The Diocese of Wichita () is a Latin Catholic ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church in Kansas. It covers Allen, Bourbon, Butler, Chase, Chautauqua, Cherokee, Cowley, Crawford, Elk, Greenwood, Harper, Harvey, Kingman, Labette, Marion, McPherson, Montgomery, Morris, Neosho, Reno, Rice, Sedgwick, Sumner, Wilson, and Woodson counties in south central and southeast Kansas. The diocese is home to 112,549 Catholics in 90 parishes. The Diocese of Wichita is a suffragan diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. History The first resident pastor within the area now known as the Diocese of Wichita was appointed in 1873. The Vicariate of Kansas came to an end when the Diocese of Leavenworth, covering the entire state, was established in 1877, with Bishop Fink as first bishop. Kansas grew so rapidly over the next ten years that Bishop Fink petitioned the Pope to establish two new Sees in Kansas, one at Wichita and the other at Concordia. The petition having been granted, in 1887 the western two-thirds of the state was divided equally in half. The north became the Diocese of Concordia and the south became the Diocese of Wichita. Reverend James O'Reilly, pastor in Topeka, Kansas, was appointed the first bishop of Wichita. However, he became ill and died before being consecrated, leaving the new diocese without a bishop for a year. In 1888, Reverend John J. Hennessy, pastor in St. Louis, Missouri, was appointed Bishop of Wichita. Bishop Hennessy found a struggling new diocese, missionary in nature. The first census in 1889 gave the Catholic population as 8,000, with 16 priests. Bishop Hennessy was Bishop of Wichita for 32 years. Because of the small number of Catholics in the diocese, the Holy See eventually added nine counties in southeast Kansas to the Diocese of Wichita. Within the first couple of decades of the 1900s the Catholic population reached 32,000 parishioners, and 97 parishes had been constructed, most with schools. Bishop Hennessy built a new Cathedral, honoring Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, which was dedicated in September 1912, the jubilee year of the diocese. In 1951 the western part of the Diocese of Wichita was split off and a new Diocese of Dodge City was formed, which left the Diocese of Wichita with its present boundaries. In February 2019, it was announced that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) had been investigating sex abuse