A number of churches will be closed as the Archdiocese of Hartford
solidifies plans to reorganize its 212 parishes, but church officials
believe those remaining will be full of vibrant, energized Roman
Catholics, focused on the church’s mission of spreading the gospel.
Final plans won’t be announced until spring but, according to a recently issued report,
the archdiocese’s initial target is 114 parishes or “pastorates.”
Some
will have more than one church open for worship; in others, parishes
will use a single campus.
In each, there will be a pastor who may be
assisted by associate priests or deacons, according to the report,
“Stewards for Tomorrow,” which has been mailed to 186,000 households in
the archdiocese. It can be found at www.stewardsfortomorrow.org.
“In most cases, that decision will be made at a local level,”
said the Rev. James Shanley, vicar for pastoral planning for the
archdiocese, which encompasses New Haven, Litchfield and Hartford
counties. “In some instances the archdiocese might strongly recommend
that a church be closed.”
The consolidation is necessary because there are fewer priests
and fewer Catholics attending Mass than there were 50 years ago, when
immigrants and other Catholics filled churches, Shanley said. “We
probably have the right number of priests for the people that are going
to Mass at the moment,” Shanley said, but many are nearing retirement
age.
In a state with a declining population overall, the numbers of
Catholics and priests have suffered a stark drop in the last 50 years,
according to the report, prepared by consultant PartnersEdge
of Minnesota.
Between 1965 and 2015, the number of Catholics in the
archdiocese dropped 27 percent, from 751,192 to 545,980, while the
number of priests fell 65 percent, from 535 to 186. The number of
parishes, however, increased during those 50 years, from 195 to 212.
“We do not have enough priests” to serve all the archdiocese’s
parishes, Shanley said. Many parishes already are linked, with one
priest serving two or three. There have already been a handful of
mergers, such as St. Ambrose Parish in North Branford, which continues to meet in two churches.
Another parish undergoing a merger is St. Aedan and St. Brendan Church
in the Westville section of New Haven. There, Masses are held only at
St. Aedan on Fountain Street during the winter, to save on heating
costs. But according to the Rev. Thomas Shepard, pastor, St. Brendan
Church on Whalley Avenue will be put up for sale, one of several
buildings, including a former school, a rectory and a convent, that the
parish no longer needs.
“A merger is like a marriage,” Shepard said of the 480 families
in St. Aedan and St. Brendan. He called linking parishes “the first exit
on the way to Mergerville.” The difference is that linked parishes have
separate congregations, while a merged parish is considered one body.
“Oftentimes people are not that much wedded to a building; they like
particular Mass times,” he said.
St. Aedan and St. Brendan have been holding joint activities such
as annual picnics for years, and lay ministers have been shared as
well, so merging was a natural next step, Shepard said.
“These transitions, these changes, are difficult for all of us,
including myself,” Shepard said. “The thought that I would be asked to
sell church buildings is very difficult for me,” but he added that “the
archdiocese looks at us and a couple of other parishes as pioneers in
all of this.”
Sheila Masterson, chairwoman of the parish’s pastoral council,
said, “We do a tremendous number of joint events and worked really hard
to make sure everybody was … comfortable with the new format. … I would
be hard-pressed to point out members of the parish who do not think of
themselves as members of St. Aedan and St. Brendan.”
With all of the joint activities and forums, “really the
parishioners in both parishes were the driving force behind what finally
happened,” Masterson said. “It was the members of the church who were
driving that train because the church is the people.”
The Rev. John Granato, pastor of the Torrington Cluster
of four parishes, said, “We’re trying to figure out how best we can
best serve the parishes of Torrington,” which are within 1 mile of each
other.”
“We know that we can’t stay as is because four stand-alone
parishes does not make sense.”
He pointed out that while the Catholic
Church is growing in other parts of the world, it is not in New England.
Granato, who is assisted by two other priests, said there is
anxiety among parishioners but he said he tells them, “We live in faith;
we live in hope.”
Shanley said six Litchfield County churches outside of
Torrington, now linked in pairs, also are discussing how best to
organize themselves.
Across the archdiocese, too many parishes have too small a number
of members, Shanley said. When two or more are merged, “there’s a whole
new sense of growth,” he said. “People want to go to churches that are
full [and] exciting. If the only concern is keeping the building, that’s
not something that people want to belong to.”
Other factors that are being considered include how much parking a
church has, whether there is a parish school and the church’s state of
repair. Some churches, especially in the city, are 100 years old, he
said. But some of those are likely to stay open. “St. Francis is massive
on Ferry Street, in great condition with a school next to it,” Shanley
said.
Like St. Aedan and St. Brendan, Shanley said “linked parishes
will become merged in most cases, not always with the parish they’re
currently linked with.
Another church in Fair Haven is St. Rose of Lima
on Blatchley Avenue. The Rev. James Manship, pastor, said, “What I’ve
been told is that the only decision that’s been made is the formation of
pastorates,” which are made up of two or more merged parishes led by
one priest.
“I think you’ve got to look at a lot of things,” said Manship.
“St. Rose is a kind of unusual parish in that we have strong numbers,
we’re able to sustain ourselves in our offertory and we’re growing.” He
said more than 1,100 worshippers come to Sunday Masses, offered in both
Spanish and English, and there are 480 children in the religious
education program.
While many of the urban churches were founded by immigrants such
as the Italians, the Poles and the Germans, there is less of an ethnic
identity in the parishes now, partly because people have moved to the
suburbs.
Shanley pointed out that St. Donato, originally an
Italian-American parish, was closed but that there are two other Italian
parishes, St. Michael in Wooster Square and St. Anthony
in the Hill. Parishes with small numbers would “rather spend their
money on something that’s more mission-oriented” than on heating oil or
electricity.
St. Donato is now used as a Catholic Charities site. Shanley said
the archdiocese prefers that closed churches be sold to other religious
or charitable groups.
“In the suburbs, if parishes are merged together perhaps they’ll
decide that one physical plant will be … a community center,” Shanley
said. He said if a building is sold the proceeds stay with the
congregation and don’t revert to the archdiocese.
He said that when members of parishes that are looking at merging
meet, there is some resistance, but “by the time they talk more about
it with people from other parishes, they come up with more options.”
“Although these are changes, it’s not because of failure on the
community’s part or anyone’s part,” Shanley said. “It’s sad for people
to have their church closed or have it merged or have it used for
something else, but that’s the reality today.”
Will Clark, chief operating officer of the New Haven Public
Schools, is on a committee that is discussing the reorganization,
composed of members of the city’s 13 parishes. “The history and
individual strengths of each parish and the people in it are really
valuable,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of trepidation among a lot of
parishioners out there … and what we’ve tried to do is look at the
bigger picture.”
Clark, a member of St. Joseph Church
on Edwards Street, said that, whatever plan is developed, it should not
be implemented without looking at each parish’s unique strengths.
“You’ve got to start with: What’s the vision? What’s the theological
rallying cry of the work that we do? … It should be very up-front and
should be very transparent and if it takes a little bit longer, then so
be it.”
Shanley said the archdiocese would like to put more effort into
evangelizing on college campuses, to increase membership and possibly
recruit more priests. “We want to make sure they are ministered to as
well,” he said.
Other faith communities also are facing shrinking membership.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newhallville recently closed because of low membership and a high degree of debt.