There Is No Secret To Reverse Parish Closings
Photo by Nathaniel Tetteh on Unsplash On May 8, 2018, Fr. Matthew P. Schneider, LC, of the Archdiocese of Washington, D. C. published to his blog on Patheos.com an article entitled, The #1 Secret to Reverse Parish Closings . While I am not in any way disparaging Fr. Schneider and I do hold him in the highest regard, I do mean to put an end to the lazy, thoughtless, and enduringly unproductive advice he restates, advice which finds relevance only in the small positive feedback loops in which it is circulated like pot at a Willie Nelson concert. We, as Catholics, seem to have a macabre horror of considering as relevant anything that finds Catholics or the Catholic Church at fault for its own problems. Fr. Schneider's oft-repeated trope, that "parish closures come from demographic factors like Catholics moving to the suburbs, ethnic parish attendance dropping, and the population decline of the rust belt," is a perfect example of this mindset. Other than the ...