The Baltimore Sun reports on the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s plans for restructuring. They are dramatic. Sixty-one current parishes would be reduced down to 21 across the city and suburbs. Baltimore used to be home to more than a quarter million Catholics at their height. Reported Sunday Mass attendance across the diocese is down to just 2,000 parishioners.
There are going to be similar and worse bloodlettings in dioceses such as Philadelphia, Newark, and New York in the future. It is already a huge burden that almost every priest must be a “buildings and grounds man,” but in an age of declining Mass attendance, and a low level of vocations to the priesthood, there is simply no way for Catholicism to go on maintaining the physical infrastructure she has in the Northeast of this country.
In the rosiest of scenarios, the very many treasures of these parishes, such as altar rails, baldachins, paintings, and sculptures, will migrate in an orderly way south and west toward the Sunbelt and northern Appalachia where there is, for now, still a growing Catholic population and where many Catholics from Northeast dioceses are moving anyway.