Further Consulting

Back in 2020, we shared a publication by the organization Acts XXIX. This article, entitled “Re-Imagining What a Catholic Parish Can Be: A Destination for the 21^st Century,” was disseminated in this diocese so that clergy could “better understand the ‘why’ of Uniting in Heart.”

Its origins were with an organization called Acts XXIX, in the Archdiocese of Detroit. The paper can be read in its entirety here. We discussed the content in our June 2020 post, “The Why.”

It is perhaps relevant to remind people of this once more, since this week clergy and parish leaders attended a “Leadership & Formation Day” led by Acts XXIX members.

As we noted previously, the organization recognizes difficulties in the Church that are undeniable: a shortage of priests and resources, declining numbers after the abuse crisis, overworked clergy and personnel, a culture opposed to faith, the rise of the “nones,”etc .

Back in 2020, the organization used the article mentioned above to posit that, since both the world and the Church are suffering, the Church should seize upon the impact of Covid-19 to move forward via a path of “radical change.”

The authors invited us to “dare to imagine” a different sort of parish emerging, one in which more priests would live together, easing the burdens of work, burnout, loneliness, and so on. This would enable more daily Masses (3-4), more confessions, more opportunities of Eucharistic adoration (perhaps as much as every day).

Well-paid laity, in this model, would comprise a team that took over critical jobs and ministries like operations, evangelization, marriage & family life, worship, evangelization, finance, and many others, leaving priests and deacons free to do their specific work, so that the overall quality of pastoral care, worship, catechesis etcetera would soar. Masses would be at capacity and unreached populations would be given the opportunity for the Gospel.

This all sounds fairly good, doesn’t it?

The difficulty arrives when one considers “the how,” which outside of all unicorns and rainbows-style ideation, one must surely do. By what means could such a parish be built? According to Acts XXIX in 2020: it’s by scrapping the standard parish model, which they asserted to be “broken and untenable” in favor of large mega-parishes.

The authors explain:

“What might God be asking us to build today?
Perhaps the Holy Spirit is calling us to see these days we’re living in as an opportunity to reimage[sic] what a parish can be.

A diocese with, for example, 200 parishes, could be retooled to 40 or 50 parishes, where each parish becomes a true center of excellence for unleashing the gospel….”

At the time, we commented:

…[I]n the end, the authors’ solution to all the Church’s challenges and their prescription for renewed spiritual health would appear to lie in a program of drastic parish closures. A ratio of more than 3 closed for every one left open was the example offered in the Acts XXIX paper.

A few thoughts:

As most would agree, the challenges to our Faith today are not small. We have no wish to minimize them, and in fact can find common ground with the authors of the piece in terms of some of the problems we face–although many other things could be added to the list of things needing to be addressed.

The assumption here seems to be that the new mega-parishes will be so well-managed that they just will not have those issues that plague the Church: retaining teens and young people, gaining priestly vocations, etc.–as though these were primarily issues of resource allocation and programming.

Is this where we think the problems hurting our Church lie? Or do the roots lie deeper than management and programs? Was the Church built and its mission spread by well-paid, resource-rich individuals to begin with?

Secondly, like many such proposals, the authors tend to gloss over the negative consequences. It seems to be taken for granted that everyone will simply adapt to the “retooling,” that the loss of, in this case, over 75% of parishes (as suggested in the Acts XXIX article) will merely be unfortunate. The reality is that whole communities will be negatively impacted, and that some number of disheartened people will simply not return to the “retooled” Church for one reason or another.

We have pointed previously to the Gallup research that shows how past drastic changes at the parish level led to massive and seemingly permanent losses of members of our Faith. Is this merely a “regrettable” but acceptable loss?

Finally, behind all the positivity of language in such plans, one gets the sense that there is very, very little belief that the Church is likely to recover and grow. Some closures are inevitable, as we have acknowledged. Permanent closures on a massive scale, however, adopted as a new strategy, speak very little to hope, optimism or to the belief that God works even in small or poor communities. This will be transparently obvious to the world we’re hoping to evangelize.

People who point this out will likely be dismissed as being merely stodgy and fearful of change….

Yet could we not also argue that the Church appears to be retreating from the world, despite its protestations to the contrary, when it becomes focused on creating surroundings that are more comfortable or more efficient by business standards? We retract the open arms of the Church from the places that need them the most, reducing her points of contact with mankind, leaving a trail of empty altars, while considering ourselves to be more “apostolic.”

To what extent will Acts XXIX’s line of reasoning be present in our own diocesan plan? Their article was presented as offering the “why” of Uniting in Heart. Does it also represent the “how“?

We might well argue that these well-intentioned theories, espoused in 2020 by Acts XXIX and those of a similar mindset, have informed much of what we have experienced in three years of Uniting in Heart. Readers can judge for themselves whether the intended outcome occurred.

Now, this is not to say that the organization is a terrible one, nor to take aim at any of the presenters who visited and consulted with your priests and lay leaders this week. There is always a process of sifting the wheat from the chaff within an organization and among the ideas it promotes, and a similar process among the hearers of those ideas.

It simply bears repeating that this organization was originally introduced to our diocese as “the why” of UiH, and as bearing with great enthusiasm a novel and “radical” solution. One shouldn’t imbibe without caution the recommendations of those who found wonderful the thought of closing 3 out of 4 parishes–in my opinion at least.

It will be interesting to see whether the strategy of mass closure/mega-parish is still a focus in present-day Acts XXIX philosophy and a core tenet of its program, or whether they have adopted other means of promoting parish renewal. If the latter, it seems fair as well as prudent to consider which if any of those ideas meet genuine needs here in the DOL or whether they are more performative in nature.

“Test all things; hold fast to what is good.” (I Thess 5:21)