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Inside
NCR Parishes signs of big changes in church
NCR has published
occasional articles about the closing of churches, especially inner-city
churches, and the frequent amalgamation of parishes into one big, "viable"
parish. These have usually been stories of discontent, frequently of defiance.
The stories have also reflected signs of the times.
After several such articles, a sameness sets in. There is a
pattern. Broken-down neighborhoods. Dwindled, drained congregations. Lack of
money. Lack of priests. Yet readers continue to write asking us to investigate
their particular city or parish. They are often angry. They blame the bishop or
other clergy for unfairness or insensitivity, for leaving the wrong parish
church open and closing the wrong one, usually their own.
A reader from the Midwest wrote: "In our diocese parishes are
closing all over the place. We are told this is because of the shortage of
priests and because it is burdensome for our aging priest population to serve
two parishes simultaneously -- as if you can't have a parish without a priest
(good thing the churches at Ephesus and Philippi didn't know that)."
This writer blames the bishop for his "top-down, exclusive,
authoritarian methods." Priests are leaving in disgust, the writer goes on,
while priests are being brought in from India, Poland and elsewhere to "man"
vacant parishes. The writer suggests that "if there are as many people in pain
about this sort of thing in other dioceses, you [NCR] would be providing
needed solace" by writing articles and letting the world know the abandoned
parishes "are not alone."
Another reader sent clips from two Boston newspapers following
Cardinal Bernard Law's announcement of a merger of three churches in Ipswich.
One is a Polish national church whose parishioners are unhappy with the
cardinal. "He wants to pull my church out from under me. I'll pray on the
beach," John Krajeski told the Boston Sunday Herald. He added that his
91-year-old mother was planning to leave the church in protest.
"Sadness is a part of such a change for people of faith," Law
wrote in a letter announcing the changes. "So too is hope a part of this
moment," he added. Right now the sadness is winning. According to the Boston
Sunday Globe, parishioners argued that "the church is the keystone in holding
together community, heritage and ethnic traditions. For many families, the
church has been a chain linking the generations. It is where funerals for
grandparents were held, where parents were married, children and grandchildren
baptized."
These are just samples of the frustrations expressed and the
appeals to NCR to expose the misbehaving bishops or the church at large
or the changing culture that led the better-off to build spanking new churches
in neat suburbs while the old ones, half-empty, decay in decaying ghettos.
NCR can't respond to them all. There are too many such
tales. And there is too much complexity and historical baggage and mixed
motives to risk easy judgments about who is knave and who is martyr -- and
where in all this might be the Holy Spirit who, we were always told, would
guide the church.
But we can say and often have said what may be too obvious and up
too close to be clearly seen: A great change is taking place. Insofar as one
can judge spiritual phenomena by the usual human criteria, great things are
happening in, yes, New Jersey. Presentation Parish in Upper Saddle River is a
mind-boggling hive of activity catering to body, brain, psyche and soul. A
great many people are involved and caught up in the excitement. They have a
cause, a challenge, a streak of meaning in a confused world. They are lay
people. There is one priest, the pastor, who is 65, with knees caving in. There
are few if any young priests to take his place: to do the part in this great
venture that for nearly two millennia Catholics were told only the priest could
do.
Presentation is not an isolated parish. NCR's Oct. 18,
1996, issue contained an extensive feature by Managing Editor Tom Roberts on
St. Mary's Parish in Colts Neck, N.J., and in our Feb. 28 issue,
Editor-at-Large Arthur Jones had a major feature on Corpus Christi Parish in
Rochester, N.Y. We are getting letters suggesting other parishes as models for
the future, and we'll get to some of them. Most of these proudly proclaim the
ever-expanding role of the laity, who can do almost everything.
But here we run into the big change that few seem to talk about.
Century after century, the priest was the heart of the parish, even the heart
of the wider church, not because he was handsome or kind or diplomatic or smart
but, the church taught, because he had special powers that went to the core of
being Catholic, especially power to hear confessions and offer Mass. Whether
the Mass was seen as primarily sacrificial or -- since the Vatican Council --
eucharistic, only the ordained priest could offer it. Catholicism is primarily
a eucharistic community: Left, right and center seem to agree on that.
We could say, as Christians usually say under stress, that God
will provide. But whatever God is providing, it isn't enough priests for the
priestless parishes all over the place. Theology therefore seems in need of
catching up with reality. If a parish -- or church -- of the laity is adequate
for God's people, then it's no longer a eucharistic church, unless we bend the
meaning of many hallowed words and concepts, including Mass, priest, even
Catholicism.
The ongoing, unfinished story will no doubt zig and zag from the
forlorn ghetto church to the bustling suburban compound; an ongoing story of
anguish and hope -- but then, since Day 1, certainty and neatness were never
characteristics of any church Jesus Christ might be remotely associated
with.
-- Michael Farrell
National Catholic Reporter, April 11,
1997
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