If you think that's bad, wait until next year: Up to 50 parishes could be shuttered.
Few of the devoted can dispute the need to shore up the archdiocese's crumbling educational empire. Schools with 150 students aren't merely inefficient; they often lack resources to justify the tuition.
But rightsizing never feels more wrong than when your child gets shoved to the sidewalk. Laura McCarthy pays $12,000 a year in taxes to live in Abington Township and $5,000 more to send two kids to Immaculate Conception, a beloved Jenkintown K-8 slated for merger.
Consolidations make sense, but after working on parish finances, McCarthy wonders whether even a regional model can survive Catholics' refusal to give as their parents did.
"The real problem," she says, "is that supporting the church is the last thing on people's list today. It's behind taking their kids to Disney and furnishing their houses."
In 2001, 103,000 children in the city and suburbs attended archdiocesan schools. Today, just 68,000 do.
Barely a third of Catholics in the area go to Mass. Whether out of fury over the sex scandal or as a modern response to old-world interaction, many Catholics don't even succumb to guilt anymore.
American church leaders could acknowledge such defiance by pushing Rome for more transparency and bold, institutional change to lure back the masses. Instead, bishops convene more commissions, lock more doors, and pray they hold on to the few folks left in the pews.
School and parish closings are intended to stabilize. But what if they have the opposite effect and drive away those who fought to stay?
What if the decisions render the church a slumlord stuck with vacant eyesores? How can any saving from killing the heat in a cavernous church exceed the cost of creating all that bad blood?
