Pope John Paul II divided the state of Texas into two ecclesiastical provinces Dec. 29, making Galveston-Houston an archdiocese and the metropolitan see for six other eastern Texas dioceses.

The split coincided with the pope's appointment of a new archbishop of San Antonio, which since 1926 had been the metropolitan see for all the dioceses of Texas. San Antonio remains the metropolitan see for seven other dioceses in the state.

The changes make Texas the second large state to be divided into two provinces and the first in the country to encompass two provinces entirely within its boundaries.

California has been divided into two provinces since 1936, Los Angeles in the south and San Francisco in the north, but the San Francisco Archdiocese is also metropolitan see for the dioceses in three other states --- Utah, Nevada and Hawaii.

Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza, who has headed the Galveston-Houston Diocese since 1984, was made an archbishop. His coadjutor, Bishop Daniel N. DiNardo, was made a coadjutor archbishop.

Noting that he intends to retire in about a year --- he turns 75 in January 2006 --- Archbishop Fiorenza joked to reporters, "I think you will be able to say the thing that will be most significant about my time as archbishop is its brevity."

The other dioceses forming the new province are Tyler, Austin, Beaumont, Victoria, Corpus Christi and Brownsville. Apart from Tyler in the northeast and Austin in the east central part of the state, all run along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Auxiliary Bishop Jose H. Gomez of Denver was named the new archbishop of San Antonio. He succeeds Archbishop Patrick F. Flores, head of the archdiocese since 1979, who turned 75 last July. Both archbishops were Galveston-Houston priests before they became bishops.

Dioceses that remain part of the San Antonio province are Laredo, San Angelo and El Paso along the Mexican border and Amarillo, Lubbock, Fort Worth and Dallas in the northern part of the state.

Texas has about 5.7 million Catholics in a total population of 21 million. The new Galveston-Houston province has about 2.6 million Catholics in a population of 11 million, while the San Antonio province now has about 3.1 million Catholics in a population of 10 million.

Before the split San Antonio had been metropolitan see of the second-largest ecclesiastical province in the world numerically, with the archdiocese and 14 dioceses. The province of Porto Alegre, Brazil, consists of the archdiocese plus 16 dioceses.

The addition of another ecclesiastical province in the United States brings the total of Latin-rite provinces in the nation to 32. In the western U.S., provinces in addition to Los Angeles (Southern California) and San Francisco (Northern California, Nevada, Utah and Hawaii) include Portland (Oregon, Idaho and Montana), Seattle (Washington), Anchorage (Alaska), Denver (Colorado and Wyoming) and Santa Fe (New Mexico and Arizona).

There are also two Eastern-rite provinces in the U.S., headed by the Byzantine archbishop of Pittsburgh and the Ukrainian archbishop of Philadelphia.

The U.S. Catholic military ordinariate is headed by an archbishop and uses the name Archdiocese for the Military Services, but it is technically an ordinariate in church law, not an archdiocese. In any case it would not be a metropolitan see of a province, since it has no other dioceses under it.

In church law the archdiocese is called the metropolitan see of a province and the dioceses under its leadership are suffragan sees. The bishops who head those dioceses are called suffragan bishops in their relationship to the archbishop, who is called their metropolitan.

A Latin-rite metropolitan has very limited legal authority over the other dioceses in his province, but an important pastoral role as the leader of the area's bishops.

Canon 431 of the Code of Canon Law says dioceses of an area are brought together into provinces "to promote the common pastoral action of different neighboring dioceses according to the circumstances of persons and places and to foster more suitably the relations of the diocesan bishops among themselves."

If the majority of diocesan bishops in a province think they should hold a provincial council, it is up to the metropolitan, with the consent of the majority, to convoke it and determine its time, place and agenda. The metropolitan must preside over such a council unless he is legitimately impeded and a provincial council cannot be held when the metropolitan see is vacant. Provincial councils are rarely called, however.

The metropolitan also ordinarily presides over the periodic meetings of the bishops of a province to draw up a list of priests in the province whom they consider good candidates to become bishops.

A new "Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops" issued by the Vatican last March emphasizes the "fraternal correction" role of a metropolitan in guarding against "abuses and errors" in the ministry of any of his suffragan bishops.

In such cases the archbishop can approach the bishop as an elder brother, seeking to help him correct a problem, but he has no legal authority to intervene juridically in the affairs of the other diocese; his obligation if the error or abuse is not corrected is to report the matter to Rome.

The formation of the Galveston-Houston Archdiocese marks the first time a new ecclesiastical province was created in the United States since 1980, when Mobile, Ala., was made an archdiocese and placed over the dioceses of Mississippi and Alabama, which were previously part of the New Orleans province.

---CNS Contributing to this story was Erik Noriega in Houston.