Roman Catholic Diocese of Joliet
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The Roman Catholic Diocese of Joliet is an ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. It is comprised of the City of Joliet in Illinois and its surrounding counties: DuPage, Ford, Grundy, Iroquois, Kankakee, Kendall and Will. It is governed by a bishop who is a suffragan of the Archbishop of Chicago. The mother church is the Cathedral of Saint Raymond Nonnatus. On June 27, 2006, Rev. James Peter Sartain succeeded retiring bishop Joseph Imesch as the bishop of the Diocese of Joliet, IL.
[edit] History
In 1808, the area that is now known as Joliet was governed by the now-defunct Diocese of Bardstown, present-day Archdiocese of Louisville in Kentucky. In 1824, administration of the area was transferred to the Archdiocese of Saint Louis in Missouri. Another period or reorganization for the expanding American Catholic community led to the transfer of administration over Joliet to the now-defunct Diocese of Vincennes, present-day Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
With the industrialization of Illinois and the emergence of Chicago as an important center of commerce for the nation, the new churches and missions in the Joliet area flourished. Its congregants were mostly newly arrived immigrant laborers from Europe and several generations of local farmers.
In 1948, the Diocese of Joliet was formally established to meet the demands of the exponential growth of Catholicism in the region, resulting from local post-World War II housing developments and commercial modernization.
