Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
160 to 24 “not a sign of failure”…
Egads, the lengths people will go to spin. This is a staple of leadership across the board these days, called toxic positivity. I see it in education all the time as well. Can’t say anything perceived as negative even if it is 100% accurately the truth. Facts be damned.
To experience the soul crushing nature of your own parish closing with so many others, then be told these were dead branches and that’s it’s good thing, is not Christ like.
A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not extinguish, till He leads justice to victory.
‘Tis but a scratch.
Catholics who have always supported abortion are not surprised at this, are they? Catholic churches closing down. In the meantime Muslims will find this news encouraging. More need for mosque’s in the good ole’ USA.
I hope not.
The good news in our diocese is that we’ve had an increase in new catechumens in the past two years. Always Hope.
https://www.liveaction.org/news/death-rate-us-surpass-birth-rate-2030
Looking at a map of that Archdiocese, one will see that many of the faithful will be forced to drive long distances to attend Mass. They used to be able to walk to Mass in the small towns the Archbishop is now effectively kicking out of the Church.
Wolves in shepherd’s clothing seemingly outnumber the actual shepherds these days.
Meanwhile, the Church bureaucracy grows …
IF you were to run the math a certain way…
Rural parishes
seem to make more vocations.
have a better attendance to population ratio.
cost less to run (smaller building).
lower security / vandalism risks.
more likely to meet their operating costs.
By a certain kind of math, the bishop should save a rural parish and close a city church instead…
Never. Gonna. Happen.
They don’t have the vocations to staff 160 parishes. No point in complaining about math. I’ll wager they might have had more vocations if they hadn’t screened out interested parties they disliked for ignoble reasons (and if satisfactory recruits hadn’t been driven out of the seminaries by some of the ringers they did recruit). That’s a wager, though. It’s perfectly possible that their situation is just what it is.
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Yes it’s a sign of failure. Don’t know who Bp. Zinkula fancies he’s fooling.
It’s interesting to speculate what our bishops might do differently if dioceses like Dubuque that implode to the extent that 85% (!!!) of its parishes must close would also have to trim 85% of chancery bureaucracy, and 85% of chancery budget.
It would be even nicer if the bishop who presided over such a decline would be retired (perhaps with a reduced pension) and his diocese merged with a neighbor and declared ‘mission territory’. If a diocese has so utterly collapsed, why is it still a diocese? To borrow the complacent, smug attitude of the failed Bishop of Dubuque, shouldn’t a diocese (and a bishop) that is so clearly a ‘dead branch’ be pruned away so that living ones can bear fruit?
As it stands, there are no negative consequences for bishops who are content to manage decline, or are wedded to failed ideologies that drive away their flocks. In short, bishops and chancery bureaucrats are largely insulated from the consequences of bad decisions— instead those consequences are all borne by the flock. At some point, that injustice and lack of accountability has to end.
For the folks who might think that failures like the Archdiocese of Dubuque are inevitable, and it’s all a bishop can do to make the collapse as painless as possible, I’d refer them to the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Under the outstanding leadership of Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, that diocese prospered such that His Excellency had to do that rarest of all things in this, the Church’s ‘New Springtime’— he had so many vocations he had to build a seminary!
Persons claiming that the collapse we are witnessing in Catholic demographics are simply inevitable are contradicted by the example of the humble diocese of Lincoln.
Interestingly enough, I cannot find any evidence that His Excellency was ever asked to address his fellow bishops about how he made his diocese such a roaring success. In fact, in his twenty years as Bishop of Lincoln, His Excellency was (as far as I can tell) never voted to chair any committee of the USCCB. He was largely ignored by his peers. I suspect he embarrassed them.
I’m currently reading Joseph Shaw’s The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity. In chapter 7, titled “What Vatican II Did to the Church”, Shaw references a fascinating study published in 2019—
”The first approach (asking folks who have stopped practicing the Faith *why* they left) has been undertaken by Stephen Bullivant in another work, a survey of lapsed Catholics undertaken for the the Diocese of Portland in southern England: Why Catholics Leave. It reveals no clear pattern of people saying that they lapsed because the Church’s teaching was too conservative, let alone that they would return if it changed. On the contrary, many participants had been deeply demoralized by the failure of their local parish to engage with difficult teaching, and complained about parish catechists rubbishing the Church’s official positions.”
Another fascinating surprise from Bullivant’s survey was the result that 10% of respondents agreed or “strongly agreed” with the statement: “I prefer the Latin Mass but there is none in my area”.
Food for thought.
“ According to archdiocesan data, Catholic marriages have declined 57% and infant
baptisms are down 22% since 2006.” In once very Catholic Dubuque, IA archdiocese. Since 2006.
It’s rare you get accurate official statistics from the institution on how bad things are—and no resurgence “from the peripheries” as we were promised under the Argentine.
But they will keep doing what they are doing hoping for a different outcome.
David WS:
Too many in the Church hierarchy act like the tenants in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. The wicked tenants acted like they owned the householder’s vineyard and could do with it as they pleased. At the end of the parable Christ had some choice words directed at the Jewish hierarchy of the day.
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“43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.” (Matthew 21:33-46 RSVCE)
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Christ did rebuke most of the churches in His messages to the seven churches in the book of Revelation. He warned the church at Ephesus that they were risking the removal of their lampstand. He was also blunt in His message to the church at Laodicea.
The Catholic Culture website has an article about this subject matter “The parish that prefers death to new life”:
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https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/parish-with-death-wish/
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This article gives an interesting take on parishes and managed decline.