who self-identify. Additionally, Catholics have a higher than average birth rate, so have a distribution skewed towards non-adults.) Other estimates from recent years generally range around 20% to 28%. Catholics in the U.S. are about 6% of the church's total worldwide membership. A poll by The Barna Group in 2004 found Catholic ethnicity to be 60% white (commonly called Caucasian , 31% Hispanic , 4% Black , and 5% other ethnicity. {Link without Title} HISTORY Catholicism first came to the territories now forming the United States with the Spanish explorers and settlers in present-day Florida (1513) and the Southwest . The first Christian worship service held in the current United States was a Catholic Mass celebrated in St. Augustine, Florida. The influence of the Alta California Missions (1769 and onwards) forms a lasting memorial to part of this heritage. Catholicism received a boost with the settling of in a fairly intolerant age, particularly amongst other English plantations which frequently exhibited a quite militant Protestantism . (See the Maryland Toleration Act , and note the pre-eminence of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in Catholic circles.) However, at the time of the American Revolution , Catholics formed less than 1 % of the population of the thirteen colonies. Subsequent mass- Immigration -- especially of Catholics from Ireland , Germany , southern Europe ( Italy , Portugal ), Poland , the Philippines , and Latin America -- has impacted the flavor of Catholicism in the United States. Some anti-immigrant movements, like the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan , have also been anti-Catholic. In the latter half of the 19th century, the first attempt at standardizing discipline in the American Church occurred with the convocation of the Plenary Councils Of Baltimore . DIOCESES EXTERNAL LINKS
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