By Tom Roberts
National Catholic Reporter
January 23, 2009
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The nationwide disputes over parish closings reached a new level of acrimony in January when Archbishop Alfred Hughes requested that New Orleans police clear two churches of protesting parishioners who had been occupying the buildings.
In one case, police broke down a door at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church and removed two people from the premises, including New Orleans novelist Poppy Z. Brite.
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| Former parishioners clap and give a thumbs up to Harold Baquet after he was forced out of the closed Our Lady of Good Counsel Church to be escorted home by New Orleans police officers. Attorney Lee Madere, who claimed to be acting pro bono on behalf of t he parish, thrust his body on top of the police car and tried to stop it from moving. Photo by Christine Bordelon |
While no other bishop has yet resorted to such heavy-handed tactics, and some parishioners in Boston have been occupying five parishes for years in a standoff with the archdiocese, emotions run high whenever church authorities announce closings and mergers.
As columnist James Gill put it in The Times-Picayune newspaper: "The hierarchy may be inclined to expect people in its pastoral care to behave like sheep, but Hughes should not have been surprised that parishioners would refuse to let go of churches their families have, in some cases, attended for generations. These are deep and emotional waters, and some congregants find the prospect of transferring to another church deeply distressing."
That paragraph could stand as a universal assessment of a phenomenon that is occurring with regularity in many regions of the United States. Parish closings, wrenching events often compared to losing a loved one, have become a reality of U.S. church life in the early 21st century as a host of forces -- from huge demographic switches to severe money problems -- combine to reshape the Catholic landscape.
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| Laima Mihailovich, a member of Our Lady of Vilnius Parish, joins a demonstration in front of St. Patrick Cathedral in New York March 11, 2007, to protest the closing of their church. Photo by Frances Roberts |
The problem appears especially acute in old Catholic centers in the Northeast and in other rust-belt and urban centers where the flight of Catholics to the suburbs and a steady decrease in the number of priests are two of the reasons most often given by bishops for shuttering churches.
Surprisingly, no one at the national level is keeping precise track of the current number of closings. A spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said bishops are not required to report closings. Part of the difficulty in tracking such numbers derives from the fact that diocesan realignments can involve both closings and mergers. In fact, there are more parishes in existence today -- 18,479 -- than there were in 1965, when there were 17,637. But the current number is down considerably from 1995, when there were 19,331 parishes in existence, a drop of more than 850 over that period, according to figures compiled by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University in Washington.
Surface tremors
Each week, however, seems to bring news of new closings. Catholics in the Albany, N.Y., diocese recently were warned to expect to lose up to 20 percent of that diocese's parishes, amounting to more than 30 sites, following several years of consultation involving 38 lay groups. The specifics of the plan are expected to be announced by the end of January.
The closings, however emotionally upsetting, represent only the surface tremors, the disruption of old patterns and associations, that actually are the result of deeper shifts and trends. In the broadest view, parish life has changed inevitably and irrevocably, said Marti Jewell, director of a four-year research project called Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership. "I think the restructuring of parishes is inevitable and happening in two ways," she said. One involves the model of a priest pastoring multiple parishes; the second involves the use of parish life coordinators, laypeople appointed by a bishop to lead parishes in all significant areas except sacramental ministries. Laypeople cannot, for instance, hear confessions or preside at eucharistic celebrations.
The issue of parish closings turns on more than demographics and money. Indeed, some would say the forces at work are changing church life as we know it, even if the changes are unplanned and largely unspoken of outside of groups whose lives and ministries are directly affected. Beyond grieving parishioners and beleaguered priests lie giant questions about lay ministry; about whether bishops who don't prefer the lay option are using the priest shortage as a reason to close and consolidate healthy parishes that could easily survive with a parish life coordinator; and about hierarchical accountability. In some instances, the anger of parishioners is fed by skepticism arising from the bishops' handling of the sexual-abuse crisis and financial scandals.
What is clear, say Jewell and others who have long researched trends in the church, is that new models of church are necessarily emerging. Exactly what form they will take and whether the new models will be available everywhere is still open to questions.
While the numbers make it clear that something's got to give, the call to lay ministry, argues Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, South Dakota, is not the product of necessity or cultural norms. Rather, he told a national summit on lay ministry last April, laypeople are experiencing "the new realities" of what the U.S. bishops in a 2005 document described as "lay participation in Christ's ministry."
Whether the new emphasis on lay ministry -- 31,000 lay ministers are employed for a minimum of 20 hours a week at the parish level -- is a matter of necessity or an evolution in ecclesiology, one of the forces driving both the discussion and practice of lay ministry at this point in U.S. church history is the priest shortage. The trend has been clear for decades. In 1965, a total of 58,632 priests served a Catholic population of 45.6 million, including 35,925 diocesan priests and 22,707 priests who were members of religious orders, according to figures compiled by CARA. In 2008, the total figure stood at 40,580, with 27,614 diocesan priests and only 12,966 religious-order priests to serve a population that has grown to 64.1 million.
There were 994 ordinations nationwide in 1965; 480 in 2008, and while that latter number is up 26 ordinations from the year before, the number doesn't begin to approach replacement level.
Those figures don't tell the entire story. Of the current total of diocesan priests, only 70 percent are available for parish ministry, with about 30 percent sick, retired or absent for a variety of reasons, said Mary Gautier, a demographer at CARA. In addition, the average age of those priests is 60.
There's a further hitch in calculating the number of priests nationally to serve the number of Catholics nationally. The populations of priests and Catholics aren't spread out evenly. For instance, said Jewell, "at one extreme -- and this would be the Newark [N.J.] diocese and Chicago and Philadelphia -- you have 50 more priests than parishes. Newark has 200 more priests than parishes. At the other end of the spectrum you have dioceses that have 50-80 more parishes than they have priests."
Regional shifts
If the Northeast is closing down, the South and West are exploding in some areas, with the influx of immigrants and the shift of Catholic populations following work, said Gautier.
In some large dioceses, said Jewell, "you may have 10,000-20,000 Catholics per priest … providing pastoral care is impossible."
Consequently, in some places priests are being assigned either to very large parishes that result from mergers or new construction in the suburbs or they are being assigned to as many as eight or nine parishes. "We are doing a serious injustice to the pastors where we're asking so much of them," Jewell said, "not to mention hospital work and chaplaincies."
St. Joseph Sr. Chris Schenk, executive director of the group Future Church, doesn't dispute the analysis that the church is changing dramatically at the grass-roots level. But she questions why so many parishes are being closed ostensibly because of the priest shortage when church law provides an alternative.
Everyone engaged in the discussion knows the canon, 517.2, that allows someone who is not ordained to have everyday leadership of a parish with a priest moderator.
The model exists in some dioceses, especially those with acute priest shortages, with the bishop's blessing, since the post of parish life coordinator requires hiring by a bishop. Other sorts of parish ministries, including pastoral associate, can be filled by a pastor. But those hired by a pastor don't have the authority of a coordinator to convene such groups as a parish council and a finance council and to have authority in overseeing day-to-day activities.
Schenk's principal point is that it is better to keep viable parishes that could run with good staff and deacons, religious sisters or laypeople than to break up communities that have bonded and have a sense of outreach and mission to the communities where they are located. She claims that the smaller churches targeted for closing, most in the inner city, would in many instances be equal to a larger Protestant congregation. She argues that often the smaller congregations have a greater sense of mission and commitment than sprawling suburban parishes.
The apostolic mission
"My point is that we have Catholics who want to be in the urban region. We may be in the suburbs but we go [to the inner city] because of the apostolic mission of the community," she said. "We want to make that mission attractive to as many Catholics as possible and serve urban poor communities. If they are viable, vibrant communities, why would we consolidate them just because we don't have enough priests? Sustain the mission with parish life coordinators and a priest for sacramental purposes."
As an aid to Catholics seeking to preserve the mission of a parish marked for closing, the FutureChurch Web site contains suggestions on how to sustain a parish, and the rights of Catholics are outlined in a kind of canon-law primer for those facing eviction.
Few, if any, have had as much experience with church law regarding parish closings as Peter Borre, chair of the Council of Parishes, which describes itself as a support and advocacy group for Boston's Catholic parishes -- particularly those the archdiocese would like to shutter.
If Boston was ground zero for the explosion of the sex-abuse crisis in 2002, it also became the center of resistance to church plans to close parishes.
Borre, a Catholic-educated, multilingual Harvard grad who has had a military and business career, showed up one evening in 2004 at a suburban parish that was targeted for closing in a massive plan to shutter 83 parishes in the archdiocese. He suggested to people there who already occupied the church in an attempt to prevent its closing that parishes form an alliance to fight the archdiocese's plan.
About 25 parishes, "a subset of the 83 parishes that were planned to be closed when the archdiocese of Boston made that catastrophic decision," are members of the council. The group has no dues, no offices, no minutes, he said in a recent phone interview, but it does meet once a month and recently held its 49th meeting. The vigils have been going on in some parishes for as long as 51 months.
The protesters have achieved a measure of success. At one point, nine churches were occupied. Cardinal Sean O'Malley "basically reopened four of these nine." One is a full parish and the others were reopened with a lesser status. Five are still occupied.
Borre was raised in Rome and educated by Jesuits there, and returns to that city occasionally to meet with canon lawyers attending to a number of cases going through the church judicial system. He said currently the group has nine cases that were rejected at one level for consideration, but have been appealed to the Signatura, or the Vatican's Supreme Court, which is now overseen by Archbishop Raymond Burke, who previously headed the St. Louis archdiocese.
Borre said representatives at all nine parishes, who have split legal fees of about $100,000, decided to appeal to the full bench "fully cognizant of the fact that the likelihood of success is on a par with my chances of being the starting quarterback for the New England Patriots."
If the expectations of the legal process are low, the exercise of going through the Vatican court system has yielded one bit of information that Borre considers confirmation of his claim that the archdiocese is using parishes like an ATM card, looking to sell off property to pay for the sex-abuse scandal settlements. In one round of decisions turning down the cases, the court explained that the archdiocese had been given wide latitude in closing parishes to avoid financial ruin threatened, in part, by the sex-abuse crisis.
Tom Roberts is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org
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