By Kevin Coyne
The New York Times
July 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/06colnj.html?_r=2&ref=nyregionspecial2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
THE revival tent was pitched amid the cabbage fields that surround the Church of Our Lady of Pompeii, and as the bishop waited outside in the dying light, preparing to say a sunset Mass, he leaned on his crosier, a wooden staff shaped like a shepherd’s crook. Some restive members of his flock stood a few yards off, aiming their Hail Marys at him.
They have seen a fair amount of each other lately: Bishop Joseph A. Galante, leader of 500,000 Roman Catholics in the Diocese of Camden, and the protesters who track his public schedule, turning up with signs and prayers. They hope to persuade him to change his mind about closing their parishes as part of the consolidation plan he announced in April, among the most sweeping ever proposed by an American diocese.
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| Bishop Joseph A. Galante, of the diocese of Camden. Photo by David Hunsinger for The New York Times |
“Ex Audi Vox Populi, Et Noli Tardare,” urged the hand-lettered sign held by Anthony Mecca: Listen to the Voice of the People, and Do Not Delay. Lead soprano at the age of 8 in the boys’ section of the men’s choir at the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Camden, Mr. Mecca, now 76, still prays in Latin during Mass at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Pitman. His parish, where he has worshiped for the last 40 years, is set to merge with a neighboring one in Glassboro.
“We’re not doing this condemning him,” he said. “I just don’t think he’s heard us.”
For most of the 20th century, bishops in New Jersey — where 41 percent of the population is Catholic, a concentration exceeded only by Massachusetts and Rhode Island — might easily have been issued hard hats as well as miters upon installation, so much building did they do. The first bishop of Camden, Bartholomew Eustace, built 31 new parishes, 25 schools and one hospital between 1938 and 1957.
The job description has changed considerably in recent years. In the 1950s, almost three-quarters of American Catholics attended Mass regularly; in Bishop Galante’s diocese now, fewer than a quarter do. The sexual abuse scandals undermined the church’s moral authority, and the legal settlements drained church treasuries. The number of new vocations — priests to run parishes, nuns and brothers to run schools — plummeted.
“Somebody said to me, ‘It took us 70 years to build up this diocese and you’re destroying it in three years,’ ” Bishop Galante said in an earlier interview at his office in Camden. “The difficulty for me is, how do I help people understand that we can’t live the way we did, because it’s not going to work anymore.”
Bishop Galante grew up in Northeast Philadelphia in the tight orbit of his parish, St. Dominic’s, and its school during the flush postwar years when the pull of the church on its members was at its most commanding. “When I was first ordained, you were expected to wait in the rectory for the phone or the doorbell to ring, and they did,” he said about his first years as a priest, in the mid-1960s. “You can’t do that anymore. We have to go out to the people, and that’s a major change.”
He was 65 when he was installed as the bishop in Camden in 2004 — after a stint at the Vatican, and almost a dozen years as a bishop in Texas, the first bishop here who didn’t come from either northern New Jersey or New York — but he quickly made clear that he didn’t regard the job as a placid caretaker’s sinecure before retirement. He had seen the church at its worst, as the national spokesman for the bishops’ conference that set guidelines for the handling of sexual abuse claims, and he wanted it to do better.
For more than a year, Bishop Galante spent his evenings visiting the 124 parishes in the diocese, which covers the state’s six southernmost counties, hearing what Catholics liked, and didn’t, about their church. He knew some churches would have to go. Dioceses everywhere have been shedding parishes, especially in old city neighborhoods; the question was how many.
“It’s a terribly painful thing to close a parish — it’s like a death,” said Mary Gautier, senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. The number of parishes in the United States peaked in 1995 at 19,331, a number that has since declined to about 18,500. “But they’ve gotten to the point now where there are just not enough people left to staff them.”
Over the next seven years, the number of active diocesan priests in Camden is expected to drop to 85 from 162. “The tradition around here was that there were enough priests, that Father pretty much did everything,” said Bishop Galante, whose view on how parishes could work was shaped by his time in Texas, where the laity carried more of the weight. “The ethos here was more complacent, but in the meantime, changes were happening, and how we did church remained pretty much the same.”
The planning group he appointed — including laity as well as priests and other religious members — recommended even deeper cuts than he had expected, slashing the number of parishes almost in half. Over the next two years, the 124 parishes in the diocese will become 66. Some churches will remain open as “worship sites” within new parishes; about two dozen will be shuttered.
“I thought about that,” Bishop Galante said about the strategy of gradual attrition that most other dioceses have used. “But I saw in other places it’s like waiting for the next shoe to drop. How far do you keep the level of tension and uncertainty?”
And so the Hail Marys continued outside the tent here — from representatives of the half-dozen or so downsized parishes that have protested the loudest — until Bishop Galante and his concelebrants proceeded in to begin Mass.
“We’re optimistic that it won’t take too long before either Rome or Bishop Galante hears us,” said Laura Vassallo, 34, who had come with her two sisters, her four nieces and her mother from St. Mary’s in nearby Malaga, which is scheduled to close entirely.
The argument that bigger parishes can do more — hire lay youth ministers, for instance, a position that exists now at only one parish in the entire diocese — doesn’t sway her, or the others who have joined the Council of Parishes, a new group formed to oppose the mergers. “This is just one man’s desire for megachurches, and all of us who belong to smaller parishes, which is the majority of the diocese, are suffering for that,” she said.
This gospel at the evening’s Mass, the end of a four-day tent revival, was from Matthew: Jesus telling his disciples, “But I say to you, love your enemies.”
“That’s not easy, but it is what Jesus expected,” Bishop Galante said in his homily, speaking evenly and without notes to the crowd seated under the tent.
“For many people it seems strange to have a Catholic tent revival,” he said as the last light of the sun died in the western sky and a nearly full moon rose in the East. “What’s strange is that we’re not doing enough Catholic revival.”
The crowd began to applaud, and a few people turned around discreetly to see what the reaction would be among the protesters, but they had already gone.
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