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Cardinal Dolan’s final decisions in the Making All Things New pastoral planning process hit hard in many parishes of the archdiocese when they were announced at Sunday Masses Nov. 2.
When it’s your parish that’s being merged with another and will soon cease to exist as a stand-alone parish, feelings of sadness, confusion and even anger are all quite natural. It was revealing when the cardinal, in one of the interviews he did that day, emphasized that he would have been surprised if parishioners did not have such strong attachments to their parishes.
Of course, that doesn’t change the reality of what is starting to transpire in the archdiocese’s parishes, as different worshipping communities merge and parishioners find their way, often in a place that may be nearby their old spiritual home but is still a distance to span.
If it’s any consolation, New York is hardly the first U.S. diocese where parishioners have had to face the prospect of finding a new place to worship after the previous one merged or closed. While preparing this column, I did a quick search of Catholic News Service’s story archives for the past five years and encountered a whole host of Catholic dioceses, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest sections of the country, that have restructured or realigned their parishes, and schools, for that matter.
Similar kinds of restructuring as Making All Things New have recently taken place in the past decade in Detroit, Cleveland, Boston and Buffalo, and in Springfield, Mass., and Fargo, N.D.
The 2014 Official Catholic Directory shows a total of 17,900 U.S. parishes, down from 18,674 in 2009. Those numbers are in contrast to an overall Catholic population that grew slightly during those years, by about 1.4 million to 69.5 million this year.
Looking at the realities that have happened elsewhere, you might say the Archdiocese of New York was overdue for a hard look at its parish configuration. Cardinal Dolan made the case well, I thought, when he spoke about a parish system instituted in the 19th century, which has continued largely uninterrupted and unchanged (except for the realignment of 2007 under Cardinal Egan, which affected 21 parishes). No offense, said Cardinal Dolan, to me and other interviewers the day the decisions were announced, but the way the parishes were configured no longer meets the reality of Catholic life in the archdiocese.
Change was in order, and it is being accomplished.
Changing the configuration of parishes accomplishes some things but it does not accomplish everything. Looking deeper at the low numbers of Mass attendance by Catholics in this archdiocese is worth exploring in greater depth, not only as part of the current process but also as part of an overall assessment of Catholic life and ministry here.
When I asked the cardinal about an evangelization program that would bring Catholics back into the churches, he said the idea was worthy of consideration but it had not been practical in recent years because of the financial burdens parishes and pastors faced in paying the bills and maintaining facilities.
The cardinal, on many occasions throughout his nearly six years as shepherd of the archdiocese, has used his column and blog to address the matter of a society where people want to express their religious beliefs without belonging to an institutional church.
Throughout the next months and years, the case of “believing and belonging” will have to be made all over again to Catholics who are coming to church and to those who are not. If we fail to do so in a compelling and effective way, we’ll probably be working on a new version of Making All Things New again about a decade down the line.
