CATHOLICS: A report finds only 14% in the London diocese attend weekend mass
Last Updated: September 16, 2011 7:19am
- Bishop Ronald Fabbro said a report released Thursday shows the church must change in response to declining attendance and fewer priests. (JOHN MINER, The London Free Press)
"We cannot continue operating as we are now -- we must make strategic changes," Bishop Ronald Fabbro said Thursday.
The diocese released a 65-page report that found only 14% of the 450,000 Roman Catholics in the diocese attend weekend mass, down 3.5% in the last three years.
Other report highlights, and Fabbro's reaction:
Downward trends: Marriages, baptisms, first communions and confirmations are down, marriages the most. They fell to 967 in 2009, from 2,800 in 1975, down 65.5% .
Fabro on the overall report: "What I found hard was when you looked at all the graphs, they are all going down."
"Things that we thought would never change -- attitudes about marriage and funerals. We have lost something and I found that hard," Fabro said.
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On new Catholics
The church was bolstered in the past decades by immigration from largely Catholic countries, but that's changed. Most immigrants now come from non-Catholic countries.
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On social media
He said the church must reach out and use social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.
"Things that I have to learn about. The bishop has to change, too."
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On faith and falling attendance
Fabbro said he recognizes people still have faith. "They do have a spiritual life even if they don't have a connection to traditional religions as we've had in the past. How do we connect with that? I think that is the question for us -- how do we reach out to them?"
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On declining numbers of priests
The report projects the number in the diocese will decline from 100 now to 73 by 2025, a major challenge.
"What we are going to look at are the different models of ministry, the different possibilities of leadership in our church," Fabbro said.
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On ordination of women priests
That's one thing that won't be looked at. "Not in the Catholic church. That is not an open question for us," Fabbro said.
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On parish closings/mergers
An exercise the diocese completed five years ago, it's not considering more.
"The intention . . . is to build up parishes and help them reach out to our people," Fabbro said.
The Roman Catholic church in Southwestern Ontario isn't alone in facing changes. Attendance at many Protestant churches has fallen as well. The United Church, the largest Protestant denomination, has closed on average one church a week in Canada.
http://www.lfpress.com/news/london/2011/09/15/18690906.html
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Reduce bureaucracy. Fight culture war.By Ian Hunter Issue: November 2011 |   |
The diocese of London, Ontario, Canada, has issued a report which registers a decline in all areas of Church activity. A well-qualified layman sends his comments not by Twitter or Facebook as the Bishop thinks he should, but by old-fashioned print.
Author: Ian Hunter
Author: Ian Hunter
In an unusually frank letter to churches and parishioners of London Diocese, Roman Catholic Bishop Ronald Fabbro has described the parlous condition of the Church. The Bishop’s letter summarizes findings in a Diocesan Report dealing with attendance at Mass, financial and personnel issues, and demographic projections. Herewith, a brief summary.
Mass Attendance: In decline. Of the 450,000 Catholics registered in the London Diocese, less than 14% regularly attend Mass. In 1975, there were 171 parishes to attend; today there are 120.
Priests: In 1991, 178 priests served the Diocese; today about 100. By 2025, a projected 73, many of them “missionary priests” from abroad.
Sacramental Participation: Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation – all down. Church marriages way down. Church funerals declining. Personal confession, almost non-existent.
Finance: Parish donations up 15% since 1994 (less than the rate of inflation), but the trendline is down.
Ecclesiastical bureaucracy: Up. In 1995 parish support service staff numbered 462; today 513. In numbers the apparatchiks multiply while the worshippers dwindle.
What is to be done? In the local paper London Free Press, Bishop Fabbro called the Church to an agenda of “change”, and he mentioned specifically mastery of Twitter, Facebook and the new social media. His letter to the parishes promised a seemingly endless round of consultations and “strategy planning” with “…Episcopal Vicars and Directors, Deanery Chairs, Diocesan leaders…” and others.
Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath; the Bishop is consulting precisely the kind of people who have reduced the Church to its present morass and I anticipate no eruptions of Solomonic wisdom from such quarters. Whom should he consult? Young families, particularly home schoolers; recent converts who come to Rome, despite the times, because they perceive her to be Peter’s rock. Consult with Opus Dei. Will this happen? Not on your life.
The basic truth is that the Roman Catholic Church is, or should be, at war with almost everything that passes for contemporary “culture”. The Church has nothing to learn from current mores; it need not embrace modern technologies. Modernity is an abomination, a daily disgrace to a Judeo-Christian heritage whose legatees we are, and the Church needs to challenge our culture at every turn. This is a truth which, it seems to me, Pope Benedict XVl understands well, and his Canadian Bishops, for the most part, do not.
I do not claim to have answers, but I am fairly confident that I know what does not work. Don’t invite the leading Catholic-basher, Stephen Lewis, to tell Catholics how to live out the Gospel. Don’t allow ostensibly Catholic Colleges, like King’s College in London, to participate in UWO’s shameful decision to honour Henry Morgentaler. It does not require Twitter to tell the good news of Jesus Christ; it does require courage to proclaim the truth fearlessly to a relentlessly secular and hostile culture. Do not cozy up to Dalton McGuinty to create gay/straight alliances in Catholic schools; do conduct a rigorous pruning of what is taught in Catholic schools, and by whom, and see if you can discern anything that is recognizably Catholic and worth preserving. The fastest growing, and most promising, education initiative is home schooling; get behind home-schoolers in every possible way you can. Priests need not be retrained in new social media; they must be challenged to live up to their vows. My observation in London diocese is that the more orthodox and effective priests tend to be marginalized, sent off to the boondocks, while timeservers are often rewarded.
One more thing: when Catholic Bishops choose to sound off in public, let it be on Christian, not social, issues. When the Canadian bishops speak why is there always a faint echo of an NDP policy forum? The very same issue of our Parish Bulletin that contained Bishop Fabbro’s letter urged us: “Let’s vote for a poverty free Ontario.” It does not take the recently departed Saint Jack to interpret this particular plea in the context of the October 6 election.
Bishop Fabbro’s letter concluded: “I am interested in your thoughts about the Report and our plans …contact me through the different social media, including Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.”
Sorry, Bishop, but I am of the Gutenberg generation, you remember those antediluvians who actually read books and communicate in print, so please accept this column as my response.
Ian Hunter
Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.
An index of Catholicism's decline
A review by Pat Buchanan
As the Watergate scandal of 1973-1974 diverted attention from the far greater tragedy unfolding in Southeast Asia, so, too, the scandal of predator-priests now afflicting the Catholic Church may be covering up a far greater calamity.
Thirty-seven years after the end of the only church council of the 20th century, the jury has come in with its verdict: Vatican II appears to have been an unrelieved disaster for Roman Catholicism. Liars may figure, but figures do not lie. Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis has pulled together a slim volume of statistics he has titled Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II. His findings make prophets of Catholic traditionalists who warned that Vatican II would prove a blunder of historic dimensions, and those same findings expose as foolish and naive those who believed a council could reconcile Catholicism and modernity. When Pope John XXIII threw open the windows of the church, all the poisonous vapors of modernity entered, along with the Devil himself. Here are Jones's grim statistics of Catholicism's decline:
Priests. While the number of priests in the United States more than doubled to 58,000, between 1930 and 1965, since then that number has fallen to 45,000. By 2020, there will be only 31,000 priests left, and more than half of these priests will be over 70.
Ordinations. In 1965, 1,575 new priests were ordained in the United States. In 2002, the number was 450. In 1965, only 1 percent of U.S. parishes were without a priest. Today, there are 3,000 priestless parishes, 15 percent of all U.S. parishes.
Seminarians. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians dropped from 49,000 to 4,700, a decline of over 90 percent. Two-thirds of the 600 seminaries that were operating in 1965 have now closed.
Sisters. In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic nuns. By 2002, that had fallen to 75,000 and the average age of a Catholic nun is today 68. In 1965, there were 104,000 teaching nuns. Today, there are 8,200, a decline of 94 percent since the end of Vatican II.
Religious Orders. For religious orders in America, the end is in sight. In 1965, 3,559 young men were studying to become Jesuit priests. In 2000, the figure was 389. With the Christian Brothers, the situation is even more dire. Their number has shrunk by two-thirds, with the number of seminarians falling 99 percent. In 1965, there were 912 seminarians in the Christian Brothers. In 2000, there were only seven.
The number of young men studying to become Franciscan and Redemptorist priests fell from 3,379 in 1965 to 84 in 2000.
Catholic schools. Almost half of all Catholic high schools in the United States have closed since 1965. The student population has fallen from 700,000 to 386,000. Parochial schools suffered an even greater decline. Some 4,000 have disappeared, and the number of pupils attending has fallen below 2 million -- from 4.5 million.
Though the number of U.S. Catholics has risen by 20 million since 1965, Jones' statistics show that the power of Catholic belief and devotion to the Faith are not nearly what they were.
Catholic Marriage. Catholic marriages have fallen in number by one-third since 1965, while the annual number of annulments has soared from 338 in 1968 to 50,000 in 2002.
Attendance at Mass. A 1958 Gallup Poll reported that three in four Catholics attended church on Sundays. A recent study by the University of Notre Dame found that only one in four now attend.
Only 10 percent of lay religious teachers now accept church teaching on contraception. Fifty-three percent believe a Catholic can have an abortion and remain a good Catholic. Sixty-five percent believe that Catholics may divorce and remarry. Seventy-seven percent believe one can be a good Catholic without going to mass on Sundays. By one New York Times poll, 70 percent of all Catholics in the age group 18 to 44 believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Jesus.
At the opening of Vatican II, reformers were all the rage. They were going to lead us out of our Catholic ghettos by altering the liturgy, rewriting the Bible and missals, abandoning the old traditions, making us more ecumenical, and engaging the world. And their legacy?
Four decades of devastation wrought upon the church, and the final disgrace of a hierarchy that lacked the moral courage of the Boy Scouts to keep the perverts out of the seminaries, and throw them out of the rectories and schools of Holy Mother Church.
Through the papacy of Pius XII, the church resisted the clamor to accommodate itself to the world and remained a moral beacon to mankind. Since Vatican II, the church has sought to meet the world halfway.
Jones' statistics tell us the price of appeasement.
This article is taken from http://www.townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/pb20021211.shtml
"Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church since Vatican II" (113 pages) by Kenneth C. Jones is available at many bookstores.
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