Walk
down a city street in New York City or take a short drive through
Chicago and you are likely to see numerous churches. Take a closer look
at one of these buildings, however, and you might be startled to realize
you are actually looking at an apartment building or condominium.
Not
that long ago I was walking through my parish neighborhood on the South
Side of Chicago and I stumbled across a church I hadn't seen before. As
I looked closer I saw that the church had been converted into luxury
apartments. As a person of faith, how does one feel looking at such a
transformed space? A myriad thoughts and emotions surfaced in me.
Initially,
it was simply a sense of loss. Here was a house of worship, a place
where the Christian community had gathered to offer praise and thanks to
God. Here was a place that had housed powerful moments in the life of a
community, from baptisms to funerals. Here was the vestige of Christian
values and witness turned into an apartment building.
Despite
the validity of those thoughts and emotions, it's important not to
romanticize the past, give way to despair, or extrapolate too much from
the experience. It is perhaps commonplace for Catholics in the Midwest
and Northeast to gaze around their congregations on Sundays and observe a
diminishment in attendance. Often this can lead to a lament about the
decline of faith, criticism of secular values, or a challenge to parish
pastoral staffs to "do more to attract youth and young families."
Yet
the picture of how the church in the United States got to this place is
much more complex, and the outlook for Catholicism in our country today
is much more hopeful.
Historically, the Catholic
population in the United States was largely centered in urban areas in
the Northeast and the Midwest. It was largely a diverse immigrant
population from throughout Europe. For example, in a nine-block radius
in that same South Side Chicago neighborhood there were three Catholic
parishes that served different cultural groups: Polish, Irish, and
Italian. This, of course, as many longtime Catholics remember, was
commonplace. Our big city landscapes are peppered by numerous beautiful
church buildings built with great dedication, pride, and artistic merit
by the congregations who worshiped in those magnificent buildings for
years.
However, demographics shift through time. Today,
due to a smaller Catholic population in the neighborhood, those three
Catholic churches in Chicago have merged into one parish. While there
are still strong remnants of the founding Polish, Irish, and Italian
communities, the vast majority of the current Catholic congregants are
Latino/a and their primary language is Spanish. More than this, the
archdiocese, instead of closing these buildings in favor of using just
one church building, decided to keep each of the former church buildings
open for Sunday liturgies.
While the three parishes
merged into one, the worship spaces remained active. However, this has
led to great challenges. Each parish has a church, rectory, school
building, and convent. All together the new parish entity has 13 old
buildings to maintain.
This story is not uncommon.
Similarly common are the frustrations of parishioners in these
situations who feel that, "all the church cares about is money," and
their primary mission is to maintain these old buildings. It is
certainly a great danger to the faith when Catholics who are called by Pope
Francis to be "missionary disciples" find themselves instead almost
completely occupied with the task of maintaining church buildings, no
matter how inspiring the architecture. What to do with sparsely
populated church buildings in these changing times is a great challenge
to parishes and dioceses, and there are no easy answers.
No comments:
Post a Comment