Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 26, 2025
On January 5, the feast of the 4th bishop of Philadelphia, Saint John Neumann, the current bishop, Nelson Perez, released a pastoral letter.
Archbishop Perez considers his 2025 letter to be pivotal in his leadership of the Archdiocese and he wants every Catholic to read it and every parish to discuss it. The pastoral letter is not long and it is easy to read. The letter announces a process of “trust and hope” that will lead our Archdiocese into the future. You can go to the website of the Archdiocese, archphila.org and read the letter and other relevant discussion on the letter and the process that will lead to implementation.
Archbishop Perez begins his pastoral letter by noting a sad but obvious fact: many people have drifted away or have been driven away from Catholic practice. He offers a shocking statistic, that 83% of baptized Catholics don’t go to Mass. And he asks us what we can do about it.
The response in much of the US Catholic Church is to ask this question: “Where can the Church no longer afford to be due to finances or the number of priests?” The Archbishop says that this question leads to massive closures of churches, a retrenchment of the Church. In Philadelphia, Archbishop Perez proposes that we ask a different question, “Where does the Church need to be and how?” As we together look for ways of growing the Church by inviting our people to come home, Archbishop Perez says, “I did not come (to Philadelphia) to close churches; I came here to build up the Church of Philadelphia”.
He does acknowledge that some churches are not sustainable and that we have a shortage of priests, but he asks us to move forward with a missionary motivation, not a management of decline.
The heart of his proposal is that the Archdiocese will “plant” at least 10 “missionary hubs” in each county and that the hubs will be given resources and the charge to evangelize. As the hubs succeed, the Archdiocese will have to make choices about what other institutions are needed and which are not. But the heart of the plan is to create throughout the Archdiocese a limited number of strong missionary hubs, not to close lots of parishes.
I urge you to read the pastoral letter and to get involved in discussions about the future of the Catholic Church in our Archdiocese.
At this point, I am not sure what this new initiative will mean for our Center City churches. Most are staffed by religious Orders (Saint John’s by the Capuchins; Saint Francis Xavier by the Oratorians; Saint Patrick’s by the Dominicans; Old Saint Joseph by the Jesuits and Old Saint Augustine’s by the Augustinians).
These churches serve tourists, workers and shoppers and they attract regular parishioners from all over the city, people who choose Center City churches for various reasons. Center City churches are not like neighborhood based parishes. As we move through the process, we will have a role in explaining our unique situation to the rest of the Archdiocese.
Throughout the United States, hundreds of churches have closed and churches will need to close in Philadelphia. But our Archbishop has initiated a process that does not begin with “what needs to close?”, but with “how can we be effective missionaries and what structures do we need to be effective?”
As in other dioceses, things must change! The Archdiocese can’t keep doing the same things and maintaining all parishes. Most important, we have to keep our focus on the Church’s mission, not on buildings and institutions.
