Thousands of Churches Close In Northeast, Rust Belt, But Dioceses Can Hardly Build Them Fast Enough In South, Southwest
Baltimore becomes the latest victim of plummeting Mass attendance.
By Gary Gately
Call it a tale of two Churches.
In Northeast and Rust Belt cities that have historically had high numbers of Catholics, Mass attendance has plummeted, leading to the closings of more than 2,000 parishes in the past two decades alone.
But in much of the South and Southwest, dioceses can hardly build churches fast enough or big enough — many with more than 1,000 seats, some with more than 3,000 — to keep pace with the booming Catholic population, due to migration within the country and an influx of Catholic immigrants.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore, the nation’s first diocese, has become the latest victim of a precipitous decline in population and church attendance. The archdiocese’s “Seek the City to Come” plan proposes shuttering 30 of 61 churches in the city and surrounding suburbs as part of a consolidation plan. Closed churches could be used for different purposes or sold after closing.
Parishes are distinct corporate entities from the archdiocese, and whatever assets a parish owns stay with that parish or follow that parish when merged into a newly formed parish, which would also remain a separate entity from the archdiocese.
Predictably, news of the impending closings brought shock, outrage, heartbreak and vows to fight to save parishes slated for possible closing.
(Full disclosure: The 40 churches facing possible closure include my new parish after I moved a few months ago, Our Lady of Victory, a warm, thriving church with four weekend Masses where I’ve befriended some parishioners – including Burmese refugees who, like me, walk to Mass – and staff members, and I had just started volunteering for the parish food pantry. The 40 parishes also include that of my ex-wife and sons and my parish for a decade, St. Pius X.)
Under the leadership of Archbishop William E. Lori, the archdiocese began work on “Seek the City” in September 2022, but just released the total number of parishes that would be affected and a list of those proposed for closing.
“If we consider the challenges the Catholic Church of Baltimore City face today with deferred maintenance, low Mass attendance, and multiple unmet opportunities to better serve the needs of the broader community, we could not consider ourselves to be good stewards if we did not take bold steps to ensure a brighter future, not just for tomorrow, but for years to come,” the archdiocese said.
“This requires us to carefully take stock of, and realign, our human and material resources so that we have revitalized parishes and ministries actively bringing Christ’s healing presence to those in need.”
The name of the initiative comes from St. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.”
The city to come is a radically different one than it had been in Baltimore in many respects, as in numerous other cities in the Northeast and Rust Belt where the Church had played a major role in shaping and helping define the lives of generations of Catholic immigrants and their descendants.
Baltimore has been particularly hard hit: With the continuous flight to the suburbs and beyond, its population has declined from more than 900,000 in the mid-1970s to about 569,000 today.
In the city, which once boasted more than 250,000 Catholics attending Mass, fewer than 10,000 now do so, and many of them come from the suburbs.
Some city parishes have shrunk from thousands of members to fewer than 100.
“If we consider the challenges the Catholic Church of Baltimore City face today with deferred maintenance, low Mass attendance, and multiple unmet opportunities to better serve the needs of the broader community, we could not consider ourselves to be good stewards if we did not take bold steps to ensure a brighter future, not just for tomorrow, but for years to come.” — Archdiocese of Baltimore
The archdiocese will hold public “listening sessions” on April 25 and April 30, then make final decisions by June.
Seek the City would represent among the largest wave of closings in the history of the archdiocese, established in 1789. It now comprises about 150 parishes spread across the city and nine counties.
The archdiocese says some parishes that have shrunk to a tiny fraction of their former size now struggle to cover basic expenses. The restructuring, archdiocesan leaders say, would enable larger, newly formed churches through mergers to become more vibrant parishes, among other things, allowing them to add ministries to better serve their members and evangelize to spread Christ’s message.
On a hopeful note, the city is not without parishes that have rebounded from the brink of oblivion to become thriving churches with numerous ministries that draw members from the city as well as the suburbs. For example, only 100 people had attended the two weekend Masses at St. Ignatius Church in downtown Baltimore when Jesuit priest Father William J. Watters became pastor in 1991. Father Watters is widely credited with transforming St. Ignatius into a thriving downtown church with more than 1,000 registered families, some coming from as far as 30 miles away.
Baltimore is certainly not alone in shutting down parishes as a result of declining Mass attendance and, in some other cities (though not Baltimore, according to the archdiocese), a shortage of priests. Dioceses in New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and numerous other cities have also closed churches in recent years.
Some of the closed U.S. churches have been transformed into brewpubs, art galleries, condos, bookstores, museums, hockey rinks, shelters for migrants and homeless people, even a Dollar Tree (in Boston). In Baltimore, the former St. Michael’s Church in Upper Fells Point has been converted into the Ministry of Brewing, housed in the former St. Michael’s Church in Baltimore’s Upper Fells Point, and the nearby former St. Stanislaus Church is now Sanctuary Bodyworks, a gym, yoga and dance studio.
The Vatican weighed in with guidelines on conversions of Catholic churches in its 2018 international conference “Doesn’t God Dwell Here Anymore?” and published guidelines for dioceses looking to sell church property. They ban selling sacred relics and turning over buildings to “sordid” use, such as liquor stores, abortion clinics and nightclubs. Pope Francis reminded delegates of the model given by St. Lawrence, a third-century deacon remembered for “selling the precious items of worship and distributing the proceeds to the poor.”
Catholicism remains the largest denomination in the country and has comprised about 20% of the population since 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, but membership has undergone profound geographic shifts. And just 28% of U.S. Catholics attend Mass at least weekly. Larger shares of Catholics say they pray daily (52%) and that religion is very important in their life (46%).
Nationwide, the number of U.S. Catholics grew 40% between 1980 and 2019, to more than 67 million, Georgetown University researchers say.
But the growth has been anything but even. In 1980, a combined 69% of the U.S. Catholic population lived in the Northeast and Midwest; the remaining 31%, in the South and Southwest and South. By 2019, by contrast, 53% of the U.S. Catholic population lived in the South and Southwest, while the percentage of Catholics living in the Northeast plunged to 28%.
The demographic shifts play out dramatically in places like the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, traditional Bible Belt country. It’s now home to nearly 428,000 Catholics, more than all but a handful of dioceses in the Northeast, and Las Vegas counts a total of more than 40,000 members at just two parishes
The Catholic Church is also aging, Pew reports: 58% of American Catholics are ages 50 and older. But Hispanic Catholics tend to be much younger than White Catholics. Just 43% of Hispanic Catholics are 50 and older, compared with 68% of White Catholics. And only 14% of Hispanic Catholics are ages 65 and older, compared with 38% of White Catholics.
Nationally, young Catholics have increasingly left the Church of their parents, perhaps in part because the younger members grew up acutely aware of the horrors of clergy sex abuse and its cover-up by Church hierarchy.
Whatever the reasons behind it, the impending restructuring in Baltimore has proved devastating to parishioners across the old port city, particularly those who could lose churches that long served as anchors of their communities. Some of them said the archdiocese’s handling of Seek the City may prompt them to leave the Church.
Anne Lewandowski Rossbach, a fourth-generation parishioner at Our Lady of Good Counsel, a South Baltimore church among those the archdiocese proposes closing, expressed shock, dismay and anger. She says it’s inexplicable that the archdiocse’s parish consolidation would force parishioners to travel 2 ½ miles to Holy Cross Church in Federal Hill. It’s near Oriole Park at Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium, and even paid parking is at a premium.
Rossbach told The Catholic Observer that Our Lady of Good Counsel, by contrast, has plenty of parking and is a thriving parish where many young families attend. If the archdiocese closes it, she predicts, many parishioners will leave the Catholic Church for good.
“If you close Our Lady of Good Counsel, we fear our vibrant Locust Point Community will grow dim, and a strong Catholic community will lose its faith,” she says. “We have an Episcopal church and a Lutheran church in walking distance, and people are going to say: ‘You know what? I’m gonna go to one of those churches.’”
Rossbach and many others believe the consolidation plan is related to the archdiocese bankruptcy and legal claims by victims of clergy abuse. The archdiocese denies this.
In a Baltimore Sun column, lifelong Catholic Dan Rodricks wrote: “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.”
Rodricks noted that the Boston Archdiocese closed more than 60 churches and sold other properties to raise millions of dollars to settle hundreds of victims’ lawsuits.
The Baltimore archdiocese did not respond to questions about whether any of the 40 churches are losing money or in the black.
Franciscan Friar Timothy Dore has served as pastor at several Baltimore churches, including small parishes in low-income neighborhoods. They include the 151-year-old St. Ann’s Catholic Church in East Baltimore, which the archdiocese proposes closing.
Dore, now a staff member at the Shrine of St. Anthony in the Baltimore suburb of Howard County, has been an outspoken critic of the archdiocese’s Seek the City plan.
“It’s more like forsake the city, Dore told The Catholic Observer. “People are very, very angry. They feel like the decisions have already been made, that this is just a dog-and-pony show, smoke and mirrors. They feel betrayed. I can’t say I’m not angry myself. I’m kind of disgusted. My heart is broken.”
Dore said some of the proposed closings stunned him. Among them: the Romanesque gem St. Joseph’s Monastery in West Baltimore, where he was baptized, received First Holy Communion, served as an altar boy and attended the parish school. St. Joseph’s members say the parish has been growing, in part because people from the suburbs travel to Mass there.
“Nobody wants their parish to close, but some churches definitely need to close,” Dore said. For example, he pointed to St. Mary Star of the Sea, a city parish where only around 40 people attend Mass.
“What bothers me,” Dore said, “is this draconian closure of 40 churches. We hear about food deserts, but if they close all these churches, we’ll end up with church deserts all over the city, and the elderly and people who lack transportation won’t be able to get to them.”
The friar says the Seek the City proposal suggests that worshiping Eucharistic communities need to be larger and more centrally located in certain geographic urban areas.
“But frankly,” Dore adds, “I believe size does not matter. It seems to me that smaller, intentional and vibrant Eucharistic communities can more resemble the early church’s model of ‘house churches’ than can larger parish groups where people can often get lost and may feel like just a face in the crowd. What’s wrong with smaller faith communities, as long as they are thriving, life-giving and financially stable?”
As the archdiocese prepares for the first “listening session” on Thursday, Dore says: “My best hope is that the archdiocese will listen again, and maybe now a lot of the people who have been on the sidelines and not been part of the process will speak up, and perhaps the archdiocese will seriously consider the extent of these church closures. There must be a more reasonable and pastorally sensitive alternative to this draconian proposal for the future of the Church and its presence in the City of Baltimore. Otherwise, people are going to keep walking away from the Church.”
Friar Dore, I loved and agreed with all of your comments. I have been attending Mass and been very involved with St. Vindent de Paul Church since 1965. The Sunday morning liturgy is lively, the music is beautiful, and attendance is growing...especially the number of young children! It is heart warming! Fr. Ray is so wonderful with everyone, especially the children and the poor. We have a strong outreach for the poor, with dinners on Friday, a clothing ministry, groceries for the poor, and a housing ministry in conjunction with Health Care for the Homeless. We are welcoming to all, including LGBTQ+, the poor, and others who have been shunned by other Catholic Churches. We also help support a nearby public school...both financially and with volunteers. We also contribute generously to a small all black Catholic school, run by Mother Mary Lang sisters and an organization in South Baltimore which is building homes for the poor and working to combat the polution every present there. As you can see, we are very pro-active for the poor, both living conditions and education.
Thank you for your article in The Catholic Observer. It was refreshing in this trying time.
Rita McMullin