You may have the impression that Minnesota is chock-full of Scandinavian Lutherans, but that’s not so: German Catholics make up an even larger proportion of the state population. There is a band running east-west in the center of the state that is very Catholic, centered on the city of St Cloud, about an hour west of Minneapolis. This is the Diocese of St Cloud.
The good news is that many Catholics are falling away from the church.
The change is part of the diocese’s plan to consolidate its 131 parishes into just 48, a dramatic reshuffling of religious and community life in this historically Catholic region of central Minnesota.
Church officials say a declining Catholic population, lower Mass attendance and a shortage of priests leave them little choice.
That’s the way I want to see it happening: not blowing up churches, not punishing believers, just a slow, steady, and entirely voluntary departure of believers from the folly of religion. (Although I would like to see an end to religious tax exemptions; we shouldn’t punish people for believing, but we also shouldn’t be rewarding them for it.)
We can simply sit back and wait as religious belief slowly sublimates and eventually disappears. Catholicism is just one subset of fading religions.
The changes also reflect broader religious trends in Minnesota and the U.S.
Across the country, Catholic dioceses are grappling with similar challenges. According to the Pew Research Center, about 40 percent of U.S. Catholics seldom or never attend Mass.
While the population within the St. Cloud Diocese has grown by about 7 percent since 2010, the number of Catholics has fallen from 22 percent to 16 percent, according to diocesan figures. During the same period, Mass attendance has declined by one-third.
Some churches are less than half full on Sundays, Kresky said. At the same time, insurance, maintenance and operating costs continue to rise, she said. And some churches in the diocese are just a few miles or even a few blocks apart.
The churches they have left are all propped up on the benefit of tax exemptions. Let’s accelerate their fade into irrelevance, leaving behind nothing but some interesting empty architecture. Bye-bye!
Those buildings can often make very decent venues for gigs, as we all know; and for art exhibitions, community centres/meeting halls, dance and exercise classes etc. etc. etc. Always a pleasure to see some perfectly nice-looking architecture – sometimes very soundly built, depending on the date – put to good use at last :-)
I have always liked church architecture and the music, even if, as Tim Minchin puts it:
“Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords, but the lyrics are dodgy.”
One time, a friend and I took a couple of hits of acid and wandered around the St. Paul Cathedral admiring all the art while tripping balls.
I guess technically, it was a ‘religious experience’, but I wasn’t motivated to sign up for their newsletter…
The Basilica in Minneapolis is pretty cool, also.
The worry I always have seeing these stories of shrinking parishes is that they’re shifting elsewhere. Better disinterested Catholics that fervent converts to some branch of Evangelical.
@opposablethumbs:
Very true: the Randolph Theatre here in Toronto (previously the Bathurst Street Theatre) was originally a Wesleyan Methodist Church, and still very much looks like a late 1800s church building. (It was both for a while; they rented out the building as a theatre starting in the 1950s, but it was still an active church into the 1980s when they sold the building.)
For that matter, the Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church a little north of there (which is where the Bathurst Street congregation meets now after the sale of the original building) is also the home of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir.
If more churches were like the United Church of Canada, there would probably be a lot less antipathy towards churches. (The first legal same-sex marriage in Ontario was performed in 2001 at a United Church, before they were actually allowed by statute; the Church had read out the banns, and the Government Registrar probably didn’t realize both names were women when the marriage was registered.) The United Church was basically formed as an answer to ‘there are a lot of towns springing up out West, and we (Presbyterians, Wesleyans, other non-denominational) can’t all afford to open up churches out there, and we honestly have more commonalities than differences, so let’s create an umbrella organization that lets us do bulk purchases and together we can just open up one church per town’, so from its founding it has been very much a ‘we’re not here to quibble the details, everyone is welcome’ church.