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

Holy Ghost [blog.cleveland.com]

Memory eternal

This is serious grief. Holy Ghost is full of history and memories; surely a way to keep it alive could be found.

Fr. Serge

Demography is destiny. I suppose we could have some sort of forced resettlement of the Greek Catholics from their comfortable suburbs and erect state-owned industries to keep them employed, but the sad fact is Cleveland is--and has been for some time--a dying city losing population at a rate approaching 1-3% per year. No people, no Church.

How sad--prayers for the remaining parishioners. I just hope that the marvelous screen ends up --intact-- in another church.

With good will and determination, sometimes things which seem impossible can be done. Cardinal Spellman announced the closing of Old Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York, and turned up to celebrate the final Mass - and was faced with an enormous crowd of irate Irish Catholics who had family connections with the Old Cathedral. The Cardinal had the good sense to call the clan heads over to his car and ask what on earth was going on. They put the same question to him. He answered that the Old Cathedral had not been self-supporting for years, and it was unreasonable to expect the Archdiocese to subsidize it forever. The clan heads then made him an offer: they would raise the money for a good renovation and continue to raise the money to pay the ongoing expenses, and the Archdiocese would agree that the Old Cathedral, while remaining a parish church for the neighborhood, would always be available for special services for the Irish community. Both sides agreed; the Old Cathedral looks lovely, has no financial worries, on regular Sundays has Masses in English and Spanish, and does indeed accommodate the Irish community on special occasions. Could something similar not be done for Holy Ghost?

Fr. Serge

Demography is our destiny?!?!?!?!

Why isn't evangelization our destiny?!?!?!?!

Or is that crazy talk?

Monomakh

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.

Look at the situation of St. Boniface in Chicago [saintbonifaceinfo.com]. That page has links to pictures in Flickr [flickr.com] that show the building has basically been left to fall apart.

I find it ironic that 200 people can show up for the final liturgy, but where were these same people any other time of the year?

When I attended Liturgy there four years ago there were nine people in church.

It was time to close it. Remove the crosses from the domes, pull the cornerstone, give the Iconostas to St. Mary's, and call it a day.

Something tells me St. Gregory's in Lakewood may suffer a similar fate down the road. Only about 30 people are currently attending.

One problem is the Metropolia keeps lying to itself about its membership numbers. The parish rolls are a bad joke, retaining the names of people who have long since moved away or regularly attend the RC parish down the street, or who have just dropped out. The worst are the people who move, register at another parish, and thus are double-counted. This gives Their Graces a warm fuzzy feeling that things are better than they are. The only way to rectify the situation would be actually counting the number of people who show up for three or four consecutive Sundays not including any feast days, then averaging the total and aggregating over all the parishes and missions. I bet the results would cause a few bishops to wet their riassas.

In totally unrelated news, Epiphany of Our Lord in Annandale just signed a contract to break ground on a new church with space for almost 300 people. Unfortunately, a covert check of the attendance log shows they haven't been bringing in half that many people for more than a year. Sic transit gloria, and all that. . . Even in my day, though, the parish roll at Epiphany was almost as accurate as the voting registration rolls on the South Side of Chicago. If I remember correctly, there were nominally about 900 people on the baptismal role, of whom roughly half still lived in Northern Virginia, of whom about 250-300 would regularly attend Liturgy. The new church was scaled on that basis, but that was before the RDL exodus.

To see the iconostasis of which John speaks, see here - the Directory page, which I haven't yet converted to an historical entry.

Many years,

Neil

Evangelization... sorry, need to snicker a little.

In short, over the years we've been told by "those in the know"...

-- We don't evangelize to the Orthodox. But if they do want to be "Catholic," they need to attend their respective sister Catholic Chuch. (If you are Russian Orthodox, then you have to go to a Russian Catholic church, etc.)

-- We don't evangelize to RCs. Their clergy doesn't like that.

-- BUT, we can evangelize to Eastern Catholics. However, they need to be of our Church. Other ECs must go to the Church in which they were baptized, or that the father belonged, or...???

-- We can also evangelize to Protestants, but if they want to convert, they must first swim the Tiber as they are "western." LATER, they can make the trip to Constantinople.

-- And we can evangelize to the unchurched, but there's that becoming an RC thing first.

-- And if the person is from a "mixed" marriage, God help you! And if there are children involved... God help you more!

That's good, since theoretically both those groups have received the gospel already.

Yes, that is good... kind of.

The reference here should have been to those who RCs and EOs who have fallen away from the Church, especially in those instances of mixed marriages (EO/RC) where one or both individuals have not been attending either Church. They usually show up on our doorstep when they need a child baptized.