Under the Seek the City plan announced in May, the number of parishes in Baltimore and parts of Baltimore County would be reduced from 61 to 23, while the number of worship sites would decrease from 59 to 30. The plan means the closure of dozens of churches across the region.
Many Catholics were outraged by the news that their beloved parishes would close a few weeks before Christmas.
Lifelong Catholic Ralph Moore said the callousness of archdiocesan leaders had prompted him to leave the faith.
“It’s an eviction from our church home,” said Moore, who belongs St. Ann’s in Govans, which is slated to close Dec. 1. “Those folks downtown think they can just move us around like pieces on a chessboard.”
Archbishop William E. Lori said in a letter to Baltimore Catholics that it was “not an easy time.”
“I appreciate the input you have offered, the love you have for your community, and I recognize that this is not an easy journey,” Lori wrote in a letter read at Mass last weekend.
Lori issued official decrees to 31 parishes that they are being merged, or folded, into others. He said the action is required by Canon Law.
Christian Kendzierski, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese, said parishioners have until Oct. 11 to submit a written appeal before the mergers take effect on Dec. 1, the first Sunday of Advent and the start of a new liturgical year.
The process of closing churches that in some cases have stood in neighborhoods for a century or more promises to be gut-wrenching.
One parish to formally receive notice of its looming merger is St. Ann, a Black Catholic Church in East Baltimore. St. Ann is set to merge with St. Francis Xavier, which is located a mile away and is one of the oldest African American Catholic churches in the country.
Moore, who has attended St. Ann’s for 30 years, helped raise $30,000 for a new roof for the church. He was part of a delegation that traveled to Rome last year to advocate for the canonization of six Black Catholics. St. Ann’s, which is more than 150 years old, is also an important site of Black Catholic history, Moore said.
Of 16 parishes identified by the archdiocese as predominantly Black, nine are being merged with other parishes and closing their churches.
Moore said he had met extensively with Auxiliary Bishop Bruce Lewandowski throughout the Seek the City process, joining him for periodic lunches at Tamber’s Restaurant in Charles Village to discuss the importance of the city’s Black Catholic congregations.
“I think it’s heartless that they have a deadline for churches to close three weeks before Christmas,” Moore said. “It’s just mean.”
Moore said people drive for miles to attend St. Ann’s, many of whom had been attending the church their whole lives. About 45 to 50 people attend regular Sunday Mass and as many as 300 come to holiday services, he said.
“People thought they would be buried from their home church and now they can’t,” he said.
In a interview last spring, Lewandowski stressed that “none of these decisions were easy.” But he said St. Francis Xavier’s historic importance took precedence. “When you look at St. Francis Xavier, the first black Catholic parish in the country, that’s where we have to be,” he said.
Although St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church just east of downtown does not appear on the list of parishes that received formal letters, the final Seek the City plan released last May calls for it to close its doors and be merged with another parish, St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Little Italy.
Jill Huppert, a parishioner at St. Vincent’s, said church officials told parishioners they had a year to draft a plan to work with St. Leo’s.
”We were told we have a year from September to come up with an action plan for how we’re going to work together,” she said.
St. Vincent’s, which was founded in 1840 to serve Irish laborers and is one of the oldest churches in the archdiocese, is on the National Register of Historic Places, as is St. Leo’s.
Despite their lengthy histories and proximity, the churches are quite different. St. Vincent’s draws liberal Catholics and warmly welcomes LGBTQ people; St. Leo’s was founded by Italian immigrants and hosts an annual Italian festival.
Huppert said that St. Vincent’s has a hefty endowment that keeps the church financially viable. She said that many parishioners, including herself, are cynical about Seek the City.
”It was just lip service, this whole process of telling the parishes that they had input,” she said. “I don’t trust the archbishop, especially about this process.”
The large-scale reorganization for Baltimore-area Catholic parishes, first announced in mid-April, drastically reduces the Catholic Church’s footprint in a city where the first U.S. diocese was established in 1789.
After releasing a draft plan in April, the archdiocese held several public meetings to gather feedback, leading to adjustments in the final plan issued in May.
Lewandowski said last spring that the plan’s consolidation was not related to the archdiocese’s decision to file for bankruptcy in September 2022, before a state law went into effect allowing more survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file lawsuits.
That same year, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General released a 456-page report outlining decades of past sexual, physical and emotional abuse by more than 100 members of the clergy. Lori has said “the report details a reprehensible time in the history of this Archdiocese, a time that will not be covered up, ignored or forgotten.”
Published on the archdiocesan website, the decrees attribute the church closures to population changes, declining Mass attendance, financial woes and the proximity of population changes. They also outline new boundaries, including management of parish records and the handling of assets and liabilities for merged parishes.
Lewandowski previously said that the archdiocese envisioned the newly merged parishes celebrating Mass on Dec. 1, the first Sunday of Advent.
“These are not easy times for a lot of folks as they form new parishes,” he acknowledged. But he said that come December, there “would not be routine masses at the parishes that have been merged in.”