ROCHESTER, DIOCESE OF. – Diocese and city in the State of New York (U.S.A.). A suffragan of New York, it has an area of 7,081 square miles with 934,081 inhabitants, of whom 320,700 are Catholic. There are 423 priests, of whom 87 are religious belonging to 10 different congregations, 173 parishes and 47 chapels, 16 female congregations with 1,347 sisters, 2 diocesan seminaries, 1 college, 1 orphanage, and 4 hospitals.
The diocese was erected on 24 January 1868 by separation from the Diocese of Buffalo (New York). The first bishop, Mgr. Bernard McQuaid, who later became a champion of Catholic education, was consecrated on 12 July 1868. When he took possession of his diocese, there were 60 churches and 38 priests, including 7 Redemptorists; at his death (1909), after 40 years of activity, the diocese was flourishing with churches, parishes, and charitable institutions, and the Catholic population had risen to 121,000. This growth was due to Irish, German, French, Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, and Ruthenian immigration. The bishop sought, as far as possible, to provide these immigrants with priests who spoke their native languages; he also strongly insisted on the creation of Catholic schools and in 1891 began the erection of a major seminary, to which Leo XIII granted the faculty of conferring academic degrees in philosophy and theology.