Still Running Off at the Keyboard

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - The noise of chatting parishioners saturates the foyer after the five weekend Masses at St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church.

Busy parents sympathize with one another. Kids find new playmates. And singles meet other singles.

The foyer helps the 5,000 worshippers each weekend preserve their sense of community. The fast-growing congregation decided five years ago to expand into a 1,500-seat sanctuary instead of splitting into two separate congregations and search for an available priest among a shrinking pool.

Catholic churches are joining their Protestant counterparts across the country in creating megachurches - where thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of parishioners worship together. But unlike the Protestant churches that use high-profile, evangelistic campaigns to grow, dioceses say too few priests and too many worshippers drive their expansion.

While the number of worshippers per parish nationwide has grown by nearly 35 percent in almost three decades, the number of priests dropped 26 percent, said Mary Gautier with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which tracks U.S. Catholic Church growth patterns.

"That's the reality in the Catholic Church today: You don't want to build something that will be OK for now, when you know this large population is going to get bigger," Gautier said.

Dioceses in the South and West - the hot spots for new jobs and suburban sprawl - are primarily the ones building larger parishes that are increasingly filled with Hispanic Catholics, many of whom are immigrants, Gautier said.

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