Catholic Texas

Texas is really growing and the Catholic Church is growing along with the state! The Lone Star State is the place to be. Check this out from Whispers:

On a related note, every top-tier posting on the nation's appointment docket might now be put to bed, but the new vacancy in Texas' capital makes for a significant trio of Lone Star dioceses set to receive new chiefs.

What the three lack in prominence, see, they more than make up for in numbers, with each showing ever-expansive growth over recent years. Bottom line: it's all worth keeping an eye on.

Beyond the Austin church -- its membership doubled since 1990 -- Bishop Edmond Carmody of Corpus Christi (diocesan pop. 400,000, tripled from 1980) reached the retirement age of 75 in March, while the nation's most-Catholic diocese -- the million-plus Brownsville church, where Catholics comprise nearly nine-tenths of the Rio Grande Valley's inhabitants, all told -- likewise looks toward a successor for Bishop Raymundo Peña, who sent his letter over in February.

Its Catholic contingent likewise trebled in size since the 80's, the latter especially portends even more of a boom -- at the close of its first synod in 2007, fully half of the Brownsville fold was reported to be age 25 or younger, a stat one'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else on these shores.

All three fall in the province of Galveston-Houston, home to the American South's first cardinal... himself still awaiting another auxiliary -- or, better still, two -- to help keep after his own charge, all 1.5 million of it.

At mid-decade, Texas' 5 million Catholics overtook Baptists to become the mega-state's largest religious group.