Serving nearly five million Catholics in approximately 600 locations, including 287 parishes, over 250 schools, a seminary, cemeteries and mortuaries, and various social service, administrative, and ministerial offices. It encompasses Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and serves over 100 ethnic groups, with Mass offered in nearly 50 languages and dialects each week. Archdiocesan schools currently serve over 68,000 students, and over 150,000 young people and adults participate in religious education programs.
 

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the largest Catholic Archdiocese in the United States.

In the 1960s, the Archdiocese initiated a leading role in reaching across traditional Catholic education models, by leveraging newly available FCC licenses to pursue an innovative technology solution for a broad-based, 8,000 square mile and challenging environment made up of loosely connected schools and parishes. The Archdiocese, through one of its civil corporations, acquired Instructional Television Fixed Service broadcast (ITFS) spectrum licenses issued by the FCC and now holds licenses for the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara Geographic Service Areas. For many years, these FCC licenses enabled the provision of instructional television (ITV) to Catholic schools through traditional “line-of-sight” broadcast signals. In 2004, when the FCC re-purposed the ITFS educational spectrum to the 2.5 Ghz Educational Broadband Service (EBS), the new rule configuration permitted cellular wireless broadband service, and the Archdiocese took the opportunity to do a full industry assessment seeking a lease and services arrangement with a business partner that would allow it to enter the new era and provide even more robust technology for education throughout the Archdiocese. This led to 30-year leases in 2006 for Los Angeles and Santa Barbara spectrum with Clearwire, which transitioned to the Clearwire/Sprint commercial arrangement and is now again transitioning with the T-Mobile merger. The leases followed the FCC rules allowing a lease of no more than 95% of the spectrum, with the Archdiocese retaining use of 5% of the spectrum under a services arrangement which has facilitated creative wireless initiatives for educational efforts in our schools and parishes.
 

The C3 effort is funded with the significant resources provided under T-Mobile (previously Sprint) leases and services agreements. Our leased EBS spectrum is in fact, a cornerstone of T-Mobile’s 4G and 5G broadband deployment in Los Angeles, while access to the portion of the spectrum retained by the Archdiocese, allows the Archdiocese to obtain both services from T-Mobile and other third parties and allows direct access to T-Mobile’s broadband network for connectivity for devices and services. 
 

In 2009, the Archdiocese launched the Catholic Communication Collaboration, most commonly referred to as “C3”, initiative to use the EBS spectrum and lease benefits to expand use of and access to technology resources for educational purposes throughout the Archdiocese.

In 2010, a Working Group was assembled to oversee the C3 pilot project and it has since become the de facto technology advisory committee for the C3 efforts in the Archdiocese. The Working Group focuses on opportunities and programs that can be adapted to local needs. 

In addition to the T-Mobile lease payments, which are directed to all education and technology aspects of the Archdiocesan Catholic Center budget and related efforts, direct funding and direct and indirect services have been provided under the T-Mobile (previously Sprint) services agreement to support the activities outlined below.