www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Holy Ghost Church in Cleveland closes

Let me put it to you this way:

You can go to Antarctica, and evangelize with all the fervor of the Apostle Paul himself, but unless there is a canon that allows you to baptize penguins, the size of your church will be circumscribed by the (small) number of people on that continent.

Similarly, you can have the most marvelous outreach program in the world, you can have gifted preachers, but in a dying city with a shrinking population and churches located in areas far from the communities they were meant to serve, your success will be limited. A city of less than 2 million people has need of fewer churches than one that has a population of 2.5 million people. The people who move tend to be young adults with families, who are the lifeblood of any parish. The people who remain are mainly older people who have or are about to retire. That's the story of Cleveland, where the median age is now 37 years. Older populations are less economically well off and lack the physical ability to do many of the things a parish must in order to grow.

When you are also dealing with a church whose core believers come from a specific community and that community moves away so that few of its members can or will make the long journey to church, it is almost impossible to maintain the critical mass that is needed to do the mundane stuff like pay the utility bills, fix the roof, maintain the exterior, etc.

Consider that Holy Ghost, like a lot of other parishes of its day, were built in the middle of an ethnic neighborhood and was sized accordingly. However, the people moved, the neighborhood changed, and the building is no longer sustainable.

That does not mean that it should be razed (I doubt that it can, historic preservation codes being what they are), but it does mean unless someone has some very deep pockets, it will never function as a parish church again--unless you can think of some way to get an Eastern European community to move back to the neighborhood. You need to maintain that ethnic core if you want to build up a parish that appeals to a wider group of people. After all, who else will be the bearers and transmitters of the Tradition? Even in new parishes that sprang up in non-traditional areas such as the south, the southwest and the far west, there was always a nucleus of ethnics willing to do the hard work of getting the parish up and running.

Those people used to live in places like Cleveland. Now they live elsewhere, and the Church's center of gravity is shifting.

In places where the population is growing, the Church will grow. In places where the population is shrinking, the Church will shrink. No people, no church. If you think differently, please do try starting a new parish, or reviving an old one, in a moribund rust-belt city center.