Monday, May 15, 2006
BISHOP LENNON
is being installed today.
An article in "The Plain Dealer" sets out the challenges that he will face, and perhaps gives a hint as to why this particular man was chosen to lead the Cleveland Diocese.
Cleveland is not alone in considering reorganization. Ninety-three dioceses have undergone such plans since 1990.
However, as other major dioceses in Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago have closed churches on a large scale - some more than once in recent decades - Cleveland avoided cuts.
Boston, for example, has about 300 churches to care for 2 million Catholics; Cleveland has 233 parishes for 800,000 Catholics, just two fewer parishes than it had in 1970.
Officials here said the Cleveland diocese, which does not have the same financial pressures that contributed to the recent closings in Boston, has chosen to involve parishioners.
"We still have to make the hard decisions, but people will still have a voice," said Mary Pat Frey of the church planning office.
Bishop Lennon has prior experience with parish closings:
In a recent interview, Lennon, who administered the church-closing plan in Boston as an auxiliary bishop, said it will take him a while to learn the needs of the Cleveland diocese.
Those needs are great. We have a critical clergy shortage - thanks, I presume, to the lavendar seminary. Fr. Donald Cozzens, afterall, who wrote one of the first books on the state of Catholic seminaries, wrote from Cleveland. The article spells it out:
Not enough priests are available to meet traditional expectations, and the remaining clergy are aging. From 1970 to 2005, active diocesan priests declined from 598 to 296. Priests under 40 dropped from 240 to 29.
By the diocese's estimate, the priest shortage will become much worse. Assuming the retirement age remains at 70 and five priests are ordained per year, the church estimates the number of active diocesan priests will decline again by almost half, to 151, by 2030.
Can a diocese be run without a staff?
Oh sure, there are plenty of nuns willing to fill in. But running a diocese depends first and foremost on the ability to dispense the sacraments. If you haven't got sacraments, you might as well gather up the candles, roll up the altar cloths and go get a job in industry. So Bishop Lennon has some challenges ahead of him.
On the positive side, other articles indicate that he knows the scope of the problem. In one he is quoted as saying that the laity want to meet him and to find out "who does he root for?" That really is the heart of the problems in our diocese. Either we root for God and God's laws or we root for the oppposition. It's become rather obvious that some bishops in the Church in America have been rooting for the opposition.
Bishop Lennon also seems to know that he needs to be visible.
Lennon reached out to those gathered, saying he wants to visit as many of the 240 parishes in the diocese as he can in coming weeks. "So I can come to know you, and you can come to know me," he said.
Trite it may be but talk is cheap and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so we'll see. There are a lot of parishes to visit.
In any case, a new era begins in Cleveland on this rainy Monday in May. A chance to move beyond the sexual abuse scandal resides in Bishop Lennon. May God grant him the strength, the wisdom, the grace to meet the challenges and turn this diocese around. May the Blessed Virgin be his constant companion.
And now...let the sit-ins begin!
