Closing churches

There is an article in the Register about the closing of churches in Canada.  According to it, about one-third of all the Christian churches in Canada across all denominations will be closing in the next ten years or so.   There doesn't seem to be any plan or any hope of reversing this trend among the leaders.

I am reminded of the 'pastoral plan' put forward a year or two ago in one diocese, where they tried to spin the low number of priests and failing churches as a reorganization scheme, a simple shuffling of the deck in order to make the diocese more efficient.  Nowhere in the 'pastoral plan' was any mention of evangelization, bringing Christ to the people- nothing.  Just a closure here, turning two or three parishes into a 'pastoral zone', that sort of thing.  Nor is there any mention in this article about going against the grain and trying to bring some life back into these failing dioceses, just a sense that the whole sordid mess is just a shame, really, but there really isn't anything to be done.

To paraphrase Msgr Schuler who, in his 33 years as pastor at St Agnes in St Paul's Minnesota had 30 first masses celebrated in his parish: it is as though they are sitting around during a famine discussing how to starve to death more slowly instead of rising up and planting some potatoes.