www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Cleveland Catholic Diocese reveals full list parish closings

Brilliant! I have never heard that before...It gives a vocational dimension to the concept of stewardship.

I think this is why large families (used to) have one vocation coming from their ranks.

You are right but also in some cases its layity too who fail to support their Churches and not just financial support all the whole host of other things that go into keeping a parish active and vibrant.
One who has experience.
Stephanos I
PS We have an active vocations prayer group and vocations committee, with the result that we have an unusually high proportion of priestly vocations.

Father Bless!

Praise God for that!

Alexis is right about geographic location. I don't know for sure where these parishes are closing but I am willing to bet they are inner city and the near environs.

The crisis in vocations certainly comes into play here also, but the fact there are not enough people to keep these parishes viable is the number one determining factor. It's a shame to lose these older magnificent buildings but maintenance alone makes many of them too costly to keep open when the people just aren't there.

The article does state most are urban parishes. 29 of 41 will merge with other parishes.
Being lazy today I watched the video first without reading the article.

Sorry, I got my numbers wrong.

29 parishes will close entirely and 41 parishes will merge to make 18 parishes. A total loss of 52 parishes. Although you probably all read that in the first place.

I think I'll go go lay down for a while now.

I live in Akron which is in the Cleveland Diocese. Part of the problem is numerous small ethnic parishes located in the inner city. In the North Hill neighborhood we have one Polish church, two Italian churches (I suppose for different regions of Italy) and one Croatian church. All of these parishes are small and the overwhelming majority of the parishioners drive in from the suburbs.

On the near south side there is a small Hungarian church next to the main post office. Not far away is a Slovak parish. There is another small parish with a very traditionalist atmosphere.

It is sad that the people in these parishes did not evangelize those who moved into the neighborhood as the parishioners moved out. Given that this didn't happen, it is not surprising that the diocese is closing and consolidating parishes. This will certainly be painful for some people. Two of these parishes have beautiful church buildings.

Jews know the road Northeast Ohio's uprooted Catholics are traveling: Connie Schultz
Posted by gmillner March 18, 2009 05:30AM
You don't have to be Catholic to feel anguish over the news that 52 parishes will disappear in the Cleveland Diocese.

The response has been an outcry of families being pulled apart. Who cannot empathize with such heartbreak?

Just like their brothers and sisters in cities across the country, Catholics here are reeling from the consequence of a dispersed and diminishing flock. Bishop Richard Lennon matter-of-factly announced that 70 churches will be affected by closings and mergers by June 30, 2010. The collective gasp assured him that this is not business as usual.

Read Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett's

Cleveland Catholic church closings draw anger from some in the pews

It was Cleveland's turn, some say. Hard to hear when this beloved city of ours has already suffered more than its share of economic hardship. This latest blow feels like loss heaped onto loss. The broadest shoulders bend.

It is an essential human longing to belong to something that, collectively, makes us bigger and better than our lonely selves. Many find that solace in communal worship.

There is something so intimate in the shared humility of heads bowed in prayer, week after week, year after year. Together, we stumble and grow, each "I" becoming "we" through the interlocking weave of celebrations and mourning, potlucks and fish fries.

Listing the churches that will close does not begin to describe the impact on the spiritual life of the nearly 800,000 Catholics in this region of Ohio. What will become of us, they ask. How will we survive?

Catholics might find comfort in the experience of Cleveland's older Jews, many of whom remember all too well what it feels like to lose your family's religious home.

"I can remember so many abandoned synagogues in the city of Cleveland," Myra White told me earlier this week. "Years ago, everyone was from a different small town in Poland or Lithuania or Ukraine. . . . Every group had its own little temple."

She is 68 and a longtime Realtor. To her, a house of worship is more than bricks and mortar.

"To me, a building is a person," she said. "It feels so sad to leave them behind. But, you know, it didn't affect my identity. I didn't stop being a Jew."

The city's East Side is peppered with churches housed in former synagogues that closed as Jews moved to the eastern suburbs, a migration superbly documented by the Cleveland Jewish History Web site.

Some temples merged. Others relocated. What happened to their congregations was up to them, says Arnold Berger, a 77-year-old retired professor and computer whiz who maintains the Jewish History Web site.

It takes conscious effort to preserve tradition beyond the walls of its birth, he said.

"This is a sad time, especially for older Catholics with memories," Berger said. "Like the old
synagogues, old churches were a response to large surges of ethnic populations. But if you want to preserve your traditions, you must be willing to move where your younger people are going. You leave the building, but you take the art and the stories with you."

It's also important that congregations merge histories, Berger said. He helped with the controversial merger in the mid-1960s of the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, so he knows a thing or two about what does and doesn't work.

"It does not work for one church to say to the other members, 'Welcome.' That makes the people who lost their church feel like losers. Ideally, merged churches are like good second marriages. Some pictures have to come down, others go up."

The challenge is in preserving an old church while growing a new one.

For many Catholics, it's too early to imagine such a thing, but this is precisely the time to start thinking about it. Unlike in Boston, where churches shut down quickly, Cleveland Catholics have about a year to adapt to this dramatic change.

The diocese insists that some churches must close.

All hearts are welcome to stay open.

I.F.

Article on St. Patrick Church in Cleveland [blog.cleveland.com]

I spoke with my former Ruthenian pastor yesterday. He told me that everyone is asking when Bishop John is going to start closing parishes. It turns out that because of the RDL there are not enough people left even to form one good sized parish in Cleveland. But the assault on the people with the RDL will continue unabated. I think the plan is to chase everyone away so they can have the money from the sale of the churches to pay the retired priests.

I understand your frustration, and certainly the RDL is not helping matters, but demography is destiny, and it is an incontrovertible fact that the population of the old Ruthenian heartland--Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey--is both shrinking and aging. Your situation is not much different from that of the Latin parishes in Cleveland: rustbelt churches face shrinking congregations unless they find ways of reaching out beyond their "natural" constituencies. Even then, their ultimate fate is to fade away unless some way is found to keep their kids at home. One reason the population in these states is falling is the lack of opportunity for young people. They go off to college, they want satisfying and well-paying careers, and they just can't be found back home. They go where the jobs are, and when they get there, they look for churches in which to worship.

I would liken the situation of the Eastern Churches to a creosote bush (which, by the way, is the oldest living thing on earth). It dies back from the center, and grows outward. So, too, with the Greek Catholic and Orthodox Churches: they are dying back in the old ethnic settlements, but they are growing with increasing dynamism on the periphery--in places like the South, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest. And, when you look at the demographics of these regions, you recognize that these are the places where the population as a whole is growing, where the new professions are rising, and it seems natural that the Church would move to where the people are.

Wow, the bishop of Cleveland is closing a parish (i.e., St. Patrick's) that is larger than any of the Catholic parishes near my home in California.

Maybe with an economic collapse and pandemic in the Fall, we could pack those churches again.

That actually happened in Siglo de Oro Spain, where a disproportionate part of the population (8-12% of the adult population in some provinces) was made up of priests. Well, it scarcely helped the Church there, and the spectacle of jobless priests just staying home and begging for Mass stipends at the doors of churches didn't do anything to edify the people. It can even be argued that it deprived the society and economy of a large number of people who would have been better off as productive workers rather than as priests who arguably had no real vocation.

The plus side was that Spain was able to send an endless stream of missionaries to the whole world, but these probably accounted for less than 1% of the entire Spanish population.