Last year, I wrote an article for the Lamp, a magazine perhaps best thought of as a “Catholic New Yorker,” about the restructuring of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. I grew up in this archdiocese, attending a school and church there, competing in CYO sports, and on the whole taking for granted my Catholic milieu at a time when I didn’t even know it was diminishing.
The Pillar, another excellent Catholic publication, recently provided more insight into this pressing problem for American Catholics. Brendan Hodge has looked into the possibility of a merger between the diocese of Steubenville with the neighboring diocese of Columbus. Hodge broadens his focus to identify other potential Steubenvilles nationwide — i.e., dioceses facing serious crises that might require extraordinary action. In doing so, he produces this fascinating map of changes in diocesan population over the past 30 years:
Catholics appear to be mimicking the rest of the nation in moving to (and growing in) the South and West. There are some exceptions, and some bright spots in the Northeast and Midwest, but the trend in the latter isn’t good. (Some of the growing areas might be starting from a lower base, but the trajectory is still stark.) This map confirms what one priest had told me when I was writing my Lamp story, that even as some dioceses in increasingly less Catholic parts of the country are working out how to organize themselves amid decline, those parts with growing Catholic populations have logistical problems of the opposite kind: too many parishioners, not enough churches and Mass times, etc.
You’d rather be having those problems, of course. But all is not lost in the struggling areas. In writing my Lamp story, I found signs of real strength in my home archdiocese, especially from young priests and laity who have a renewed commitment to orthodoxy. Still, the overall trend, taken together with the general decline in religiosity, suggests that Catholics in some parts of the country have a lot of evangelization to do. But I believe it can be done. The Catholic Church, for all its struggles and recent PR troubles, offers a spiritual salve that is — in my view — unlike anything else this world can offer. It is up to the believers who remain to remind those who have fallen away.