All over Europe, churches creatively rethink as numbers plummet

A huge drop in church membership and participation since the 1960s has accelerated over the past decade, despite determined Church efforts to reach out with new forms of evangelisation.

Nov 25, 2017

By Jonathan Luxmoore
A huge drop in church membership and participation since the 1960s has accelerated over the past decade, despite determined Church efforts to reach out with new forms of evangelisation.

In traditionally Catholic Italy, up to 40 per cent of Catholic parishes are now run by foreign-born clergy, while in Spain, where Catholics traditionally make up four-fifths of the population of 40 million, only one in five Catholics now attends Mass, according to recent data, and many of the country’s 68 dioceses report no seminary admissions.

In 2013, after repeated clashes with the previous Socialist government over secular education, same-sex marriage and relaxed divorce and abortion laws, Spain’s bishops’ conference urged Catholics to “join forces, share experiences and people, and prioritise spending resources”.

In neighbouring France, where fewer than 1 in 10 Catholics now attend Sunday Mass, priestly vocations have also fallen, leaving many of the country’s 36,000 parishes without resident pastors and fuelling fears that one-fifth of its 15,000 historic churches could face closure.

In Ireland similarly, regular Mass attendance among Catholics has plummeted, and seven out of eight Catholic seminaries have closed, leaving just 19 ordinands to begin training this September.

Even in Poland, Church leaders have warned they may soon have to withdraw priests from working abroad and begin merging some of the country’s 11,000 parishes, as admissions to Poland’s 84 diocesan and religious order seminaries decline, accompanied by a sharp fall in recruitment to Poland’s 104 female orders and congregations. In June, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz of Warsaw confirmed plans to recruit and incardinate visiting clergy from India, Vietnam and the Philippines.

In Britain, reorganisations are underway, with the Archdiocese of Birmingham now running a special “Future Planning” section on its website.

It’s a “sign of the times” to have priests working together across neighbouring parishes, Birmingham Archbishop Bernard Longley explained in a recent message, and to have laity helping with administrative tasks so clergy can “focus on their primary roles of sacramental ministry, catechesis, prayer and pastoral care”.

Margaret Doherty, communications director for the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, says newly emerging forms of Catholic life are designed to ensure “people are looked after and lay Catholics play an active role”. But each diocese will have its own needs, clergy profile and mission aims, so the reforms can’t be coordinated centrally or nudged in particular directions with models or best practices.

“There’ve been consultations, so people at all levels can be notified and involved, and taken along with the process,” Doherty explained. “While change is always difficult, and sometimes traumatic, it’s usually a positive thing. I haven’t heard of any theological treatises against these reforms, and I’m sure we can be optimistic.”

Although the idea of “Christian Europe“ is still vigorously defended in many quarters, most experts now concur that traditional Church methods and structures are having to change. The idyllic picture of a church and priest in every village now firmly belongs to history.

This is evident in Germany, where Catholics still make up 30 percent of the population of 82.6 million. The German Church is comparatively rich, thanks to its membership tax system, which was introduced in the 19th century to compensate for state seizures of ecclesiastical property and earns the Church around 5 billion euros (US $6 billion) yearly.

But Catholics have been stopping payments and leaving the Church at the rate of some 150,000 annually, while Mass attendance among those still registered has halved in the last three decades. This has required some rethinking.

In its annual report this October, Germany’s largest diocese numerically, Cologne, which has 2 million members, posted revenues of 917 million euros (US $1.085 billion), 4 per cent up from the previous year. Most came from the Church tax and was used for salaries, building maintenance and handouts to parishes, which are now grouped into 180 “pastoral care areas”.

When it comes to restructuring, Cologne’s archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, is something of a veteran. In 2012, when head of Germany’s Berlin Archdiocese, he announced another major shake-up, involving the merger of 105 local parishes into 35 “pastoral spaces” and the pooling of resources in youth work, charitable activity and other fields.

“The charisma of priests and pastors will be better oriented than before,” Woelki explained in a pastoral letter, “so everyone can use their special gifts in sacramental ministry, catechesis and pastoral work, and Church life can be networked through small spiritual cells living by the Gospel”.
The need for change was obvious.

After Germany’s 1989-90 reunification, the Berlin Archdiocese had run up debts of $140 million; and by 2009, it had sold unused churches and laid off 40 percent of its clergy, administrators and staffers.

Even now, the archdiocese is forecast to lose a further third of its membership by 2030, while Catholic schools, nurseries, hospitals and elderly homes are reorganized to reflect a “diaspora experience”. But the 35 pastoral spaces are now up and running under its new archbishop, Heiner Koch, reassigned from Dresden in 2015.

Stefan Foerner, the archdiocese spokesman, is cautious when it comes to a greater role for laity in ministering or celebrating Mass. But lay Catholics are now “decisively involved” at all levels of Church life, he says, and seen as “sharing in the universal priesthood”.

“The era of a popular folk church is over — we’ve had to reshape our structures and find new ways of working with each other,” said Foerner. “We’ve called this process, ‘Where faith gains space,’ and the central concern has been to provide spiritual self-assurance in a rapidly changing environment. The Church must remain committed to Christ’s mission, and translate this into a language for new circumstances”.

(This article first appeared on NCRonline.org, the Website of National Catholic Reporter, and is being used with permission)

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