List of schools of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago
Wikimedia list article
The following is a list of schools operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which covers Cook and Lake counties, followed by a list of former high schools closed after 1959 and former K-8 schools closed after 1983.
An August 27, 2015 article by the Chicago Tribune refers to the Archdiocese of Chicago Office of Catholic Schools as the largest private school system in the United States.
A wave of school closures after the 2014-2015 school year caused over 200 employees to change jobs and over 1,200 pupils to change schools.
At the outset of the 2020/21 academic year, the archdiocese ran 160 elementary schools and three high schools. An additional eight Catholic elementary schools and 28 Catholic high schools that are not archdiocesan-run are located within the Archdiocese of Chicago. As of 2015, the Superintendent of Catholic Schools is Jim Rigg, Ph.D.
History
The school construction boom ended when Cardinal John Cody, archbishop at the time, decided to limit construction of Catholic schools in Lake County and suburban areas in Cook County.
Between 1984 and 2004, the Office of Catholic Schools closed 148 schools and 10 school sites. By 2005, over 50% of the Chicago Archdiocese Catholic schools that existed in 1966 no longer did.
In 1985, Joseph Bernardin, then the head of the archdiocese, stated that as costs increased to operate Catholic schools, it was likely merging or closure would result. In 1990 Bernardin stated that 18 schools were to close that year.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6637923. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1983, 2015 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of schools of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.