Could Foxconn be a boon to local parishes?

MOUNT PLEASANT — While there’s been plenty of discussion about the potential “Foxconn effect” on public and private sectors, there’s been little discussion of how it could affect the “spiritual sector.”

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is looking ahead to the potential growth in parishes surrounding the future Mount Pleasant site. And parishioners at St. Paul the Apostle, 6400 Spring St., learned on Monday that their parish has been identified as one with the most potential to grow.

Room to grow

Mark Kemmeter from the Archdiocese’s Office for Planning and Councils ran through some of the projected numbers with members of the congregation before their All Common Committee meeting Monday evening.

Assuming the majority of the jobs go to people who move to the area, which creates more jobs in other sectors and all those jobs bring more people and families to the area, Kemmeter estimated the area’s population could grow by as much as 80,000 people.

continue at Journal Times

CreamCity: Going Deeper: Low Mass Attendance

Guess the date of this photo...

What is the Way? What is the Truth? What is the Life?

What does it look like, smell like, sound like? These are the questions to which the heart seeks a definitive answer.

Where is the witness to the Mystery that once freed nations from bondage? Where is the Cornerstone that built a Church to withstand the sagacity of time? My, how far we have come! How far have we fallen from the foundation that built a Church on betrayal and fear, transformed into Love, Beauty, Truth, and Life. By the will of God, Jesus chose the lesser, the downtrodden, the shamed, to be witness to His Truth and to build His Church.

The Catholic Church, and much of Christianity, is experiencing Lent once again. Lent, a period of conversion fulfilled through prayer, fasting, and alms giving, ought to bring a believer closer to God, to deepen the relationship one has with Christ, whose one and only purpose was to bring about salvation for a broken and sinful mankind. Christ is the New Covenant. Man no longer needs to sacrifice his own; God sacrificed His Only Begotten Son so we didn’t have to.

In a recent article from the Milwaukee Catholic Herald published on February 11, 2016, we are subjected to a breakdown of ideas that were offered up from the recent Archdiocesan Synod which, in part, was called to determine the causes of and solutions for low Mass attendance across the Archdiocese.

continue at Cream City Catholic

There's lots of ways to justify less Mass times.... I hear it talked about often, priests that want less Mass times.  It is comical that cramming people into pews somehow solves the problem of low Mass attendance....  I literally laughed out loud thinking about it.  If a movie is tanking at the box office, only show it once a day, since it will appear like the theater is packed and the movie is very popular, despite the fact successful movies fill the theaters for reasons other than the fact that the theater is not full.

For ordinary form parishes, there simply must be a "JPII parish" if we can call it that, in high population areas.  Among other things, one where liturgy matters.  It doesn't necessarily have to be the Traditional Latin Mass, just a parish where the priest at least understands the TLM so he can understand the modern form.  There's going to be no convincing the smile police that reverent liturgies produce Catholics who keep coming to Mass throughout their life.  But the powers that be will tell one they are wrong with a smile on their face, and that's the sign of a True Believer.

Oshkosh Hermit answers, What to do when faced with a parish merger?

Photo

After his first column, I had someone ask for advice while in the process of going through a parish closure merger.  I again invoked the assistance of the Oshkosh Hermit for some insight.  I didn't highlight but OH is one of the most quotable men I know.

I am saddened by your loss. It’s like losing a family member to have a parish church close. I prayed a rosary last night for you and your community. It’s a tough situation. My heart goes out to you – sincerely.

I have some bad news, but you probably knew it already. No, there is nothing you can do. Ouch. I’m sorry.

We hold none of the cards

When I was in the military, I was responsible to my troops under me and responsible to my superiors over me. It was certainly an unequal situation, but if I were incompetent enough or despicable enough, my subordinates could have had me in a wringer in short order. Breaking a law? Breaking a regulation? It doesn't take that much – low troop performance, low troop morale, and sundry other things could have gotten me fired as platoon commander, and I’d have been another senior enlisted guy checking out basketballs at the base gym until retirement.

Unlike the military, however, the Catholic Church is an almost-purely top-down organization. This is a gross oversimplification, but for our purposes: The pope can do just about anything he wants. The bishops, in turn, can do just about anything they wish in their dioceses. Unlike the pope, bishops are not free to break canon law, but that’s about it (though in practice, I concede, many bishops do get away with breaking canon law). I believe there are several thousand bishops in the Catholic Church today – retired, auxiliary, in charge of a diocese, in the diplomatic corps, at the Holy See, and so on; a bishop getting dismissed (or resigning before a dismissal) is an international headline in the Catholic press and only happens a few times a year. When it does happen, I all but guarantee it has NOTHING to do with buildings, with priest transfers, with financial mismanagement, with generating ill will in the faithful of a diocese, et cetera.

What about prayer? Well do popes and bishops – and the two of us for that matter – answer to God? Sure. But popes and bishops (and the two of us) get unlimited free will and vast volumes of patience on God’s part. Prayer generally only works when it’s God’s will and when the people involved are willing to listen to the Holy Spirit.

What can you do?

Don’t do a thing if it will cause you to lose charity, to lose sight of the Eternal Church you wrote of. I’ve seen people go SO bananas over this stuff, they quit on God and God’s Church. Know your limits, stay prayed up to stay in touch with God, and stay grounded with a core group of like-minded people who pray for one another. If you don’t do those things, the Devil will almost certainly make short work of you. I’m not talking about eternal destinations here, I’m talking about being left spiritually bruised, battered, and limp on the side of the road, so to speak.

Guest Post: Oshkosh Hermit: The Anatomy of Parish Closures

I have enlisted the assistance of the "Oshkosh Hermit" for a series of posts.  

Closing churches? This topic’s about as much fun as getting a dry socket at 5:02 PM on a Friday. Matt kept badgering me to write about it though, for reasons known but to God and Matt’s confessor. Here goes.

I've lived in four of Wisconsin’s five dioceses; I worked at a parish that was being closed; I've gone to mass all over the Dairy State, a number of times at churches that were being closed; many friends and relatives have endured church closings, a handful more than once while living in the same spot; and the parish in which I was married, my parents were married, my great grandparents were married, and which had been in my family for five generations was – you guessed it – recently closed. All this does not make me an expert in church closures, and, “the plural of anecdote is not data,” as they say.

There are myriad reasons why parishes get shuttered. If you’re on Badger Catholic, you already know dozens of reasons. At its most crassly oversimplified level, a parish is like a stool with three legs named Money, Parishioners, and Priests…should one of those legs be missing, the stool tips over, and the parish is no more. Do I like this?  No.  Is natural selection pretty heartless? Yes. This is pretty mercenary, but I know a parish that has multiple masses a weekend that are often standing-room-only; this parish serves the disabled, the elderly, and the working poor better than any other parish around, but they were given a dollar amount to raise each week in the collection, they’ve fallen short for a long time now, and so they’re slated to close. A parish without enough parishioners, or even with the “wrong” demographic profile of parishioners, faces the same fate. I remember one Wisconsin diocese that figured to have one priest per county by 2035…the priestly situation there has gotten better since I crunched the numbers a dozen years ago…but church closings there are as sure to happen as the sun setting in the west tonight – no matter how healthy the parishes are in terms of money and parishioners. I’m sure being a bishop has its eternal and temporal perks, but dealing with this mess is not one of those perks!

In terms of a priest shortage, I have seen two stopgap measures – that of foreign priests and that of parish administrators. Foreign priests are self-explanatory. Parish administrators are laity, permanent deacons, or religious who are in charge of the governance, religious education, and day-to-day functions of a parish; such a parish often relies, for weekend mass and sacraments, on a diocesan priest who already has a parish of his own…rarely the “rent-a-priest” system is employed. Some bishops believe in foreign priests and parish administrators as a secondary solution, while other bishops do not. The heartburn is that some dioceses have had a lot of turnover in the bishop department and no one knows whether or not to count on a certain level of foreign priests and parish administrators because the next bishop may feel completely differently. For example, Green Bay had six bishops in the twenty-five years from 1983 to 2008 (which includes an auxiliary who was acting bishop for a time). La Crosse isn't far behind in the instability department. Madison, Milwaukee, and Superior have had some episcopal stability.