I grew up Catholic in a suburb of Cincinnati. From first grade through twelfth, I was surrounded by the culture of the archdiocese, as were my parents and four siblings. Mass every weekend, schlepping back and forth in our giant minivan, the only kind of car that could fit all of us (until some of us began to leave the nest). We always made sure to look presentable, especially on Easter and Christmas. Somehow, all seven of us managed to arrive on time despite constant logistical challenges involving bathroom use and curling irons possibly left plugged in. Lenten fish fries on Friday. Dressing up in our uniforms every school day, learning math, science, and religion (our own) in classrooms with crucifixes hanging over the doors. Traveling across the city to watch and compete in basketball and volleyball games at other parishes. At night, praying the Rosary together as a family. It all formed me in ways that I didn’t even realize at the time, perhaps because it seemed, above all, so—normal.
And so it was, for Cincinnati, a city covered in Catholic traditions and Catholic buildings and populated by Catholic people since the city’s founding, and especially since the establishment of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati in 1850. A century later about a third of the city’s population was Catholic. Catholicism’s presence in the city is powerful, and long has been. It’s present in the layout of the city itself, where church (Saint Peter in Chains Cathedral) and state (City Hall) are separated by only a single street. It shows up even in the food. Legend has it that McDonald’s tested the very first Lententide Filet-O-Fish at a location in Cincinnati. And it definitely showed up in the Cincinnati suburb in which I grew up, full of friends from both my own and other parochial schools who shared much of our spiritual and social lives together. I couldn’t imagine living any other way, because I didn’t. If the people I knew lived differently, well: I didn’t talk to them about it. (The existence of “Protestants” was introduced to me delicately; I didn’t encounter any theologically serious ones until college.)
But even as I was a Catholic fish unaware I was wet, the sea of faith was receding considerably in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. A recent document, “Current Reality Report Findings and Insight,” makes this clear. Between 2010 and 2020, the total number of registered Catholic households in the Archdiocese declined six percent. Since 2010, the percentage of Catholics in the overall population of the archdiocese declined from fourteen to less than twelve percent. Weekly Mass attendance declined by nearly a quarter between 2010 and 2019 (the following year being an outlier for obvious reasons); the average Sunday Mass fills about a third of its pews. Overall participation in the Sacraments declined by twenty percent during the same period. (Not even the schools, of which I am a proud product and which serve many non-Catholics, have been immune; enrollment declined fourteen percent between the 2010—2011 school year and 2020.) The remaining faithful are spread over two hundred parishes in the vast territory of the archdiocese, encompassing nineteen counties from Ohio’s southwest border with Kentucky well into the northwestern reaches of the Buckeye State. And they are served by some one-hundred sixty priests, many of whom are soon to retire. A twenty percent decline in available priests is expected during the next decade.
To see the numbers laid out in this quasi-technocratic, McKinsey-esque fashion is almost offensive to me. More than merely an essential part of my youth, the Church—even in Cincinnati—is supposed to be a spiritual entity, immune to such calculation. But the Body of Christ consists of Her members, and the former certainly loses something along with the dwindling of the latter.
The world makes hope difficult even for the hopeful. Decline in the Church has many causes, from the lingering stink of abuse scandals to idiosyncratic issues at the level of individual parishes and everything in between. “The bigger picture is we live in a secularizing culture, and there are powerful forces at work in the culture that the Catholic Church, perhaps even in the very best circumstances, could not totally block,” one archdiocesan priest told me. “Scripture talks about that. There will come a time when people will fall away, when people will have itching ears, they will want to hear false doctrines.” He suggested that other institutional mistakes made decades ago have played a role. “I think we’re reaping the consequences of the collapse of catechesis of the faith, thirty or so years ago. There’s been a recovery, but there’s a generation or two out there that will tell you, they don’t know the faith,” said the priest. “There was just a lot of craziness in the Seventies and early Eighties.”
Eric Sammons, the editor of Crisis magazine and a resident of the archdiocese, suggested to me that Cincinnati’s struggles are typical of the Church in New England and the Northeast: “The Faith was not boldly proclaimed here, and as a consequence the Church was unable to withstand the pressures of our increasingly anti-Catholic culture.” In the pages of Crisis Sammons similarly lamented that “for over a half a century many of our seminaries have been watered down, our bishops have given in to the culture, and our parishes have proposed few convincing reasons to remain Catholic,” a state of affairs for which the blame, he believes, “should be spread to all of us.”
Whatever its causes, this decline is the impetus behind Beacons of Light, a program launched by the archdiocese two years ago which began to go into effect in July. (The aforementioned report was also prepared under its auspices.) “The way our parishes are functioning in this archdiocese, it just is not sustainable any longer,” said Archbishop Dennis Schnurr in a video explaining the program. “We need to undertake this.” Priests and laity I spoke to, as well as a representative of the archdiocese, shared Schnurr’s sentiments. “This is a stab at something,” another archdiocesan priest told me. “We don’t know what’s the best course of action. I understand that. You gotta do something. It’s better than nothing.”
The program, spearheaded by the archdiocese, entails a large-scale restructuring of life at the parish level. It means real changes for the Catholics of the archdiocese. The two hundred-some standalone churches are to be merged into fifty-seven “families” of parishes. Some churches will remain parishes unto themselves. Other individual churches will come together to comprise a single parish (of as many as eleven churches, in one case). These parish families will share the same priests (or priest). They will also get combined councils and Mass schedules, and, where applicable, will have their schools divided up. Beacons of Light differs from past re-organizations, the last of which was performed more than twenty years ago, in the amount of direction and resources being offered by the archdiocese itself. In the past when studies were conducted and recommendations offered, they were not always followed. Jeremy Helmes, director of the archdiocesan office for divine worship and sacraments, said that there is “quite a bit more structure to this process” and that the prescribed changes will take place with adequate support. “It’s really about building faith communities that will be able to provide for evangelization and ministry and service in a way that we’re not able to provide for right now because of a number of factors, including limited resources,” Helmes said. It is certainly true that the infrastructure of the archdiocese was built on different assumptions that no longer obtain, not all of which are for the worse (Helmes cited horse-and-buggy travel and animosity between Catholics of different ethnicities). “We have to rethink how we best use our resources to best be the church right now.” There is reason to hope for this. Combined churches can pool resources. Priests can enjoy more reasonable workloads and return to communal living as a more regular feature of their lives. Parishioners of nearby churches can be brought together in ways they might not have been before.
But there are also difficulties. Some churches, accustomed to collection offerings going to a predictable location, might resist seeing them distributed elsewhere. Priestly assignments are being disrupted; storied connections between clergy and churches are being severed while priests are forced to adjust to the workings of multiple churches simultaneously. And the same qualities that give an individual church its distinct character may be relinquished uneasily, with friction the result.
In the northern parts of the diocese, especially, there have been complaints among the faithful that the restructuring process has been biased against them. Catholics with whom I spoke, both priests and laity, feared that whatever analytical tools were used to determine parish restructurings were weighted toward parishes with schools, whereas in these heavily Catholic and more remote regions of the state, there are fewer parochial schools but a greater religious identity (in the terms possible under law) among public schools. Helmes called this concern “a bit unfounded,” a product of the struggle the sprawling diocese has always faced. However true that may be, those northern parishes do face significant restructurings; seven individual churches in its upper reaches will be combined into one collective parish.
Even in the south, there have been issues. Two parishes near where I grew up that had essentially acted as one for as long as I could remember, Saint Andrew’s and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, were initially going to become part of other parish families apart from each other. I happened to attend Mass at one of these churches just after the first Beacons of Light parish re-organizations were announced. Parishioners were dissatisfied with the decision. Helmes stressed that the archdiocese has tried as much as possible to make this process transparent. And it is true that, after initial parish assignments were announced last fall, there was a period of comment about them. (Saint Andrew’s and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton ended up being united in the final restructuring.) He also emphasized that the pastoral planning phase in which they determine their new arrangements and decide how to share resources will be appropriately bottom-up. “The decisions are going to be made on the ground according to our Catholic principle of subsidiarity,” Helmes said. “And so we hope that will ultimately lead to a sense of ownership. That’s not to say the transition won’t be difficult. But we hope that because the decisions are made a lot more locally that it will lead to more ownership by parishioners.”
But priests with whom I spoke said that while most of the laity have been understanding when things are explained to them, there have been other sources of discontent. “An awful lot of people are worried about their own parish. Any time you have uncertainty, all of the worst possibilities loom large,” one priest said. “Most of the laity are worried,” said Sammons. “They fear the parish will be shut down and they’ll have to drive farther away to go to their new parish. They don’t like their current priests being transferred to another parish.” (Asked about church and school closures, Helmes said that they were not the intent of the program, but that they may arise from decisions made by the new parish families.) There is also a concern that the Church in Cincinnati is really facing “managed decline,” as Sammons wrote in Crisis. Helmes rejected this characterization. “We’re not interested in simply managing decline,” he said. “We’re interested in building vital and vibrant faith communities. And we know that we’re gonna have to do that in a different way than we did, say, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago.”
Tumult and discontent amid such dramatic change is to be expected. “It’s going to require all the Catholics of the archdiocese to step into a place that we haven’t been before,” said Jennifer Schack, an archdiocesan spokesman, in the Cincinnati Enquirer. “It’s going to challenge each of us.”
Is it a challenge the archdiocese can meet? Despair is the temptation. But its history is not immune to setbacks and challenges. Bishop Edward Fenwick, a missionary when he first began his work organizing and ministering to the faithful here (he likely said the first Mass in the area) once found the task of administering it so daunting that he attempted to offer his resignation to Pope Leo XII in 1824. The region’s history and heritage were formed not only by a succession of bishops whose names now adorn various Catholic institutions throughout the city but by the millions of lay men and women who helped build up Catholic life in the city. Its flowering in subsequent centuries would seem to belie Fenwick’s pessimism. And the fact that our task today is fundamentally different from Fenwick’s, one of preservation and restoration, brings both its own difficulties and its own advantages.
Already there have been encouraging signs. One priest highlighted the sense of “greater realism” that the program entails for the archdiocese. “To the extent that this wakes people up to their duty to evangelize, that’s a good thing.” This priest, another to whom I spoke, and Helmes also pointed to an increase in the number of priestly ordinations and to the high character of the younger clergy. “The newer guys, they’re a different breed,” the second priest said. “I have to keep up with them.” Both of these priests also spoke highly of the laity; the latter, of his experience with the young fervent families to whom he ministers, and the former of the laity in general. “I have wonderful interactions with wonderful faithful Catholics,” he said. “As a priest, it’s laypeople who save my faith. Because they make great sacrifices, almost always far greater than I do. And they encourage me. They’re the cause for my hope.” It’s possible, as one of these priests told me, that many cultural maladies are approaching a point where they will undo themselves, which would helpfully weaken one of the Church’s great headwinds.
But the clergy also talked about institutional inertia and a commitment to liturgical and other unfortunate post-conciliar trends which reflect both high-level commitments within the archdiocese and the attachment of parishioners to the status quo. At the most extreme end, there is a concern that Beacons of Light, though a necessary logistical step, fails to redress these more serious concerns. “The first step,” said Sammons, “is restructuring the diocese, but the second (and just as important) step is to restore a more faithful and bold proclamation of the Gospel. If we continue to have watered-down homilies and insipid liturgies, then the decline will continue and we’ll eventually need a Beacons of Light II to close more parishes.”
What does this mean in the short term? For most people, a smaller but more committed Church. “I think the decline will continue for the foreseeable future, as there’s no evidence that Catholics, both clergy and lay, are committed to a more faithful living of Catholicism,” Sammons said. “However, I do think we’ll reach the point where the only Catholics left in the Church will be those committed to the Faith, and from that mustard seed the Church can grow again.” One of the priests with whom I spoke expressed this idea in similar, albeit less pessimistic, terms. “I do believe we have to get smaller to get bigger,” he said, echoing Cardinal Ratzinger’s famous remarks about the prospect of a smaller, less prosperous Church.
I remain ambivalent. I do not currently reside in the archdiocese that formed me, but when I return to it, I see much that gives me hope. Still, the words of the future Pope Benedict XVI alluded to by the priest are instructive. It will likely be the case—is likely the case already—that many of those who only came to and remained in the Church through a kind of cultural muscle memory have fallen away. (I have evidence for this from my own social circle.) This reality is a tragedy, one it falls to those who remain in the Church to redress. And they are perhaps uniquely well equipped to do so. “The people that are hanging in there are the ones that are serious about their faith,” one priest said. “We can build off of that. They’re open to the truth, they’re open to the teachings of the faith, they can only help it prosper.” The opportunity remains for great people to do great things for the faith in Cincinnati. The names of Fenwick and his successors who built the Church need not be the last ones of renown to come out of the archdiocese. Indeed, for its sake, they cannot be.
