Church struggles with change
By Cathy Lynn Grossman and Anthony DeBarros, USA TODAY
The Catholic Church is changing in America at its most visible point: the parish church where believers pray, sing and clasp hands across pews to share the peace of God.
Today there are fewer parishes and fewer priests than in 1990 and fewer of the nation's 65 million Catholics in those pews. And there's no sign of return.
Some blame the explosive 2002 clergy sexual abuse scandal and its financial price tag. But a USA TODAY study of 176 Roman Catholic dioceses shows no statistically significant link between the decline in priests and parishes and the $772 million the church has spent to date on dealing with the scandal.
Rather, the changes are driven by a constellation of factors:
• Catholics are moving from cities in the Northeast and Midwest to the suburbs, South and Southwest.
• For decades, so few men have become priests that one in five dioceses now can't put a priest in every parish.
• Mass attendance has fallen as each generation has become less religiously observant.
• Bishops — trained to bless, not to budget — lack the managerial skills to govern multimillion-dollar institutions.
All these trends had begun years before the scandal piled on financial pressures to cover settlements, legal costs, care and counseling for victims and abusers.
From 1990 to 2003, the number of active diocesan and religious-order priests fell 22%, and the number of parishes in 176 dioceses and archdioceses dropped to 18,441. That's a loss of 547 parishes, a 3% drop nationwide, which seems small — unless it's the church where you buried your mother or baptized your baby.
MORE EMPTY PEWS
The percentage of Catholics who say they attend Mass every week is steadily declining.
1987 44%
1993 41%
1999 37%
2005 * 33%
* projected
Source: American Catholics: Gender, Generation and Commitment
By Adrienne Lewis, USA TODAY
USA TODAY's analysis supports the arguments bishops are making as they close churches.
The Archdiocese of Boston, epicenter of the crisis, sold chancery property to cover $85 million in settlements last year, and this year will close 67 churches and recast 16 others as new parishes or worship sites without a full-time priest.
Archbishop Sean O'Malley has said the crisis and the reconfiguration plan are "in no way" related. He cites demographic shifts, the priest shortage and aging, crumbling buildings too costly to keep up.
Fargo, N.D., which spent $821,000 on the abuse crisis, will close 23 parishes, but it's because the diocese is short more than 50 priests for its 158 parishes, some with fewer than a dozen families attending Mass.
They know how this feels in Milwaukee. That archdiocese shuttered about one in five parishes from 1995 to 2003.
"It was like three funerals," choir director Arlene Skwierawski says. The sanctuary for her beloved Holy Angels Church is now a basketball court for an urban day school.
Still, she went on to create a new choir at a new parish, All Saints. Most of its singers came from vanished parishes. But some voices from vanished choirs did not return.
The city consolidations "gave some people who had been driving back into the city from new homes in the suburbs a chance to say they had no loyalty to a new parish and begin going to one near their home," says Noreen Welte, director of parish planning for the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
"It gave some people who already were mad at the church for one reason or another an excuse to stop going altogether."
Did they go home to brood? Lose their faith? Leave town?
Religion is not tracked in the U.S. Census, and diocese population numbers in the Official Catholic Directory are bishops' estimates. Some reported the exact same number for 14 years. One told a statistician to bump the count up 50% to cover the people he thought should be there.
But the Census does confirm the general demographic shift from historic centers of Catholics in Eastern and Midwestern cities to suburbia and "the 'new Sun Belt' — Georgia, the Carolinas and the Southwest. Atlanta is really a 30-county suburb today," says William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.
Catholics and the parishes and priests that serve them follow the same pattern: From 1990 to 2003, the number of Catholics in Dallas more than quadrupled. It's up another 153% in neighboring Fort Worth, and up 137% in Raleigh, N.C.
Left behind: the cold and the old.
From 1990 to 2003, Pittsburgh closed 30% of its parishes; Grand Island, Neb., 29%; and Altoona-Johnstown, Pa., 27%.
In the same period, Springfield, Mass., lost 44% of active priests, Dubuque 41% and Rochester, N.Y., 40%. The national total fell by 9,264 priests, to 33,028.
Archdioceses, the 31 traditional Catholic centers where about 40% of U.S. Catholics live, are hit hard. All but one, Miami, saw a double-digit percentage decline in the number of priests. More than half of archdioceses lost parishes in the past 14 years.
The number of lapsed Catholics is harder to quantify. Like many Americans who view their faith as a cultural flourish, not an active commitment, they rarely go to church. Their Catholic identity gives a language and lilt to their prayers but makes little claim on their time, talents or income.
It's an established trend abroad where "parishes are often sacramental filling stations — people come for the Eucharist, baptisms, marriages and funerals, but little else," writes John Allen, Vatican columnist for the weekly National Catholic Reporter, a weekly newspaper.
"American Catholics have become consumers, church-shopping like their Protestant neighbors and choosing their parish by the school or the theological perspective or the music that matches them," says Brian Reynolds, chancellor for the Archdiocese of Louisville. "We have people coming from 30 or 40 or 50 ZIP codes to the church they prefer."
No one knows the ZIP codes of the no-shows.
Mass attendance dwindling
The "most damaging change in Catholic life is the precipitous decline in Mass attendance. It's the sign of a church collapsing," says Catholic University sociologist William D'Antonio, co-author of statistical studies of American Catholics.
Nationally, attendance slid from 44% in 1987 to 37% in 1999. D'Antonio predicts it will be 33% in 2005.
"Each generation starts with a lower attendance rating. People don't grow into attending Mass," he says.
It's the bishops who must negotiate these torrents of change, all conflicting, costly and traumatic. Many see their budgets pinched less by the costs of the abuse crisis than by the impact of the sluggish economy and the rising costs of operations.
They need help. "Planning, personnel and funding — the big trio — all require expertise that's not built into church training," Reynolds says.
Yet, just one in three bishops follows "best practices" outlined by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, says Francis Butler of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities Inc.
They don't have to. Bishops are autonomous. They act with only as much guidance from laity, experts and each other as they choose.
But they're mistrustful of outside voices. Many of the same critics calling for financial transparency also challenge traditions such as celibacy.
The bishops see any reform as a slippery slope: "Give up oversight of the books and the next thing you know they'll want women priests," says David Gibson, author of The Coming Catholic Church. "They can't separate ... doctrine and bookkeeping."
And now, after the abuse crisis, the laity is wary of the bishops. They feel excluded from significant decisions that will shape their parish life for years to come.
"You can't trust your bishops. You can't trust your priest. The parish where you were baptized and raised is being closed. And they want money to build a suburban church, but your kids aren't going to Mass. For a church that prides itself on tradition and certainty, these are uncertain times," says Gibson.
Shuffling a dwindling number of people into bigger Masses at fewer parish churches is no solution, says Steve Krueger, former spokesman for Voice of the Faithful, the Boston-based lay activist group formed during the abuse crisis that is a leading critic of the reconfiguration.
"They haven't addressed the real problem of plummeting Mass attendance. The demographic trends aren't turning around. And they are far from solving the priest shortage," says Krueger.
One thing is clear: Bishops and believers need each other to address the challenges.
"The Catholic world was once marked by stability," Gibson says. "Now all it is marked by is change."
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