The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Church attendance strong in Stamford
Mass attendance at churches remains strong during a time when fewer people are identifying as Catholics.
STAMFORD >> Mass attendance at city churches remains strong during a time when Connecticut leads a national trend of fewer people identifying as Catholics.
Mass attendance in Stamford has remained relatively constant over the past four years, and the number of parishioners has climbed 13 percent between 2009 and 2015, according to data provided by the Diocese of Bridgeport.
In 2007, 23.9 percent of Americans identified as Catholic, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. By 2014, that share had fallen to 20.8 percent.
Connecticut showed the sharpest decline of the 50 states— 10 percent.
However, at the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist, Stamford’s largest Catholic church, there has been a 6 percent increase in parish membership since 2013. Mass attendance at the church is up 10 percent.
Msgr. Stephen DiGiovanni said the upward trend dates back at least 18 years.
The reason: community involvement.
“The days when you could just sit in the church and wait for people to walk in are gone,” DiGiovanni said. “Now we have to package a product and sell it, and our product is God.”
DiGiovanni is deeply involved in the life of his city, sitting on boards for local organizations like the Downtown Special Services District and the Historic Neighborhood Preservation Program.
“Priests these days need to be missionaries,” he said. “Everywhere I go, people want to talk to me about God. We’ve got to be there to have that conversation.”
However, Patrick Turner, of the Diocese of Bridgeport, said it is difficult to determine a specific cause for changes in church attendance.
“Changes in pastors, changes in Mass schedule, incomplete record keeping, as well as changes in demographics, are all potential disruptions to the individual trends,” he said.
In Danbury, for example, there appears to be a connection between parishes that conduct Mass in multiple languages and a sharp increase in attendance since 2011.
St. Peter, Our Lady of Guadalupe and Immaculate Heart of Mary churches in that city all showed increases in attendance from 2011 to 2015, according to the Diocese of Bridgeport. All other churches in the 16-parish region in northern Fairfield County showed a decline in Mass attendance.
What these three churches have in common is that Mass is conducted not just in English, but also Spanish or Portuguese, or both.
At St. Peter, which offers Mass in all three languages, average weekly attendance increased 27 percent— to 1,854 in 2015 from 1,459 in 2011 —the largest surge of any parish in the region.
St. John’s in Stamford offers most of its services in English, with one Haitian Mass conducted in Creole French on Sunday evenings. Confession, however, is offered in six languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.
At Holy Name of Jesus, where services are held in English and Polish, Mass attendance is up 18 percent in the last four years as the overall population of the parish dropped by nearly 1 percent.
Sacred Heart, which offers Masses in English, Spanish and Italian, has seen its congregation shrink in the last four years, but it has reported an increase of 35 percent in Mass attendance. That’s the greatest increase in the 13-parish Stamford area.
DiGiovanni attributes St. John’s steady attendance to “quality services” rather than the number of languages spoken.
“If you offer great sermons and meet people’s needs and expectations, you’ll have a better turnout,” he said. “We have a great classical choir, and we take time writing really meaningful homilies.”
St. Gabriel Parish, which doesn’t offer foreign-language services, had one of the largest increases in weekly Mass attendance over the last for years.
The Rev. William M. Quinlan said that has to do with a 10-year beautification project his predecessor spearheaded and was completed in 2014.
“Father Cyprian Lapastina took a church that looked rather like a gym and redecorated it to look like something entirely different,” he said.
Some of Lapastina’s remodeling included a decorative railing around the church’s sanctuary and a print of The Annunciation of Mary behind the altar.
“That’s the moment St. Gabriel came to the Virgin Mary, so that means something to us here,” Quinlan said.
The Pew Religious Landscapes Studies were conducted in 2007 and 2014 via telephone interviews with more than 35,000 Americans.
The study showed Catholicism is not the only major denomination to shrink in recent years. Americans identifying as adherents to one of the mainline Protestant denominations shrank by 3.4 percent from 2007 to 2014, and evangelical Protestants by just under 1 percent.
Christians overall decreased to 70.6 percent from 78.4 percent of the population, a net decline of 5 million people. The drop was visible across all demographic categories, including age, race, sex and educational level, but was particularly pronounced among younger age groups.
Non-Christians, including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, saw an increase of 1.2 percent, with Muslims accounting for nearly half of that total.
The number of Americans who describe themselves as “unaffiliated,” including atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular,” climbed 6.7 percent.