Cleveland archbishop plans to close 50 beautiful churches. What can we learn from this?
Archbishop Lennon of Cleveland is closing 50 parishes and their beautiful churches, as the L.A. Times reported (click on this post's title) yesterday.
The parishioners do not believe the archdiocese's claims that the closings are "necessary."
Cleveland's so-called ethnic parishes are being hardest hit. Their parishioners, many of them, are from Eastern Europe. Some are valiant Hungarian Freedom Fighters who fled Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution against the atheistic Communists in 1956.
What is wrong with this picture?
Mosques are going up across the USA.
Protestant Evangelicals get many Catholics to apostasize from the True Faith.
So do Protestant Pentecostals, sects, Buddhism, New Age.
They are growing. And how is our Catholic Church doing?
Our American Catholic hierarchy is finding any and every excuse to shut down our Catholic churches everywhere -- hundreds, by now. And our parochial schools. And our seminaries, including right here in our Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Many of the closings around the USA are, and have been, of stable and even thriving parishes. These parishes typically have beautiful, majestic, traditional, and obviously Catholic churches -- exactly the kind that far too many in our hierarchy and clergy despise.
Bishops who close parishes claim they don't have enough money anymore. Why is there not enough money?
Well, the gargantuan sex abuse settlements, of course. But also...
Don't look now, but we have many fewer Catholics around than we used to, many fewer than we should have. Why?
Many Catholic bishops and many, many Catholic priests thought they were so smart and so trendy in 1968 when they publicly, and in their confessionals, defied Pope Paul VI and disobeyed his pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-woman, anti-contraception encyclical letter Humanae Vitae.
Now they, and we, are reaping the harsh and evil consequences of their aping the wicked way of the world and disregarding God's providence and plans for our well-being.
We have too few Catholics today. Unnaturally too few!
Countless Catholics contracept out of existence the children God plans to give them. Countless Catholics abort the children God gives them. They are endangering their souls with these sins.
Catholic pro-lifers prophetically warned, right from the start and all along, that this would happen if American Catholics disobeyed Humanae Vitae.
Catholic pro-lifers are right, but Catholic liberals never listen to them.
Our Church in America needs to make a formal apology to all Catholics for being pro-contraception, and to make a major push against contraception.
This is all the more urgent because so many Catholics coming here from other countries are liable to start endangering their souls by contracepting and aborting their children.
Things would start getting better if all Catholics trusted God and obeyed Catholic truth... and listened to pro-lifers.
The parishioners do not believe the archdiocese's claims that the closings are "necessary."
Cleveland's so-called ethnic parishes are being hardest hit. Their parishioners, many of them, are from Eastern Europe. Some are valiant Hungarian Freedom Fighters who fled Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution against the atheistic Communists in 1956.
What is wrong with this picture?
Mosques are going up across the USA.
Protestant Evangelicals get many Catholics to apostasize from the True Faith.
So do Protestant Pentecostals, sects, Buddhism, New Age.
They are growing. And how is our Catholic Church doing?
Our American Catholic hierarchy is finding any and every excuse to shut down our Catholic churches everywhere -- hundreds, by now. And our parochial schools. And our seminaries, including right here in our Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Many of the closings around the USA are, and have been, of stable and even thriving parishes. These parishes typically have beautiful, majestic, traditional, and obviously Catholic churches -- exactly the kind that far too many in our hierarchy and clergy despise.
Bishops who close parishes claim they don't have enough money anymore. Why is there not enough money?
Well, the gargantuan sex abuse settlements, of course. But also...
Don't look now, but we have many fewer Catholics around than we used to, many fewer than we should have. Why?
Many Catholic bishops and many, many Catholic priests thought they were so smart and so trendy in 1968 when they publicly, and in their confessionals, defied Pope Paul VI and disobeyed his pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-woman, anti-contraception encyclical letter Humanae Vitae.
Now they, and we, are reaping the harsh and evil consequences of their aping the wicked way of the world and disregarding God's providence and plans for our well-being.
We have too few Catholics today. Unnaturally too few!
Countless Catholics contracept out of existence the children God plans to give them. Countless Catholics abort the children God gives them. They are endangering their souls with these sins.
Catholic pro-lifers prophetically warned, right from the start and all along, that this would happen if American Catholics disobeyed Humanae Vitae.
Catholic pro-lifers are right, but Catholic liberals never listen to them.
Our Church in America needs to make a formal apology to all Catholics for being pro-contraception, and to make a major push against contraception.
This is all the more urgent because so many Catholics coming here from other countries are liable to start endangering their souls by contracepting and aborting their children.
Things would start getting better if all Catholics trusted God and obeyed Catholic truth... and listened to pro-lifers.
posted by Quintero at 10:47 AM
2 Comments:
I suspect that another reason closing churches is
attractive to some chanceries is the money that
can be made from the sale of the real estate.
Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but I've seen otherwise
lively parishes closed/merged and I think the trigger
was pulled because the parish was an inconvenience
to the chancery--not financially, but politically.
Also, I suspect that the map of parish closings would
look a lot different if those parishes first on the
chopping block were the ones from which the diocese hadn't recently had a vocation arise.
Dear Mr. Quintero: Greetings from John Heuertz in Kansas City. I've followed your blog off and on for a few years and I find it interesting. I'm writing in response to the blog about closing ethnic Catholic churches in Cleveland. The cathedral St. John Neumann consecrated in 1848 and where St. Katherine Drexel was baptized in 1858 in Philadelphia is apparently now in serious danger of being razed because it needs $1.5 million in roof and steeple repair and nobody's got the dough to do it. The Archdiocese there apparently washed its hands of the property several years ago. A link to the story is a a web site called pewsitter.com which is a kind of Drudge Report for right-wing Catholics like me. I like the site and thought you'd be interested in the story. I also found your observations about humanae vitae right on target and I wish everyone would read them.
Peace,
Mr. John Heuertz, OP
Kansas City
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