My jaw dropped.
Yes. We here in upstate New York are having demographic shifts and a worsening priest shortage. Yes, every diocese up has here made the difficult decision to close and merge parishes as needed, based on those demographic shifts. (I belong to one such community, which has three parishes that share two church buildings linked under a single pastor.)
Buffalo is going through a period of closing and merging parishes according to shifts in the Catholic population. Historic ethnic parishes are closing. As a Catholic and lover of history, it makes me very sad.
But ethnic cleansing, it ain’t.
I wonder if this same politician had similar things to say when many branches of the Buffalo-Erie County Public Library, mostly in neighborhoods where people don’t own cars, closed a few years ago. Or was that different, because it was a difficult decision made in the face of a county fiscal crisis, instead of a difficult decision made in the face of a population, financial, and personnel crisis?
(H/T to CVSTOS FIDEI for the Catholic League link.)
Confession booths go silent
Today, the homily was about how important the sacrament of reconciliation is and how people don’t use it enough today. I wondered where this came from (after all, we had a few people in line who didn’t make it in to confession before mass started) and then I was skimming this morning’s newspaper and saw this article that ran in the paper today. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not…
The article will eventually be deleted, so I’ll quote out some of my favorite passages.
This scene in Albany speaks volumes about the state of confession in America. The sacrament, once a pillar of Catholic practice, is crumbling. And the way people confess, both what they say and where they say it, is shifting from the old laundry lists of minor misdeeds recited in austere anonymous boxes.Only 26 percent of Catholics go to confession at least once a year, according to a 2005 poll by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. A University of Notre Dame study in the early 1980s put the number at 74 percent.
It’s an alarming trend for Catholic leaders, who see confession as essential to spiritual health. What’s at stake is a route, laid out in the Bible, to examine your conscience, overcome sin and achieve grace.
Signs of concern keep popping up. Pope Benedict XVI talked up the sacrament in at least three recent public appearances, even casting it in modern psychological terms as a remedy for “guilt complexes.”
…
O’Toole also pointed to a new emphasis since the 1960s on the social dimensions of sin, the notion that sin isn’t so much “I punched my sister” as it is things like racism, sexism and damaging the environment. Stuff that’s generally harder to talk about in the confessional.
The professor added that rates of Communion skyrocketed after Vatican II in the 1960s, while rates of confession plummeted. Catholics, he said, got the idea that the Eucharist itself provided forgiveness. For minor sins, Doyle said, that’s true.
All of that is much more complicated than the simple reason one parishioner offered for why she prays every night but hasn’t confessed in at least 15 years.
“I feel like I don’t need somebody between me and God,” said Ginny Hartkern, 59, of St. Brigid’s Church in Watervliet. “I think you can speak directly to God. You don’t need an intermediary.”
…
So is there any bright spot in the Catholic confession landscape?
Yes. Several Catholic priests agreed that the few people who still use the sacrament are using it really well.
Today’s penitents are far more likely to talk about “sins of omission,” as Doyle put it. People might lament their failures to put in enough effort at work, say, or to be generous with their money or time.
The Rev. Paul Smith, sacramental minister at churches in Altamont and Berne, said parishioners now delve into things like bigotry — into the attitudes that underlie their misbehavior.
“They’re willing to go deeper,” he said.
100-year Old Catholic Sanctuary Ordered to be Destroyed in China
This story is the featured blog article on WordPress right now, which I saw when I logged in. How tragic, on many levels.
And, as a Buddhist friend wryly pointed out to me, it ain’t just the Catholic Church that China persecutes. A local woman who is a member of Falun Gong fears for her mother’s life after she returned to China and has mysteriously disappeared.
Mixed blessings
I forgot to mention that on Sunday at the Tridentine Mass, there were a fair number of women with uncovered heads. Bad for the rite, but good in general. Why? Well, there were so many people that I think they ran out of loaner veils!
The indult parish is part of a group of three parishes (the Tridentine community is “non-territorial,” but the other two are regular urban parishes) together under one pastor, due to the dwindling number of practicing Catholics in the city, and the priest shortage. A wonderful priest in his eighties who is otherwise retired celebrates the Tridentine Mass, but the pastor has done it in the past.
For Sunday Masses, the indult Mass’s attendance is about 120, which is delightfully high for a service around here. People travel from three different states.
I love the aesthetic of it. Attending the cathedral’s long, solemn Novus Ordo Mass occasionally was a big step, and the catalyst of my reversion. It reminds me of what is special about being Catholic, as opposed to most mainstream parishes where the only glaring difference between that and Protestant services I’ve attended is that you don’t hear any female voices reading the Gospel.
Man, I’ve gone all rad-trad lately. I promise that I’ll be back to normal soon. I just finally absorbed how wonderful the old Mass is.
Sigh
I’m tired and grouchy, I got nothing done today, and I slept in and missed Mass due to a migraine, so instead of doing anything constructive, I played around on the Internet and went grocery shopping. Grocery shopping while sad isn’t a good idea….I come home with frozen pizzas and Oreos.
I will point you to this interesting “Mass in the Round” article that I dug up while looking for stories for the Diocese of Albany news blog. I’m not really sure how I feel about that arrangement–I’d have to see it in action. There appears to be a lack of kneelers, which makes me uncomfortable.
I grew up attending a church where the pews surrounded the altar in a sort of semicircle, which is a nice arrangement except that it makes weddings and funerals a little bit awkward since there’s no true “aisle” to walk down, and there’s barely enough room between the baptismal font and the altar steps to put a coffin. Being able to see what’s going on on the altar was never a concern for me, since we always sat in the back and I’m under five feet tall.
Come to think of it, now that I’m an adult, there’s no one to scold me for standing on the kneelers, so maybe I could try it….
Demographic Changes
A few blogs have discussed parish (s)hopping recently.
I find this a tough problem for many reasons. It never occurred to me that it’s proper to attend one’s local church; we always drove across town because we felt more comfortable at the other one, which was in the same neighborhood as my school so I knew most of the kids my age in church.
I’ve been writing in my blog about my parish-shopping adventures. I live in a city where in my five-mile drive to the cathedral from where I used to live, I would literally drive past three Catholic churches, and bypass a half-dozen more a few blocks away that were closer to my apartment. I travel even farther to attend a Tridentine Mass. I enjoyed the more orthodox service and beautiful environment at the cathedral, and I don’t feel at home at any of the churches closer to me.
I believe that the idea of the “neighborhood parish” ended with demographic changes in America, at least. As Catholics migrate out to the suburbs (and the population in the areas surrounding many urban churches is no longer predominantly Catholic) this leaves us with a problem–if the urban parishes are unable to survive since their parishoners have all died or moved to the suburbs, do we shutter and sell those churches?
If that were the case, here in Albany we would have shut down the cathedral decades ago, since the construction of a government office plaza razed the predominantly Italian neighborhood of 7,000 people (not a typo) that formed part of its parish. These people dispersed, mostly out to the suburbs, and the Cathedral would not hold regular Masses if people (like me) didn’t commute in from other areas. You can also see a few smaller churches in that photo that were eminent domain’d out of existence. There were three torn down to build the Plaza.
Following the demographic shifts means closing older churches with history in favor of building very bland and modern churches in the suburbs. This is going on in upstate NY quite literally right now. The Syracuse diocese recently outlined its plans for closing and merging parishes, and reducing the number of priests needed to minister to the region’s faithful. Ogdensburg did the same thing recently. As one would expect, this involves closing or merging parishes in the cities or in rural areas. The Post-Standard explains:
The diocese is reorganizing to address a declining number of priests and population shifts from urban and rural communities to suburban communities. By 2010, fewer than 100 priests are expected to be able to minister full time in an area that now has 161 parishes and 14 missions.
Vocations are low, and the population is either shifting or leaving the area entirely. Plans in Central New York include closing smaller churches and building new, larger ones that will serve entire swaths of the rural areas that people like me have been fleeing.
The next generation in upstate NY will be difficult for all institutions, not just the Church. Young people simply don’t want to stay, and young people sustain the economy. And the parishes.
Poor catechesis in action
Things are slow here at work on the reference desk, so I decided to poke around the Internet instead of doing anything academically useful. The controversy and eventual splinter church and excommunications at Corpus Christi in Rochester, NY popped into my head while I was reading something else. I decided to dig up a few articles on it–my memory was fuzzy on some of the details, and I suspected I’d look at it differently now than I did then. I saw the events as the facts were reported in my local paper. Now I have access to the New York Times, and magazines of varying ideological stripes.
I suppose it says a lot that at the time, I thought that Corpus Christi/Spiritus Christi* was a pretty cool idea. I was in my late teens. “So what if they’re schismatic!” I said to myself. “That just means that the power hierarchy is WRONG!” In hindsight, looking at their programs, it seems that even if it weren’t for the (many) other issues, the big problem is that they’re just too liberal for me. Which is quite an accomplishment, when you get down to it. After all, Newshour quoted their pastor:
REV. JIM CALLAN: All the issues I’ve been removed for will seem absolutely silly in 10 years, because we will have married priests, we will have married women priests, we’ll have Protestants and Catholics receiving Communion together. Gay people will be getting married in church. Yes, I would not do these things if I thought they were - are so far off the mark.
That was in, um, 1999.
I’d be honored to be part of a parish with so many ministries helpful to the community surrounding it–prior to the break, the church’s programs were amazing. The trouble is, I can’t get behind drastic breaks with tradition. I had considered conversion to Buddhism or to the Episcopal Church, but neither really worked for me at heart.
* - I’m linking to the Wikipedia article precisely because of how terrible it is. They’re never going to achieve a neutral point of view on this thing.
Pretty pictures in a row
I read today’s B.C. strip before learning that the creator, Johnny Hart, had died. I find it rather fitting that he died right before Easter, since the Holy Week strips seemed to be the crowning glory of his year, if a little confusing at times. (”How old was Jesus when he was crucified” is a math question?)
It will be strange to see the comics page without his work, even if I found it uninspired and unfunny about 95% of the time. I hope that the space he currently occupies on comics pages will be ceded to a new, creative, young (well, under 70) cartoonist.
