Everyone knows that the Catholic Church is seeing bad times right now, and many are leaving the Church. But my mom (an active and practicing Catholic) recently told me about some events in the Diocese of Cleveland that make it look like they’re not leaving fast enough for some in the church hierarchy, and need to be pushed out the door.
The backstory: The diocese is currently downsizing, due to low attendance at masses and a shortage of priests. The way the bishop, Richard Lennon, decided to implement this downsizing was to group the churches in the diocese into clusters of three, based on geography, and then decreed that one church in each cluster would be closed, and told the congregations to work it out amongst themselves which one would be closed. But St. Peter’s, a church that’s actually doing pretty well, both monetarily and in number of attendees, was put into a cluster of only two churches… The other one being the cathedral, which of course isn’t going to be closed.
My mom knows several of the key people involved, including Fr. Robert Marrone, the pastor of St. Peter’s. She says they all want to remain Catholic, but they’re not flinching. If this keeps on, the Catholic Church is going to lose several hundred more members at one fell swoop, and it’ll all be because of the foolishness and ego of one bishop.
My parents live in West Park, and there’s still a lot of people upset over St Pat’s & OLA (?) closing and everyone being expected to move to a smaller church. Sounds like he really is trying to get people to leave faster.
To be clear, my mom isn’t a parishioner of St. Pete’s, she just knows people there (I think my mom knows everyone worth knowing in Northeast Ohio). Her church was also scheduled to be closed, but they managed to fight that off. St. Colman’s can remain open, as long as they can raise the funds for some building repairs by next year.
Oh, and did I also mention that the bishop is running a capital campaign for the diocese, and has forbidden individual churches from running their own capital campaigns in that time, so as not to interfere with the diocesan one?
Lennon is clearly tone deaf, but he is not the criminal in this case. Bishop Pilla should have gone through this exercise in the 1980s when all the other rust-belt diocese were doing the same thing. Instead, Pilla chose to simply ignore the problem until he retired, then left a festering financial wound for his successor.
Lennon clearly has bungled several of the issues, but he came in from the hot seat that is Boston, where he faced a different set of horrible issues, and I suspect that some of the mindset he developed there has carried over to how he feels he needed to handle Cleveland. It is interesting to note that his declaration of the possibility of excommunication was delivered as a general statement of church law, (there really are rules in place regarding where one may worship or establish a parish), but his reaction to Marrone and compnay’s deliberate flouting of his authority was not a declaration of excommunication, but a call to meet with him to discuss the issues.
He ain’t my favorite guy, but I am willing to cut him some slack until the whole matter has been hashed out.
(The matter of closing one in three of the parishes is slightly misleading, as well. All the parishes in the diocese, (including suburban and rural), were grouped according geography with an attempt to include cultural relations, and told to find ways to use common resources more effectively. In the inner city and inner suburbs, that did, unfortunately, result in an order to close a number of parishes–paying three priests and heating three churches and three rectories through a Clevelend winter for a handful of parishoners while other parishes up to six time the size get by on a single priest/church/rectory setup is prohibitively expensive. St. Peter’s may consider themselves to be “large enough” to be self-supporting, but I do not know what their actual numbers might be. And, since Lennon was brought in from outside, he is, to a certain extent, relying on the advice of others to explain the situation, both financial and cultural, and I do not have any inside information on how good his staff might be or what background feuds might be affecting the information regarding Marrone.)
tom, the problem with the clustering of the parishes is that, in several cases, all of the parishes in a given cluster had good arguments for staying open, and in others, more than one of them might have needed closing. If it had been “close the bottom 1/3 of the parishes Diocese-wide”, there’d be much less problem with it: Sure, you’d still have quibbling right at the margin, but not in every single parish. Even better, set some hard standards, like a parish must have X number of registered parishioners, Y total weekend attendance, and Z weekly collections, and if every parish in the diocese manages to meet those standards, then good for them.
No, it’s not about how they want to worship: In that regard, they’re still completely Catholic. It’s just that they want to worship at all. The bishop’s criticizing them for worshiping in a non-approved space, while also not approving any space for them.
I think the Catholic Church is still getting used to the idea that an educated population will recognize the difference between edicts from the Bible and adminsitrative functions, and are likely to question Church policy on the latter instead of simply going along with it.
Parishoners are no strangers to mismanagement, but as a college degree becomes more of the standard education, and more and more people are educated in financial awareness, I think more people come forward and question just WTF is going on.
Massively. If he actually tried it, he’d get stomped so hard by his superiors it’d make his Baptism spin. In fact, he can’t excommunicate people for worshipping in a consecrated space IIRC. He doesn’t have the authority, period. Dunno what his problem is.
The situation sounds a little like the debate over St. Stanislaus Kostka parishin St. Louis. St. Stan’s had been the “Polish church” in the area for decades. As the building got older and the later-generation Poles showed less loyalty to the parish, rumors started that the church would be closed. The parishoners insisted that they controlled the local parish, not the Archdiocese.
The archbishop responded by transfering the priest from the parish, and the parishoners countered by hiring their own priest. At that point the archbishop declared the parish to be “in schism.”
You’d think so, except for what happened next. The new priest, being an outlaw and all, went beyond just saying Mass in Polish and started “reaching out” to various disaffected groups, including officiating same-sex marriages. That upset a lot of the old-line Polish members, who really only wanted a gaurantee that they’d always have their “Polish church.” And it brought in a whole group of parishoners whose identification as “Catholic” is really just loyalty to an “outlaw priest.”
Now it may be that the Cleveland archbishop is just looking long and hard at the numbers and has decided that St. X church will be a huge financial drain while Our Lady of Y can hang on a good deal longer. And it may be that, after hearing the story of St. Stan’s, he’s decided that the “let us take care of ourselves” line of thinking leads to “give 'em an inch and they’ll take a mile.”
While the practicalities of this situation may be that the cathedral won’t be closed, it’s not impossible to close a cathedral. A bishop can decide that a cathedral no longer meets the needs of the diocese, and either make another church in the diocese the cathedral or have a new cathedral built.
You'd still have problems, and possibly worse ones. For example, I live in the Diocese of Brooklyn. If there was a decision to close the bottom 1/3 of parishes, I can almost guarantee that certain areas will not have a single open parish within a reasonable distance while other areas will have six open parishes within a 10 minute drive.
It’s absolutely true that the leadership of the Catholic Church has still not gotten used to the idea of an educated laity questioning policy - but it is also true that the laity often has a parochial view and isn’t concerned with the problems of the rest of the diocese. They object to the closing of their parish or their school and that is the extent of their interest. In one school case I know of, it wasn’t even really a matter of the school closing. There would still be a Catholic school , in the very same location. Instead of being the principal reporting to a single pastor, the principal would report to a board made up of lay people and the pastors of the three parishes now associated with the school. The problem was , the name of the school was changed as it was no longer a part of the individual parish. There were candlelight vigils, and protests and talks of lawsuits - all because of a name change.
I am not about to make a blanket defense of the diocesan actions. I just noted that the “one-in-three” comment was a bit misleading to folks who have not heard any of the story before now. I suspect that the effort was made with good intentions, but that as with any bureaucracy, they set up some rules at the beginning and have tripped over the results on several occasions. I am sure that there have been a few brilliant choices and a number of execrable ones.
Church authority flows, (in the ideal world), in two directions, (up) with bishops being selected from the people (down) to become the pastors of the people from whom they were selected. Priests and parishes are the practical means by which a bishop administers to that people whom he cannot pastor due to restrictions of time and space. No priest can perform any sacramental function without the authority of the local bishop. (If your uncle from out of state stops by for a family gathering and the family wishes him to preside at a mass at the reunion, he has to get perission from the local bishop to do so, even though such permission is now a pro forma activity that is routinely granted.) When a “parish” decides that they are no longer going to abide by that association, they are truly not in communion with the church, whatever their personal beliefs. When a priest decides that he can perform his sacramental duties without regard to the authority of the bishop, he is in direct conflict with the church.
Again, note that Lennon, whatever his failings in the decisions regarding which parishes to close, is not waving the big stick in regards to the specific issue of St. Peter’s or Fr. Marrone. The initial statement regarding excommunication, (which may or may not have been issued by his office without his direct intervention), is the sort of statement that he needs to make so that if it goes as far as the parish in St. Louis, mentioned above, no one can come back, later, and say “But they never said it was a matter of excommunication!”
(And the folks in the St. Louis parish, whatever emotional attachment they may have, are simply wrong. Every parish is incorporated as a property and a facility owned by the diocese that is administered by the bishop. If one searches the title on any of that land, one will find that it is held by the bishop in the name of the diocese.)
But the places with no Catholic church nearby would be the neighborhoods with a low Catholic population. You’d be inconveniencing some people, sure, that’s inevitable, but you’d only be inconveniencing a small set of people. On the other hand, if a neighborhood has a large enough Catholic population that it really can support three churches, and you close one of them just because it’s one out of three, then you’re inconveniencing a large set of people.
If you are going to base it on standards such as “X number of registered parishioners, Y total weekend attendance, and Z weekly collections” you would most likely be closing the parishes in the poorer areas while keeping those in the wealthier areas open. I don’t know if your mother’s bishop made the right decision simply because I don’t know enough about the situation, but the Catholic Church doesn’t operate on the sort of congregational level that many other religious institutions do. And I for one, don’t believe it should. My diocese should not close all of the parishes in East New York and Brownsville so that I can continue to walk five minutes north to my parish rather than five minutes south to the adjoining one. And it really is a five minute walk to either one.