Cleveland parishes may close but Catholic church will be resurrected within all of us: Regina Brett – Regina Brett, Plain Dealer Columnist – cleveland.com

Regina Brett, Plain Dealer Columnist wrote a very thoughtful column on the closing of many parishes in the Cleveland Diocese. The announcements of which parishes were to close and which were to consolidate were made over the weekend.

I am not a complete stranger to this phenomenon. My old home town of Flint, Michigan just went through this same thing. In fact, the church where Mr. Pete was baptized, confirmed, and received first communion and reconciliation was just closed down. The church where Rosie was baptized just a few years ago was also a casualty. But Flint has been dying for the past two decades and with the current financial woes of General Motors, it will remain a shell of its former self.

But that’s not necessarily true of the Diocese of Cleveland. Cleveland and Akron are going through difficult times, but nothing like what’s going on in Michigan! Yet the Bishops cites three reasons for the closings: Population shifts from urban areas, financial hardships and a lack of priests.

I’d like to cite a fourth – rotten catechesis. While that appears to be slowly changing, what we are seeing is a result of years of drought in Catholic teaching from the bishop’s office on down to the parish level. I see lots of young people on fire for Catholic school sports – the faith? not so much. I’ve seen it up close and personal in the friends and acquaintances of my teenage sons. These kids don’t know what to believe, or they find the faith they do know to be boring. Somehow, the fullness of the gospel message in Catholic teaching isn’t getting transmitted to the current teen generation.

And in my opinion, it didn’t really get to many in the generation or two above them either. The reasons those churches aren’t full is because Catholic families don’t know their faith and they don’t know how to live their faith. Catholic families contracept and abort at the same rate as the rest of the population. I honestly don’t think it’s because they are dissenting from the teaching- I think they have never had an opportunity to know what the real teaching is!

As a result, you don’t have bigger Catholic families, and the children in the smaller families aren’t learning their Catholic faith. So it’s not a big surprise that young men aren’t stepping forward to become priests. ( and no, I do not think married priests is the answer. Deacons can be married and we don’t exactly have a plethora of those either!!).

I don’t think Bishop Lennon is going to stick around very long. I think his primary purpose has always been to make the Cleveland Diocese more efficient from a practical standpoint. He’ll stay probably until that happens and then be placed somewhere else that needs his administrative skills. But after many years of Bishop Pilla’s “social justice” focus and then Bishop Lennon, I really hope your next Bishop will be the teacher that we so sorely need in this diocese. Maybe then we’ll actually start building some churches!

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