Parish plan concedes Catholics aren’t returning
In June, at the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore, actor Max McLean will portray C.S. Lewis, the British author and Christian apologist who famously converted from atheism to belief in God, achieving wide and apparently eternal popularity among other believers.
There’s no one so convincing as a convert.
It would be interesting to conduct a poll at the June 8 performance of “C.S. Lewis on Stage: Further Up and Further In” to see how many in the audience still believe in God.
If we could corral Catholics, we could ask how many came to the Hippodrome and McLean’s one-man play seeking inspiration, hoping to find spiritual direction, perhaps to a new church. We could gather a subset of Catholics — those who already have left the church — and ask if they have any desire to return.
These would be timely questions, given the semi-shocking news of the past week: a proposal to close or repurpose churches and consolidate several parishes in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
The number of church-going Catholics has been in decline for years, and the reality is particularly stark in Baltimore, home of the nation’s first archdiocese.
A striking fact from The Sun’s reporting on the parish consolidation plan: In a city that once had 250,000 Catholics, fewer
than 5,000 of us are registered with the archdiocese and only about 2,000 regularly attend Mass.
“We have more funerals than baptisms,” a woman from a venerable city parish told me the other day. That same negative dynamic — deaths outnumbering baptisms and converts combined — exists at 33 other churches, according to the archdiocese.
That’s a powerful fact to behold. But it’s not the only explanation for the archdiocese plan.
It’s hard to believe, as claimed by the archdiocese, that the reconstitution of 61 parishes into 21 is not directly related to the clergy abuse scandal, legal claims by victims and the archdiocese’s declaration
of bankruptcy. The Boston Archdiocese, where an abuse scandal erupted in 2002, had to shut more than 60 churches and sell other long-held properties to raise millions to settle hundreds of victims’ lawsuits.
While the allegations of abuse of minors by priests have been around for a couple of decades, the departure of Catholics from the church has been underway a lot longer than that.
In Baltimore, it pretty much tracks with the white flight that commenced in the 1950s when Catholics in robust parishes scattered to other parts of the city and the suburbs. One was St. James The Less in East Baltimore, a church with a towering steeple and seating for 1,800; it ceased
to exist as a Catholic parish in 1986, and the archdiocese sold it off. St. Michael The Archangel Church in Upper Fells Point once claimed 10,000 parishioners. It closed several years ago and is now the Ministry of Brewery.
The decline in Catholic worshipers has much to do with the church’s refusal to change — to allow women to be ordained, to drop the nonsense of celibacy in the priesthood, to allow married men and women to be pastors — and because of its opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Those were serious turnoffs for many who left the church.
Harry Pandolfino, a former Catholic who now attends the United Church
of Christ, made that point in an email to me: “The only certain thing about theology is uncertainty, we can’t be sure of everything. [Religion] must be, to me, a process of searching and questioning, not a rigid reliance on out of date ethics and thinking.”
That reminded me of Father Flaherty’s homily in the opening scene from “Doubt: A Parable,” the John Patrick Shanley play being staged this month at the Vagabond Theatre in Fells Point. “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty,” Flaherty says. “When you are lost, you are not alone.”
Of course, instead of being regarded as a beautiful take on faith, the progressive priest’s powerful sermon merely raises the suspicions of the rigid Sister Aloysius. The setting was 1964, after all.
Had Shanley ever written a sequel to “Doubt,” it probably would have had Flaherty leaving the priesthood, as so many men of his generation did.
That’s an old story by now — fewer priests, fewer parishioners.
So the plan to close and consolidate suggests that the archdiocese sees itself surviving as a smaller community, unencumbered by the discontented.
There is, in that, a concession that those who left are probably never coming back.
Within the last decade, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center surveyed fallen-off American Catholics — those who had pulled away completely and those who considered themselves non-practicing “cultural Catholics.” More than 75% of the people in that survey said they could not imagine ever returning to the church. This does not mean they’re all atheists. Far from it. Pew’s further research on religious beliefs found that the vast majority of Americans still believe in God, but not always the God described in the Bible. There’s a more general belief in a spiritual force of some kind, a willingness to accept the idea of a higher power at work in the material world around us.
If fallen-off Catholics are content with that, defining God on their own terms and keeping distance from a church at odds with personal beliefs, there is not much an archbishop can do about it. So closing churches and consolidating parishes sadly makes strategic sense.