The archdiocese has 137 church parishes administered by 387 priests (including those belonging to religious institutes), 187 permanent deacons, 84 brothers, and 432 sisters.

As of June 2023[update] the archdiocese is under chapter 11 bankruptcy due to the mounting cost of litigation around cases of sexual abuse by clerics of the diocese and coverups, and covid.

Francis-Xavier de Charlevoix, S.J., made a tour of New France from the Lakes to the Mississippi, and visiting New Orleans, he describes "a little village of about one hundred cabins dotted here and there, a large wooden warehouse in which I said Mass, a chapel in course of construction and two storehouses".

[3] In 1722 the Capuchins were assigned ecclesiastical responsibility for the Lower Mississippi Valley, while the Jesuits maintained a mission, based in New Orleans, to serve the indigenous peoples.

The Jesuit vicar-general returned to France to recruit priests and also persuaded the Ursulines of Rouen to assume charge of a hospital and school.

[3] France surrendered New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi to the Spanish under the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

In April 1803, the United States purchased Louisiana from France, which had in 1800 forced Spain to retrocede the territory in the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso.

On 29 July 1953, Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Natchitoches, taking its territory from the archdiocese and making it a suffragan of the same metropolitan see.

On 11 January 1918, Pope Benedict XV erected the Diocese of Lafayette in Louisiana, taking its territory from the archdiocese making it a suffragan of the same metropolitan see.

On 22 July 1961, Pope John XXIII erected the Diocese of Baton Rouge, taking its territory from the archdiocese and making it a suffragan of the same metropolitan see.

On 2 March 1977, Pope Paul VI erected the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, taking its territory from the archdiocese and making it a suffragan of the same metropolitan see.

In December 2019, former deacon Greg Brignac was arrested for multiple acts of abuse, including raping an altar boy at Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in the late 1970s.

[12][13][14] In January 2020, the New Orleans Saints football team said that Senior Vice President for Communications Greg Bensel had provided public relations advice to the archdiocese.

[9] He advised the archdiocese to "Be direct, open and fully transparent, while making sure that all law enforcement agencies were alerted.

[16][17] The pending sex abuse lawsuits, which were suspended due to the bankruptcy filing,[17] would probably have cost the already financially struggling archdiocese millions of dollars more.

[16] On August 20, 2020, victims of sex abuse by clergy who served in the archdiocese filed a motion in court to dismiss the bankruptcy.

In 2013, the man had told Archbishop Aymond that he had been molested in 1980 at St. Ann School in Metairie by archdiocesan priest James Collery.

[19] Also in May 2020, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Grabill suspended all archdiocesan retirement benefits for priests credibly accused of sexually abusing minors.

[23] A trove of love letters which Highfill wrote to one of his victims, Scot Brander, in the 1980s also backed allegations that he committed acts of sex abuse.

[24] On October 23, 2020, archdiocesan priest Pat Wattigny was arrested in Georgia on a warrant issued by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's office,[25] charged with four counts of molestation of a juvenile, sexual abuse of a teenage boy, while he was leading a church in Slidell.

[25] In June 2023 it was revealed by hitherto secret church files—the district attorney refused to say whether a subpoena had been issued for the documents—that the last four archbishops of New Orleans had gone to "shocking lengths" to hide child abuse by a confessed molester who was still alive at the time.

The Catholic church adopted transparency policies after the Boston scandal, but the New Orleans archdiocese only acknowledged that Hecker was a predator on releasing the 2018 list of accused clergy.

[26][27] In August 2023, Hecker acknowledged his 1999 confession in an interview conducted jointly by WWL-TV and the British newspaper The Guardian.

[29][30] Hecker had confessed to committing "overtly sexual acts" with at least three underage boys in the late 1960s and 1970s and revealed his close relationships with four others until the 1980s.

[42] A woman named Lisa Friloux came forward to the archdiocese in March 2024 with complaints about sexual misconduct by a priest, Gilbert Enderle.

Around the same time, Louisiana state police served a search warrant in an investigation into whether the archdiocese once ran a concealed sex trafficking ring.

Bruce Nolan of The Times Picayune stated that because Catholic schools had a later desegregation, white liberal and African-American groups faced disappointment but that the integration had not produced as intense of a backlash.