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REL-4 DUG · THE DIOCESAN RECORD
St. Patrick's, Walkerton, stands in a diocese older than the town by four months' arithmetic and two centuries of governance, and the checklist asks the diocese's course to be printed with the parish's. The Diocese of Fort Wayne was erected on January 8, 1857, by Pius IX, carved from the Diocese of Vincennes — the year Walkerton itself was platted — with John Henry Luers as its first bishop, consecrated January 10, 1858. Its cathedral is the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at Fort Wayne, built 1859–60 and dedicated December 8, 1860; St. Matthew's at South Bend stands as co-cathedral. The course runs: suffragan to Cincinnati through the nineteenth century; transferred to the newly elevated Archdiocese of Indianapolis in 1944, the same year the diocese lost territory to the new Diocese of Lafayette (erected October 1944); territory lost again to the Diocese of Gary (erected December 17, 1956); and — the date this section corrects the audit's shorthand on — renamed the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend in 1960 by John XXIII, the "South Bend" of its name arriving sixteen years after the suffragan change the shorthand confuses it with. The diocese covers fourteen Indiana counties. Its bishop as of this build (November 2026) is Kevin C. Rhoades, appointed November 14, 2009 by Benedict XVI and installed January 13, 2010, the ninth bishop of the see. Walkerton's place in the course is the small end of it: a parish church raised in 1876 (Chapman's date, in the banked religion record) in a railroad village of the diocese's western tier, served ever since from the Fort Wayne chancery and the South Bend co-cathedral city — the frame within which the Tyler Street parish block of the architecture addendum and the Catholic Charities boundary finding of the charities addendum both sit.
Principal sources: the diocesan record (erection, bishops, and territorial changes) as carried in the standard Catholic reference record; the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend (the Rhoades appointment and installation).