Parish Closing Trauma
February 2, 2009NCR is beginning a series of articles on changing parish structures and leadership. This article, the first in a planned year-long series, focuses on parishes merging and/or closing and how the Church is responding to difficult situations.
View this ArticleAccording to Editor-at-Large, Tom Roberts, "Surprisingly, no one at the national level is keeping precise track of the current number of closings. A spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said bishops are not required to report closings. Part of the difficulty in tracking such numbers derives from the fact that diocesan realignments can involve both closings and mergers. In fact, there are more parishes in existence today -- 18,479 -- than there were in 1965, when there were 17,637. But the current number is down considerably from 1995, when there were 19,331 parishes in existence, a drop of more than 850 over that period, according to figures compiled by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University in Washington."
