Apprenticeship in the Christian Life

by Rev. Eric J. Banecker (published by What We Need Now via Substack)

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, under the leadership of Archbishop Nelson Pérez, has embarked on a familiar journey, but with a unique twist. Full disclosure: Philadelphia and its environs are a very specific place and we tend to be a bit parochial. Nowhere is this more evident than among Philadelphia Catholics, an identity which I claim, with all its virtues and vices. Yet, our claims to “Philadelphian exceptionalism” notwithstanding, the fact is that the story here is the story of every large legacy archdiocese on the East Coast: dwindling numbers of clergy, an aging Catholic population, and physical plants, built for a different time, which are almost universally in need of repair—if they are needed at all. Religious women, the backbone of our catechetical efforts for generations of children, are rapidly aging, to the point that a young person at the parish where I serve could easily spend 12 years in a Catholic school and never meet a religious sister.

In the last 30 years, our net decrease in active diocesan priests has been around 600. In that time, we’ve closed almost 100 parishes and many primary and secondary schools. But all that has been via piecemeal, localized efforts which often came at the expense of the poor. The order of events was this: residents of a large Catholic, ethnic enclave clear out to the suburbs; those who remain hunker down and find it difficult to welcome newcomers (who are often not Catholic); the parish declines and buildings deteriorate; the parish is eventually suppressed and the church building closed and sold. All of that might have taken fifty years. The closing may have happened via “twinning” with another parish or a decree from on high merging five into one with a stroke of an ecclesiastical pen. But it all happened, many times over, and almost always in places where the poor lived.

And even with those drastic measures, our clergy are still spread too thin as we try to prop up ministries at so many institutions: parishes, schools, convents, hospitals, nursing homes...

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